Observing Memories Issue 4 | Page 75

Figure 2 – Parque de la Memoria , Buenos Aires | Courtesy : Marcelo Brodsky
2 they recall ”. Their significance lies in the public dimension and the “ dialogic character of memorial space ”, that is , the space between the stories told or the events remembered , and the act of remembrance ( memory work ) they help frame . To be public and to be in public is to be exposed to alterity . According to Hannah Arendt , political equality means visibility ; conversely , political inequality and invisibility go hand in hand . Hence , in considering Arendt ’ s notion of the public sphere as ‘ the space of appearance ’, we should question not only of how we appear but of how we respond to the appearance of others – those others that , as French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas reminds us , are not an object of comprehension but an enigma of a Face that resists possession , cannot be fully known and cannot be reduced to content . That is , at its core , a question of the ethics and politics of living together in a heterogeneous space . If democracy , as Claude Lefort reminds us in “ The
Question of Democracy ”, is based on uncertainty and legitimized by the declaration of rights – the right to declare in public , among them – and by the presence of others , we should recalibrate how we assess the success of democracy and indeed of democratic public space . These can , and perhaps should , be measured by their capacity to encourage and enable the process of disrupting the continuity of the history of the victors with the memory of the vanquished and the nameless through political , cultural , spatial , and yes , architectural and artistic means . 3
3 Examples include endeavors that seek reparative justice and symbolic justice , marches and public demonstrations , organizations that fight against present-day forms of slavery , mass incarceration and other forms of oppression , Truth and Reconciliation Commissions , the removal of monuments from Public Space , and many more . Other examples include artists and collective groups that contribute with their works to make visibly visible the nameless and the vanquished such as Alfredo Jaar , Cindy Sherman , Barbara Kruger , Marcelo Brodsky , Grupo Arte Callejero , Acción Poética , Jenny Holzer , Priscilla Monge , Benvenuto Chavajay , Forensic Architecture , Chto Delat , Muntadas , Krzysztof Wodiczko , Kara Walker , Carrie Mae Weems , David Hammons , Elizabeth Alexander , Theaster Gates , Doris Salcedo , Tania Bruguera , Oscar Muñoz , Fire Theory , Regina Galindo , Anne Bouie , Jean-François Boclé , Martin Puryear , Hank Wills Thomas , Marilyn Nelson , among many others . Much of our collaborative work at Wodiczko + Bonder is based on these issues and questions . overview
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