Middle of nowhere: A place of war memories, commemoration, and aboriginal re-emergence (La Pampa, Argentina)

This article addresses a particular aspect of Rank lche re-emergence in the context set by policies of recognition and aboriginal identity politics in the province of La Pampa (Argentina). It focuses on the analysis of a memorial recently built in the 'middle of nowhere'. Specifically, it explores relationships between spatial practices, material objects of commemoration, and memories of a war of conquest, attempting to identify different modes of connecting landscape and memory ('landscapes of memory' and 'landscape as memory') and their consequences for the struggles for aboriginal recognition. In a more general sense, the article attempts to show that this landscape is a social space lived and built by the performance of multiple forms of memory, which are shown in the competing spatial practices around material forms of representing and remembering past events. This landscape is in this way a particular work of the art of remembering.