To see others in ourselves: justice and architectural ambiguity in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Abstract

Grounded in Amartya Sen’s work on justice, identity, and violence, this article studies the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia as a space that encourages the ethical assessment of justice through non-didactic, disjunctive resonance between the normative and the unfamiliar. Defining architecture as a meaningful spatio-temporal continuum, the article employs an analytical methodology drawn from creative praxis to argue that our senses of identity are formed through architecture both cognitively, in our response to the known, and affectively, in our experience of the unknown. In order to retain the discursive nature of justice, this continuum needs to operate with a destabilising ambiguity to avoid exclusive ‘othering’. This ambiguity allows for our sense of identity to expand beyond group-based ideologies that can sustain and hide societal violence.