Giving Voice to Silence: A Study of State Violence in Bolzaneto Prison during the Genoa G8 Summit - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 195

Then the trial tends to gain value as a witness, transforming the space as a
common space to celebrate memory. Then, during the trial, those who participated
as witnesses in the definition of what happened inside the Bolzaneto barracks
contributed to the creation of a social memory, ready to be shared with the rest
of the community thanks to a process of transmission of communication. Through
a juridical process, every victim, through special words, memories, and revealed
emotions, has “worked” to generate a common and collective heritage starting
point for the respect of civil and human rights. Thus, for the victim, therapeutic
jurisprudence consists of a psychopolitical rebirth.
For these reasons, in the case of the Genoa G8, the common space has been well
represented by the Bolzaneto trial, which was the first institutional and collective
stage at which all the actors of those events were summoned. The trial was more than
a juridical convocation becoming a sort of “civic call,” able to bring back within a
community's bounds the theme of justice and suffering, to reintegrate the victims in
the group of citizenship, and to bring to light what was obscured. For this reason we
have called it the “book of memory” (Zamperini and Menegatto 2011 ).

10.7 Conclusion

Political violence during a protest event is always reconstructed in the public sphere
by two adversarial coalitions: public order and social movements. While violence
in the streets is limited to police and demonstrators, the discursive battle is fought
mainly by speakers such as politicians, journalists, judges, and so on. In democratic
systems, this battle is a battle for public opinion, a battle for imposing one narrative
as the dominant interpretation of events. In these scenarios, the legal conversation
that occurs during a trial is a “social force” involved in this narrative reconstruction
of violence. The legal conversation thus can help in illuminating the dark side of
violence, forcing the different actors involved to contribute to a shared narrative
as much as possible. The court thus becomes an arena that creates social memory.
A memory of violence that interrogates the political institutions of the state, because
it defines who did what, orients attitudes with respect to what happened, and shows
the way we look to the future. In the case of the G8, the memory of the institutions
and the memory of the demonstrators are still in conflict. Therefore, through the
“social force” of the trial the many testimonies given during the hearings can
become the heritage of the community and lay the foundations for the construction
of a shared memory.
In addition, the conversational analysis of the process of Bolzaneto shows how
therapeutic jurisprudence and social psychology can work in tandem. Well-being
is a fertile ground in social psychology, with a multitude of directions in which
to proceed, depending on who is being considered: an individual, a family, a
community, or society at large. As can be seen, the “who” of well-being considered
here have been victims of state violence in Bolzaneto. Therapeutic jurisprudence
provides a framework that is useful to social psychology for the integration of well-