Cuidados en los equipos profesionales: reflexiones a partir del archivo oral y memoria del Cuartel Borgoño (1977-1989), Santiago de Chile

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present some of the considerations that arose following the development of an experience of caregiving for teams of professionals who support, investigate, and collect testimonies on human rights violations and the processing of Chile’s dictatorial past. The care experience was based on the psychodrama method, applied in workshop format, over three sessions of approximately two hours each, throughout the months when the interviews of the oral archive project “Resistir Recordando” (2019) were being designed and implemented. This process lasted a year. The project had an archaeological-anthropological approach, developed under the auspices of the Borgoño Memory Corporation, a collective dedicated to building a memorial site for the former secret detention, torture, and extermination center Cuartel Borgoño (1977-1989), located in Santiago, Chile. A qualitative analysis of the instruments used in the care workshop, especially letter writing, observation, and personal notes, is presented to explain the approaches, focus decisions, scopes, and projections. From a perspective that gathers the principles of Dussel’s ethics and multisite ethnography, and that understands the social actors as collaborators, the text discusses the notion of otherness implied in memory work. We conclude that, in general, memory work and research on human rights violations, focused on the testimonial-victim voice, deploy self-care actions that pathologize and individualize the problem. This article proposes that we should consider the figure of professionals and the field of memory as a working space susceptible of being cared for. This opens a new field of discussion on the practice of caring for professional teams, which implies considering other places of enunciation and listening, from the recognition of the density that acquires the treatment of “our catastrophe,” the otherness involved in memory work, and the unresolved nature of the violence it entails.

Keywords

• care
• case study
• memory
• oral archive
• work-related illness