It was the French historian Pierre Nora who coined the term lieux de mémoire – “sites of memory”. He meant to suggest that places and objects can embody or contain personal and collective memories, and that such memories can also obtain in the intangible – in a scent or a colour, for instance. “Even an apparently purely material site, like an archive,” Nora wrote,
becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura […] Lieux de mémoire are created by a play of memory and history […] To begin with, there must be a will to remember.
