Mario Panico (Bologna), Perpetrators’ Memoryscapes

Discussant: Guido Bartolini (Freie Universitaet Bolzano)

In my presentation, I explore how domestic spaces and everyday material objects of perpetrators, in particular houses once inhabited by Nazi camp personnel are today incorporated into memorial sites. Drawing on Georges Perec’s notion of the “infra-ordinary”, I argue that seemingly banal domestic environments play a crucial role in shaping how perpetrator memory is mediated and transmitted. These spaces operate as material remnants of everyday life and as mute witnesses to extreme violence, exposing the disturbing entanglement of ordinary routines and mass atrocity. I suggest that this interweaving produces a specific form of affective discomfort, which can serve as a productive analytical lens for studying perpetrator-related sites. Through cases of preservation and artistic re-semantisation strategies at Westerbork, Falstad, and Ravensbrück, I explore how these sites negotiate this discomfort in order to frame reflection on the fragile boundaries between normality, domesticity and violence.

Mario Panico is a research fellow at the University of Bologna and a member of TraMe – Centre for the Semiotic Study of Memory. He is a semiotician and memory studies scholar who works on material and visual culture connected to difficult pasts and processes of cultural remembrance. His first monograph is Spaces for Nostalgia: Difficult Memories and Material Consolations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He has also translated into Italian a volume of writings by Marianne Hirsch on postmemory and, together with Cristina Demaria and Patrizia Violi, co-authored Il genere del male. Immagini e voci di donne tra violenza agita e zona grigia (Mimesis, 2026), on the representation of female perpetrators in visual culture.