Abstract

Commemoration of a battle unquestionably is a political act, and thus memorial in a battlefield constitutes distinct topoi where power crystallizes. Foucault argues that ‘exercise of power’ always requires ‘space’ and devotes his pioneer work, Discipline and Punish to the intimate relation between space and power. The paper examines war cemeteries of Commonwealth War Graves Commission on the 'preserved' landscape of Gallipoli Battles in terms of the relation of which Foucault defined between power and space. Memory has been deployed on the vast site of the Battle of Gallipoli in different modes by different nations, filling the war site with monuments, cemeteries, mass graves, a museum, an archival building, and the ‘preserved’ landscape of the main battles. In this paper, I focused on war cemeteries and the new master plan of the landscape of Gallipoli. Through them, I investigated the relation between space and the control of remembrance in architectural memorialisation. In order to achieve this goal, I made use of the conceptual tools Foucault proposed in Discipline and Punish such as ‘docile bodies’, ‘the art of distributions’, ‘control’, 'discipline'. In this paper, I analyzed war cemeteries and the Gallipoli Peace Park as the topoi of architectural commemoration with reference to the question: How has power been exercised on the observer in war cemeteries and the landscape of war by means of the architectural memorialisation.