How can sites of atrocity and oppression or contentious memorials be constructively transformed through art and design?
by Emi Smith HN 300: Art, Politics & Social Justice (Dr McEvoy-Levy) March 6, 2019 Walking through The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a transformative experience (EJI 2018). The hauntingly beautiful steel pillars representative of individuals lynched carry enormous weight and impact. The architecture of the space, gradually carrying visitors along a decline the farther into the memorial they walk, leaves guests far underneath the pillars. Looking up, one quite literally feels the gigantic weight of human cruelty and suffering. Furthermore, the simplicity of the site allows one to feel the full impact of one of the darkest corners of human history. Rather than having countless plaques to read or videos to interact with, visitors can openly interpret and truly feel the emotions of the space. The simple and tragically beautiful memorial, combined with a picturesque floral landscape and calming water features, not only provides an opportunity for deeper understanding of the horrors committed against fellow humans, but it is a space for healing and coming to peace with a painful past. Sites of atrocity and oppression, such as the city of Montgomery, Alabama, can be transformed into spaces of understanding and healing through museums and memorials. European concentration camps from Nazi Germany are further examples of the use of a site of atrocity to educate in order to prevent the same evil from occurring again. Contentious memorials, such as Confederate monuments in America, could potentially be redesigned using art to create spaces fueled by understanding rather than division. Art, especially on or near sites of atrocity, has an incomparable healing power. Montgomery’s proximity to many plantations and slave-owners positioned the city to become the capital of slave trading in Alabama (one of the two largest slave states in the country). The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is built on the site of a former slave warehouse (EJI 2018). Thousands upon thousands of enslaved black people were imprisoned in warehouses just like the one in Montgomery. In these buildings, slaves were torn apart from their families, never to reunite. They were examined from head to toe by white slave-owners, like people looking at new cars. Oftentimes, slaves had to perform and show-off their best attributes in order to sell themselves, or else they would face a brutal beating later on from their white owner. Black individuals were dehumanized and brutalized in these warehouse spaces. Choosing to build a museum on the same site as one of the most heavily utilized slave warehouses in the country adds an entirely new layer of meaning to the museum. While it is a space for learning and understanding, it is also a space for feeling. It is a place to take a step back and acknowledge the atrocity that occurred literally where one is standing. It adds a sense of reality to the museum because as one is reading about the horrors committed in slave warehouses and against black people throughout history, the ghosts of that atrocity are reading over one’s shoulder. There is an overarching eeriness to the space because visitors cannot be removed from what they are learning about due to the physical site itself. The museum begins with the mass enslavement of black people and first-person accounts of the horrors of the domestic slave trade. Video accounts of slaves behind bars provide a visceral and realistic look into what individuals went through in warehouses. The museum continues into the mass segregation of blacks, focusing especially on lynchings and Jim Crow laws. Powerful visuals, including jars filled with soil taken from various lynching sites throughout the country, allow visitors to begin to grasp the extent of racial terrorism that occurred throughout the South following the collapse of slavery. The museum ends with a focus on the mass incarceration of the black population. Staggering statistics, such as the probability of ending up in prison being 1 in 3 for black men compared to 1 in 17 for white men, fill this portion of the museum. Mock video phone calls with current prisoners illustrate the inhumanity of the American prison system, as do letters written from prisoners to the Equal Justice Initiative. The structure of the museum, beginning with mass enslavement and ending with present-day mass incarceration, purposefully guides visitors to see and understand the connections between what happened in history to what is occurring right now. One can trace present-day dehumanization and racism to past actions and vice versa. Additionally, the structure of the museum is very open and lets visitors freely flow from exhibit to exhibit, allowing one to further see the connections between all three time periods of enslavement, segregation, and incarceration. The Legacy Museum is an interactive space that educates visitors through individual storytelling and powerful visuals, fostering future conversations around the different manifestations of racism in America. The museum is less so a space of healing and more so a place of education and awareness with the goal of increasing understanding and dialogue around the present-day treatment of black Americans by looking to the past. In contrast, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a place designed for peace-building and healing. However, both the museum and the memorial are built on sites of atrocities that occurred in Montgomery. Because of this, they carry even greater weight and realism for the visitor. Other sites of atrocity that have been turned into spaces for education and healing are Nazi concentration camps in Europe. The Holocaust resulted in the death of at least 6 million Jewish people, many of them dying by means of torture, starvation, and mass extermination in camps established under Nazi Germany (Holocaust Encyclopedia 2019). Many of these camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau, remain open to the public to tour (Amondson 2019). These camps are largely untouched, remaining as ghostly reminders of a horrific past. By maintaining the camps rather than tearing them down, Germany and other European countries such as Poland are forced to acknowledge their dark pasts in order to learn from them. Likewise, visitors can experience a haunting and disturbing tour of the camps to remind them that events such as the Holocaust can never happen again. In contrast to the museum and memorial in Montgomery, these spaces are less so sites of healing or education but more so demanding reminders that such appalling acts must never occur again. By allowing individuals to tour the concentration camps, sites of extreme atrocity, people can walk away reminded of how deep hatred and cruelty can run and how this must forever be prevented. Because sites of atrocity can be utilized in such creative ways through art and design to become spaces of healing, education, and remembrance; the question is raised as to whether museums and memorials on sites that did not hold atrocity can be as powerful or provocative. For example, does The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have a different impact than visiting the actual concentration camps in Europe? The answer, undeniably, is yes. The impact of the spaces is decidedly different, perhaps not for better or worse, but certainly different. The United States museum attempts to transform the space in Washington D.C. to include artifacts and emulations of the Nazi camps by exhibiting shoes worn by prisoners and bringing in railroad cars and bunks from Auschwitz (Sodaro 2018). However, the memorial museum is placed in a highly American space, the capital city of the country, and is told from an American perspective. Upon entering the museum, the first experience visitors have is of the American liberation of concentration camps. Because the museum is not located even in the same continent as the site of atrocity, the feeling upon entering and exiting the museum is different than that of experiencing walking through a real concentration camp. While the message of remembrance and never again is prominent in both spaces, the haunting presence of the past is absent from the Americanized museum. Finally, contentious memorials have the opportunity to be turned into spaces of healing and peace-building through art and design. In the American South, many memorials and monuments still exist that honor Confederate generals and ideals (Theobald 2018). This is problematic because of the entrenched racism and division these monuments honor. For many, these monuments symbolize hatred against people of color and support of white supremacy. The issue with their current representation is not merely that they exist, but that they treat those involved in the Confederacy with reverence and awe. Rather than utilizing Confederate memorials as spaces to foster educated dialogue, learning, and growth; they are spaces that promote racist ideals. These monuments should exist as signs of remembrance and never again, however; they must be altered to acknowledge the issues of the past and promote growth from this history. Rather than honor the Confederacy, memorials should question it. They should exhibit the atrocity that the Confederacy symbolized as supporting instead of treating generals with revere. In order to become spaces for healing and peace-building, Confederate memorials must be transformed into sites of learning and growth. Art and design has a powerful impact on space. It has the ability to transform sites of atrocity and contention into places for education, remembrance, and peace. Sites such as slave warehouses and lynchings that occurred in Montgomery have been altered into museums and memorials that honor victims and acknowledge a painful past in order to understand present injustice. Horrific spaces such as concentration camps in Europe remain open to tours in order to remind both governments and civilians that such evil must never be allowed to happen again. Even spaces that did not host atrocity, such as The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, have devised ways to bring the reality of human cruelty and suffering to the space (although how effective this truly is can be debated). Finally, sites of contention such as Confederate memorials have the opportunity to be altered through art to become sites of healing and understanding. The horrors of the past can be difficult to come to terms with. However, through art and design, these atrocities can be slightly more understandable, slightly easier to foster dialogue around, and slightly more healing. Art reminds us that it is up to us for these evils to never happen again. Works Cited: Amondsom, Birge. (2019). Holocaust Memorials in Germany. TripSavvy, https://www.tripsavvy.com/holocaust-memorials-in-germany-1520059. Equal Justice Initiative. (2018). The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Equal Justice Initiative, https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum. Equal Justice Initiative. (2018). The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Equal Justice Initiative, https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial. Holocaust Encyclopedia. (2019). Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of- the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution. Sodaro, Amy. (2018). Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence. Rutgers University Press. Theobald, Bill. (2018). Controversial Confederate Statues Remain in U.S. Capitol Despite Being Removed Elsewhere. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/19/confederate-statues-remain-u- s-capitol-despite-opposition/1269270002/. Comments are closed.
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