Mario DiPaolantonio received $50,870 during the 2008 SSHRC Standard Research Grant competition for his project “Commemorative Pedagogical Practices”, which seeks to explore the pedagogical implications of artistic memorial practices that arise amid legal attempts to address an unsettling and unsettled past. The project will focus specifically on Spain and Argentina, two societies in different stages of transition that are presently attempting to come to terms with state sanctioned wrongs. Each nation’s legal process of grappling with its traumatic past consequently unleashes incommensurable and unsettled memories riddling the national “we.” During such trying times, artistic memorial practices can play an important role helping to give form and expression to these unwieldy and contested memories. While art does not here supplant the legal endeavours to address and deal with this troubling past, it does forefront – through the interpretative space it opens up – the normative yearnings that commit a political community to not only address its past wrongs, but also to envision a different future. This project is thus interested in exploring how particular artistic works provide frames of orientation that render collective meaning to the irruptive memories that arise when nations use legal forums to teach and account for past state wrongs. This research will be of interest to those considering the public educational opportunities that occur through trials, truth commissions, commemorative events, and artistic practices grappling with historical traumatic events.