Intangible geographies: the digital War Heritage Museum/Exhibition of The Netherlands

The project of unveiling individual and collective memory is a complex matter in the contemporary society, accustomed to store, archive and save memory and history on digital supports with a potentially endless capacity of storage, but paradoxically characterised by a low sensibility to activate and socialise that memory. According to Misztal (2003) «the digital technology, interactive media and information systems (…) expand and problematize the status of memory» (Misztal 2003: p. 392): unlimited access and re-writing of supports declined the evidence and reliability of memory too. This concept has been prophetically defined also in 1986 by Fausto Colombo as “imperfect archives”, meaning the process of “oblivion” that sometimes follows the one of archiving when the certainty of conservation legitimates to not remember and therefore causes to forget. This is even truer when memory and history refer to a difficult memory, because is painful or controversial. Is this the case of war memories, that, when non subject to collective amnesia or removal, in the better cases, remain locked in their capacious repositories and archives, thus demonstrating a weak inclination to develop awareness towards modalities of knowledge, fruition and experience of this unpleasant and disputed past and historical memory, that indeed could be a potential extraordinary way for mutual understanding and collective supranational identity building. Despite some criticisms about promoting suffering memorials (1) in fact, as pointed out by Duffy, suffering memories can be transformed in “significant contribution to the struggle for human right” (Duffy, 2001: p.121), and this is probably one of the reasons for which war time commemoration has become a “truly popular concept” (Duffy, 1997: p. 453).