“…were it not for our perseverance, for the fact that we turned our anger into the courage to say ‘We will not accept being denied the truth’ – were it not for this, then the stories  [of our loss] would just end, they would have ended on that day. And we realize that, as we go on, we are the only power that we have.”

This is how Ilaria Cucchi – the sister of 31-year-old Stefano Cucchi, who died under mysterious circumstances in an Italian prison in 2009 – described the situation of her family and, by extension, of other families of victims of police repression in Italy, in her appearance on a television documentary about her late brother. Remembering requires a memory agent who will “actualize” or “activate” the memory in question, if it is to remain vivid. The Cucchi case demonstrates that in Italy the role of such memory communities has proven essential, considering the low commitment or unwillingness of the State to bring justice to the victims of police repression.

I have studied one such case – the violent death of Francesco Lorusso, on 11 March 1977. Lorusso, a medical student and sympathizer of a left-wing extra-parliamentary group, got involved in a conflict between left-wing and Catholic students which resulted in severe police repression during which Lorusso was shot in the back. The incident provoked an urban upheaval in which Lorusso’s friends and fellow students vented their anger in the city center, resulting in more public order measures. Lorusso’s death thus marked the final stage in the conflict between a newly arisen student movement and the local Communist authorities. The chapter on 1977 was, however, all but closed off, as the police officer who shot Lorusso was absolved on the basis of a disputed public order law, while the numerous requests by Lorusso’s family to open a new investigation remained unanswered.

In my forthcoming book on the public memory of the 1977 incidents, I interpret the family’s role in the process of getting justice in terms of “affective labor.” Post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define affective labor as an “immaterial labor,” one that “produces or manipulates affects” (‘Value and Affect’, boundary 2, 26.2, 2004). Rather than producing a material object such as a monument, it provokes an “affective state in another person” (think, for example, of a commemorative march, or any other type of memory work that manages to transform private suffering into collective grief). It expresses a moral duty to remember which is evident, first of all, in the attempts of the Lorusso family to have the police investigations reopened.

In order for this to happen, the family had to gain more public consensus. Considering both Lorusso’s difficult victim status – having been involved in riots with the police and therefore not an entirely innocent victim, in the eyes of the public opinion – and the overall negative reputation of the student movement, this could only be achieved through affective labor. In other words, it was only by producing “affective states” in local citizens, who would have no “automatic” sympathy for an alleged rioter, that his family could counter the official memory of the events of March 1977, according to which Lorusso’s death was no more than a tragic accident.

The second driving force behind the family’s affective labor was the need to overcome the trauma of Lorusso’s death, a trauma caused not only by a sense of injustice, but also by the feeling that the community no longer existed for the family. In fact, authorities never really listened to Lorusso’s parents’ pleas for justice and truth. Moreover, the political nature of the incidents exposed their loss to misinterpretations and moral judgements by the community. The loss or inability to narrate one’s traumatic story in public results in the victim’s loss of a place in history and, subsequently, the continuation of a sense of trauma. In this as other cases of political homicides in the 1970s and more recently, such as the Cucchi case mentioned above, the family was therefore excluded from society.

In short, affective labor was employed not only for the creation of a wider public consensus that would help the family gain truth and justice: it was also crucial in the very process of coming to terms with Lorusso’s death, considering the family’s silenced position in society. Attempts to provoke “affective states” in other people include participation in an annual commemorative ritual, which saw the occasional participation of families of other victims of political violence in those years, and the various appeals Lorusso’s family made to local and national politicians to have the investigations reopened and the injustice of his death acknowledged.

Unsuccessful in these attempts, the family next sought to gain public consensus with a series of public debates and the creation of local memory sites. But memorials and monuments alone cannot keep the living memory of an event alive, and risk disappearing into the urban landscape. As Michael Schudson has argued, memory sites tend to become “invisible” (and are thus forgotten) as a result of their deliberate way of recalling the past (‘Lives, laws, and language. Commemorative versus non-commemorative forms of effective public memory’, The Communication Review, 2.1, 2007).

Other, more “creative” ways should be sought to keep memories alive: an annual demonstration on March 11th, for example, managed to give visibility to the Lorusso incident but eventually disappeared, due – in part – to the shortcoming of some form of generational renewal. In more recent times, the families of victims of police repression have found an outlet in investigative documentaries, as in the Cucchi case. The internet has also become a powerful medium for contentious politics and counter-information. The Archival Network against Oblivion, for example, brings together all the victims’ associations and documentary centers and archives in Italy that work on political violence, while the Invisible Networks represent grassroots associations that do research into historical memory, truth and justice. The aim of these memory communities is to construct a “memory culture” that goes beyond traditional, official commemorative rituals, bringing the “dead memory” of violent incidents back to life, turning them into living memorials, and thus, preventing them from becoming a sort of common place in national historiography. For these groups it’s not so much about grieving, as it is about the moral duty of stimulating a more “correct” version of the past.

The value of these memory communities became clear only recently, when the Court absolved the police officers who had mistreated Cucchi, arguing that the latter had died as a result of malnutrition and dehydration (Cucchi had gone on hunger strike while in prison hospital), completely ignoring the serious bruises and fractures on his body. In another case of police brutality which has also been denounced in a documentary, the four police officers who beat to death 18-year old Federico Aldrovandi were initially sentenced to a ridiculously low prison sentence of 3 years and 6 months. They were pardoned and saw their sentence reduced to 6 months. One of them has now been released, after less than 2 months in prison. Ilaria Cucchi’s statement that “we are the only power that we have” seems truer than ever.