The thesis or premise of this approach is those memorials that work – in other words “ working memorials ” – can foster and encourage new kinds of public engagement aiming to make the world a better place . Through various modes of perception , imagination , and experience these projects should serve to re-inscribe sites into the cognitive maps of cities and their cultural and physical landscapes . Their ethics , aesthetics , and politics should then articulate discursive , interrogative , pedagogical , emotional , and therapeutic potentials . Shaped by an awareness of the need to address a plurality of publics and generations these “ working memorials ” may become active agents for culture and dialogue , demanding responsibility and eliciting “ response-ability ”, human rights activism , and civic engagement .
A final ( quite unfinished ) note
I would like to suggest that working on such projects demands very precise , dialogic and committed attitudes towards design , towards techniques and materials , towards sites of memory , towards history , towards democracy , and especially towards the Faces and voices of others . It , thus , involves establishing clear critical-ethical frameworks to position ourselves as profoundly engaged and committed witnesses in our present and for our future . This approach involves inhabiting distance as one ’ s place for action – inhabiting the distance between act and remembrance , recollected worlds and worlds to be transformed . It entails asserting “ presence ” and “ authorship ” through a dynamic interaction and imbrication of conceptual and material worlds within ( and without ) the work , with the goal of ultimately effacing oneself and disappearing from the scene . This is the attitude , and the approach I bring to my teaching ( in seminars , lectures , and design studios on memory and public space ); to my design work for projects ( see below ), and to multiple endeavors and collaborations across disciplines ( including EUROM , Radcliffe Institute on Universities and Slavery , and the Symbolic Reparations Research Project ). It is an approach that involves understanding art , architecture , and landscape as mediums capable of shedding light over a limited set of truths and values in a space located between the questions , the publics , and the instruments of our practices . It involves attempting to contribute to the construction of a “ democratic ” and “ agonistic ” society , as authors , designers , architects , engaged witnesses and sentient subjects , through an ethics of deference to the “ other ” – that is , “ moving out of ourselves ”,¬ following Lévinas – when proposing transformative actions in the public domain .
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4