You have to let out the scream : curated exhibitions of violence inside and outside the site of infamy

Some exhibitions on deeds of violence take place on the site where the violence was perpetrated. Here curators, seeking to convey the powerful emotions felt by the survivors, might need no more than plaques, exact site markers and precise descriptions of what occurred ‘just here’. Curators of exhibitions presented in public spaces may be forced to use longer texts, created objects, or atmospherics like sound or lighting to create equivalent feelings of disgust, terror, fear or compassion. This article compares the historical presentation in a Site of Conscience, Villa Grimaldi, (Santiago, Chile) to the exhibition Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions (National Museum of Australia). Though seeming very different in intent, I argue that distinctive solutions were in each case found, and had to be found, to the same central problem: how does a museum curator communicate a recently revealed, controversial and difficult national history?