Memoria Abierta was created in 1999 by Argentine Human Rights organizations in order to achieve coordinated participation in local and national initiatives that work towards a collective memory of Argentina’s recent past.

The goal was to enrich the process of the construction of collective memory with a strong commitment to the work and contribution of various professional fields, in continuity with the work realized by the organizations since their founding. We tried to face urgent challenges in a systematic way, privileging public access to information and promoting debate on the recent past to enrich democratic culture.

The first action of Memoria Abierta was to bring together disperse material, recuperate deteriorated documentation, organize it for public access, create new sources by recording oral testimonies from protagonists and witnesses, and deepen the investigation into the deployment of the plan of illegal repression in national territory through the identification and study of the numerous buildings and sites in which marks of the period can be found.

We carried out our first activities with the organization of the Colloquium “The Museum that we Envision”, which led to a publication that records the initial debate on the characteristics and forms of the organization of a future museum.

Towards the end of 1999, we presented our ideas and objectives at the First International Conference of Museums of Conscience. At this time, together with other museums that approach similar themes of societies’ pasts, we founded the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. In March of 2000, we signed a cooperation agreement that established the framework for our activities. The first donation, received in April of 2001, permitted us to begin the development of various projects and to establish our office.

Throughout the years Memoria Abierta has reached and exceeded the originally formulated objectives. In addition to initial projects of organizing documents through the Documentary Heritage program and the creation of the Oral Archive, Photographic Archive was created, as well as the Topography of Memory program. This work has produced various results: educational material, diffusion materials, training workshops and conferences about the recent history, and visible progress in the public agenda. These actions contributed to position in the debate key themes for the work of memory: the archives and access to them, public use of places that are emblematic for their use during the illegal repression, and the fundamental dilemmas that will arise when it comes time to design a museum.