Memorials

According to The Oxford New Dictionary of English  a memorial is "something, especially a structure, established to remind people of a person or event".   

The past is not "Preserved" but is "Socially Constructed" through archives, museums, monuments, school curricula, and public displays.  What happens in the past is continuously being reconstructed in the context of the present.  Every one of us encounters certain "markers" of the past that help us remember and give meaning to our lives.  Graves, cemeteries, monuments, and religious places of worship are all examples of such "markers".  "A memorial may be a day, a conference, or a space, but it need not be a monument.  A monument, on the other hand, is always a kind of memorial".   Memorials focus on certain people or events and the place that a memorial is constructed is just as important as the people or events themselves.  Memorials become landmarks that provide a symbolic place for remembrance.  If a memorial is placed at the town's center, the importance of its memory becomes very clear. 

Catherine Lavender 

Around the world, people instinctively turn to places of memory to come to terms with the past and chart a course for the future. From makeshift roadside memorials to official commemorations, millions of people around the world gather at places of memory looking for healing, reconciliation and insight on how to move forward. Memory is a critical language and terrain of human rights. It’s here, through the process of preserving the past, that evidence of human rights violations is maintained and made public, issues this evidence raises are debated and tactics for preventing it from happening again are developed. In short, these places can be critical tools for building a lasting culture of human rights. Our project is to take a fundamental human instinct and develop it as an identifiable, self-conscious tactic in the service of human rights and social justice.