This program seeks to examine the questions of the purpose of monuments, memorials, and sites of gathering in our cities. If memorials and monuments are how we share and shape a collective narrative, how are certain narratives being told? In what ways can memorials and rituals be a space of joy, to generate new ways of what we want to see in the future and to make these practices active sites of reconciling the truth about our past. Looking at memorials for Jews killed in the Holocaust, who America decides to memorialize and overlook, as well as murals for Black lives and other more ephemeral modes – these films and discussion ask us to reckon with how we create space and time for mourning that can be inspiration for a more just future.
Photo: Ada Pinkston
Panelists
Bryan C. Lee Jr. (Moderator)
Architect, Educator, Writer, and Design Justice Advocate
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
Artist
Cheyenne Concepcion
Artist, Designer, Artistic Director of New Monuments
Ada Pinkston
Artist, Educator, and Cultural Organizer
Melinda James
Guest Curator
Films
EJI’s Community Remembrance Project
USA | 2016 | 5 mins. | Directed by Equal Justice Initiative
As part of Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) campaign to recognize victims of lynching, EJI collects soil from lynching sites and has created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which acknowledges the horrors and legacy of racial injustice.
John McAslan + Partners and MASS Design Group, UK Holocaust Memorial Proposal
United Kingdom | 2016 | 2 mins. | Directed by John McAslan, Michael Murphy, Thatcher Bean
We believe that now more than ever memorials must strengthen our resolve for justice and tolerance. Our memorial is a call to action. Composed of six million individual stones—one for each of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust—the Memorial invites visitors to take a stone and light a candle, symbolizing a pledge to prevent past injustices from repeating. This is our proposal. Six million stones placed at and then taken from the center of London.
LandMarked Part 5
USA | 2018 | 3 mins. | Directed by Ada Pinkston
A tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer.
Spirit never dies, only transitions.
USA | 2020 | 10 mins. | Directed by Logan Lynette
Despite all the many things Black folks have experienced throughout the centuries, we’ve still managed to keep our spirit alive and moving through time and space. There’s debate (including in the Black community as a whole) about what is appropriate and are traditional practices. Regardless of what negative connotations are placed, these rituals remain generation after generation.
Where To With History
Germany | German (Subtitled in English) | 2020 | 62 mins. | Directed by Hans Christian Post
Dresden has in recent years grown famous and infamous. Famous for its attempt to rebuild its once bombed-out historical center. Infamous for the right-wing-surge that has since 2015 swept the city. One the one hand, the city exemplifies the ‘blooming landscapes’ that the German reunification was to bring about. On the other hand, it testifies to the things that have gone wrong in Germany and Europe since then. Every Monday evening, the two realities clash, as the Pegida movement takes to the streets. But do the two realities oppose each other? Or has the attempt to architecturally reproduce what was lost in 1945 been instrumental in bringing back the political ghosts of that very era? The film looks into this, thereby depicting a city caught up in a destructive past that won’t go away.
