Remembering

Healers, doulas, writers, and artists of all kinds will be invited to investigate the origins and legacies of the thieving of people—some of whom will be our ancestors—from the lands on, from and within which they lived and from the people alongside whom they did so.

We will be asked to interrogate geno- and geo-cidal practices of preventable, unnecessary and brutal relocation of people from the lands they knew best and where they were best known to places more hostile to their established ways of living. 

We will be attentive to the robbery of land and the dispersal of people who lived amidst it. We will take notice of the artificial manufacturing (and manufacturers) of hostility that disabled people from moving or flourishing or nurturing themselves and one another and all other brutal, disparate, and differentiated but interlaced practices of ungrounding, extraction, indenture, destruction, and enforced placelessness that we once knew under such names as slavery and settler / colonialism and creative destruction and managed decline and enclosure, amongst others. 

We will forget the old forms of statuary and we will forget black instagram grids, and Hashtag Never Forget: the product of these investigations, interrogations, attentions, and concerns will be our memorialisation. It will come into being not through awe but through action. Necessarily collaborative and processual and practiced in shared vulnerability, it will disrupt the logics that lead us to these harms.

For example, we will take inventory not just of names but where possible of their strategies for preservative resistance—that they might love, fuck, and fight against or underneath the prohibitive preventative forces—as well as the way they smelled and what they wore and how they spoke and moved and styled their hair. 

In this way, memorial work will be torn from its plinth and returned to the public and collective negotiation. It will present a way of living together with and within the muck of histories which will, like all things, accrue new meanings over time.