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Archaeology & Anthropology 2018
Global Journal of Research and Review
ISSN: 2393-8854
Page 42
October 01-02, 2018
London, UK
1
st
Edition of international Conference on
Archaeology and
Anthropology
T
he transformation of prisons intomuseum is a newpractice all
over Europe since last decades. The purpose is representing
the repressive communist regime, organized in the prisons and
the memory of the victims of the system. The main reasons
behind these transformations come as a need to underline and
commemorate the situations within these prisons, as a need to
overcome and change the symbolic of that place. This paper
brings into focus the Memory Museum of Shkodra (Albania). It
is the first museum of its kind in Albania, after the communist
regime pavilion in the Historical Museum of Tirana. It was
founded in 2014, 25 years after the fall of the communist regime,
in order to make public know the crimes of that period. The focus
of this paper lays on the “personal lives stories” and the main key
questions of the study are; what has happened inside the walls of
this former-prison and how it was transformed into a museum?
Based on some autobiographical evidences it is intended to
describe the mechanisms of violence in the prison following
an analysis of the tortures exercised there. The museum itself,
located inside the cell of a real prison (former prison of Sigurimi),
offers the meeting with the walls that have seen the sufferings,
the tortures. The visitor is experiencing the past with the prison
itself as the main object. The visitor in return takes the role of the
former prisoner, visitor’s body takes the place of former prisoner
body; means that the violence which was once the integral part
of penal experience is now transmitted as a huge esthetical
experience for the visitors inside the museum.
ermelabroci@gmail.comThe prison into a museum: body and the disciplinary power
Ermela Broci
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies, Albania
Glob J Res Rev 2018, Volume 5
DOI: 10.21767/2393-8854-C1-003