Where Memory Flows: BA Film’s Dr Struan Gray Conducts Research on Rivers as Spaces of Memory in Chile

Dr Struan Gray, Senior Lecturer on BA Film, has recently returned from a research trip to Chile and Peru, where he developed an ongoing project on Chilean film and post-dictatorship memory cultures.  

In mid-July, he presented at the Memory Studies Association annual conference, held in Lima, Peru, an opportunity to forge connections across disciplinary boundaries, including oral history, cultural geography and anthropology.  

Struan’s paper explored how a river might be interpreted as a space of memory that bears witness to different forms of state and structural violence. He focused on the Mapocho River in Santiago de Chile, into which some of the Pinochet dictatorship’s first victims were thrown, analysing how the river is represented and curated through physical memorials, literature, film and graffiti.  

More specifically, he considered the imaginative potential of water to narrate the intersection of different histories, stories and processes, placing issues of state repression, social marginality and ecological destruction into productive dialogue. 

(Above) A memorial to the political prisoners ‘disappeared’ by the Pinochet dictatorship, located on a bridge where over a hundred people were executed.

After the conference he travelled to Santiago, where he continued his research on the Mapocho. This included time spent in archives at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, visits to the state-sponsored memorials, and documentation of the graffiti and murals on the riverbanks.  

Alongside this research, he carried out a series of interviews with Chilean experimental and activist film collectives; practitioners who are pioneering new non-hierarchal and democratic approaches to the filmmaking process.  

In addition to practicing a more collaborative method of production, many of these collectives are devoted to documenting and supporting struggles for profound social, economic and political change in Chile, including the re-writing of the country’s dictatorship-era constitution.  

These research projects will be written up as two journal articles in the coming year, while also feeding into the modules that Struan teaches on BA Film, including sessions on the Latin American political cinema and feminist collective filmmaking.