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What's Being Done On . . . Memory Projects?
www.sitesofconscience.org/ The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience is a global network of historic museums on four continents committed to "presenting and interpreting a wide variety of historic issues, events and people... hold[ing] in common the belief that it is the obligation of historic sites to assist the public in drawing connections between the history of our site and its contemporary implications." The common work and ties among the member museums commemorate past struggles for democracy through programs that stimulate civic participation and dialogue on current social issues. With members as diverse as the Japanese American National Museum and the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic, the museums are linked through a Web site of conscience, staff exchange programs, Coalition conferences, capacity building, and dialogues for democracy. Membership is open on an annual basis to other museums with corresponding ideals and goals. Interview: We would like to thank Liz Sevcenko, Director of the Secretariat for the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, for answering the following interview questions. Q: Please tell us the history behind the creation of the Coalition, including its purpose and the main reasons for establishing it. In 1999, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City put out a call to historic sites around the world, asking if any believed that, like the Tenement Museum, historic sites had a critical role to play in promoting democratic engagement on pressing social issues. The Museum was preserving the history of immigrant families, working to promote public dialogue on contemporary immigration issues, and providing valuable programs and services to local immigrant communities. The Museum found itself caught between the worlds of human rights and arts and culture, struggling for support and looking for partners. Eight sites responded to the Museum's call: the District Six Museum (South Africa), remembering forced removal under apartheid; the Gulag Museum (Russia), the only Stalinist labor camp to be preserved in Russia; the Liberation War Museum (Bangladesh), excavating killing fields and memorializing the genocide of the Bangladeshi people during the Liberation War of 1971; the Maison Des Esclaves (Senegal), an 18th-century slave transport station; the National Park Service (USA), representing the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls and other sites; Memoria Abierta (Argentina), commemorating the "disappeared" during the dictatorships of the 1970s and '80s; Terezín Memorial (Czech Republic), a labor camp used to model the "humane practices" of the Nazi regime to the Red Cross; and The Workhouse (United Kingdom), a 19th-century solution to poverty. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the group organized a meeting at the Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although participants came from radically different political, historical, and cultural contexts, we shared a common commitment to activating our memory sites to offer citizens the opportunity to engage with each other on the issues of greatest concern to them today. Participants joined forces around the following statement: We hold in common the belief that it is the obligation of historic sites to assist the public in drawing connections between the history of our site and its contemporary implications. We view stimulating dialogue on pressing social issues and promoting humanitarian and democratic values as a primary function. To promote this vision, and to provide sites around the world with the support they needed to fulfill it, we founded the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. The group pledged to work together to develop effective strategies for activating our places of memory as centers for dialogue on contemporary issues. Our goal is to transform historic site museums from places of passive learning to places of active citizen engagement. We seek to use the history of what happened at our sites - whether it was a genocide, a violation of civil rights, or a triumph of democracy - as the foundation for dialogue about how and where these issues are alive today, and about what can be done to address them. Q: How do Sites of Conscience promote reconciliation and democracy and what projects do you find most effective in this mission? Every site of conscience engages citizens and addresses conflict in ways that are appropriate to its particular historical and local context. Recognizing this, we established overall international criteria for Sites of Conscience as a way of challenging ourselves, and other museums around the world, to meet our civic obligations. We defined a Site of Conscience as a museum that interprets history through a historic site; engages in programs that stimulate dialogue on pressing social issues and promote humanitarian and democratic values as a primary function; and shares opportunities for public involvement in issues raised at the site. Each site has developed its own strategies to meet these criteria, producing programs, exhibits and events designed to inspire our visitors to use what they have learned and felt at our sites to think and participate in new ways about important issues we face today. These methodologies define larger civic questions each site wants visitors to consider at the site, and tactics for engaging them in dialogue around these questions. Sites of conscience and the activities we organize at them can serve as powerful new tools in at least four processes: truth seeking and building a culture of "never again"; reparations; reconciliation; and civic engagement, or democracy building. For example, concerning "truth seeking," Memoria Abierta, a coalition of human rights organizations in Argentina, has amassed a powerful archive of documents, photographs, and sites associated with human rights abuses during the dictatorships of the 1970s and '80s. Memoria Abierta hopes to use this material to stimulate citizens "to make a commitment to solve the problems of our country." The project transformed the ordinary landscape of Buenos Aires into an ongoing series of public events reminding people of what happened under everyone's noses in the recent past, and designed to inspire every citizen to take responsibility for ensuring that the abuses in Argentina never happen again. Concerning "reparations," in Cape Town, South Africa, the District Six Museum created an ongoing, community-based center for remembering and recovery that has served as the basis for material compensation for victims of apartheid. As noted in the profile of the Museum, that you've included in this installment, in 1966, the racially integrated neighborhood of District Six was razed to the ground to make way for a new "whites only" development. The only buildings left were houses of worship. A group of former residents covered its floor of a Methodist church with a detailed map of their destroyed neighborhood, and invited their neighbors to place their homes, streets, stores, and community spaces on it. This memory-mapping project became the foundation for land reclamation claims and the Museum organized and hosted one of the Land Courts on its site. Former residents sat in chairs directly on the map of their old neighborhood, as the court granted them, in the words of one, "our land back, our homes back, our dignity back." Sites of Conscience can also serve as powerful catalysts for negotiation and reconciliation. The Gulag Museum at Perm-36 in the Urals is the only Stalinist labor camp in Russia to be preserved as a historic site. The Museum preserves the barracks where thousands of people from the former Soviet Union were imprisoned for anything, from minor work infractions to political opposition, from the Stalin era through the 1980s. Almost every family knew someone who was sent to the Gulag. Prisoners were forced into a massive labor system that fueled the industrialization of Russia. The Gulag Museum invited former prisoners and former guards to give each other "tours" of the site from each of their perspectives. The dialogues forced these individuals to confront each other as human beings, and allowed them to take significant steps in their personal process of recovery. But the Gulag Museum also realized that to build a functioning democracy in Russia, they would need to do more than heal the rift between a few individuals. Today, the Museum serves as an educational center about the Gulag system, and about the role of individual citizens in creating and sustaining human rights and democracy. On civic engagement, the Workhouse in England preserves a rare surviving example of a Victorian "solution" to poverty: structures that once loomed on the outskirts of every town as threats to the "idle and profligate." In this vision of helping the needy, people who could not support themselves were swept off the streets, separated from their families, and sent to do menial work in the workhouse. After touring the segregated quarters and forced labor yards of the Workhouse, visitors enter an exhibit titled "What Now? What Next?" It compares the classification and segregation of Britain's poor from the Victorian era through the present. The Workhouse invites visitors to address the following questions: Where would the people of The Workhouse be today? How have things improved, or become worse? What solutions to poverty and its related issues may we try in the future - is there anything new that has not been tried before? To foster the specific practices of sites working in a particular area, and to enhance their impact on common challenges to their democracies, the Coalition launched Regional Networks for Conscience that have involved over 45 new sites. The Regional Networks launched in Spring 2006 were Asian Sites of Conscience: Promoting Cultures of Peace and Pluralism in the Wake of Ethnic and Religious Conflict; South American Sites of Conscience: Promoting Debate through the Construction of Memory of the Recent Past; African Sites of Conscience: Using Histories of Citizen Action to Develop Post-Colonial and Post-Conflict Democracies; and Russian Sites of Conscience: Building an Anti-Totalitarian Culture. Q: From the experience so far of working with the member sites, do you have a sense of which kind of sites are best suited for particular historical conflicts or events? Historic sites have the unique power to inspire citizen engagement. From makeshift roadside memorials to official commemorations, places of memory draw millions looking for healing, reconciliation, and mobilization to action. However, the power of historic sites is not inherent; it must be harnessed as a self-conscious tactic in the service of human rights and social justice. The conscious effort to connect past to present and memory to action is the hallmark of the Sites of Conscience movement. In our view, there is nothing inherent in a site that guarantees it will play the civic role we envision, and nothing that precludes it from doing so. For us, a Site of Conscience is defined by the commitment of its stewards to play an active role in engaging its audiences in civic dialogue around contemporary issues. The most powerful site of the Atlantic slave trade cannot spontaneously inspire democratic exchange about contemporary racism, and risks lying dormant at the margins of civic life. On the other hand, there are almost no limits to the stories and themes that can inspire important dialogue. Sites representing the triumph of democracy, social justice, or human rights, like the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, where the Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, are as powerful as sites representing their failure, like the Maison des Esclaves in Senegal. Sites representing the histories of human interaction with the natural world, like the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, are as important as sites interpreting humans' interaction with one another. The door is wide open to any site: the onus is on the stewards to activate these sites as democratic fora. Q: What are some of the common problems your member organizations face? From your experience, what are the best strategies for dealing with these problems? Sites of Conscience are constantly learning from one another and pushing boundaries in terms of what museums can and should offer their visitors, and how historic sites can help visitors confront and discuss difficult histories in such a way that will inspire action and change. This is particularly challenging in countries where the pain of the past is still raw (e.g., the fairly recent legacy of military dictatorship in Argentina) and much public debate exists around the issues of public memorials and museums. Sites in other countries, such as Bangladesh, are struggling to address politically sensitive ideas of pluralism and democracy, where violence against progressive and cultural groups is widespread today. Having an international body of support not only legitimizes the social realities and struggles of our sites, but also fosters a constant exchange of best practices that enable us to offer more opportunities for civic engagement on human rights issues. When seeking to harness the power of places of memory to inspire dialogue and citizen action on human rights, Coalition Members have wrestled with many issues. For example, how to use the power of place: connect visitors to the specific history of your site; understand and use the ways the spaces make people feel to help them connect to the broader issues you are trying to raise. It is often difficult to make the process part of the product. "Controversy" is too often avoided as something damaging to an institution or a project; in fact, engaging conflicting perspectives is one of the greatest opportunities for sites of conscience. Involve stakeholders from different perspectives in the development of the project. The process of developing the story and experience is a productive starting point for dialogue about the contemporary issues at stake. Involving different perspectives at the outset ensures that these perspectives will be raised in the exhibit, and that different groups will participate in dialogues after the project is completed. It is important to develop different forms of dialogue that can engage people with different amounts of time to spend, different cultural backgrounds, and different personalities. In addition to offering in-depth dialogue programs after tours, sites are developing ways to generate discussions among visitors during the tours. Others are also developing ways to stimulate dialogue and address contemporary issues through the Web, printed material, and other media. Coalition Members have had to manage visitor expectations. To prepare visitors for the sensitive issues they may encounter, sites work to communicate their commitment to addressing contemporary questions through information on Web sites, at visitor centers, by distributing maps of the site that indicate where visitors will encounter material on the present day, and by training front line staff to speak to visitors before they go on the tour. Member Sites should serve as open fora. Raising both sides of an issue and encouraging debate stimulates citizen participation more effectively than teaching a single story to a passive audience. But museums must find ways to do this without becoming moral relativists, or appearing to excuse or condone perpetrators. Sites should also serve as ongoing fora. Memorials must be active places where issues are constantly debated, where stories are told and retold. The site and program must be flexible enough to accommodate the ways the meaning of the past changes for each generation, to be constantly reinvented. A static narrative or permanent sculpture will foreclose dialogue and become obsolete in short order. To be most effective, sites should focus on individual human experiences as a starting point. This helps visitors to connect the story to their own lives and imagine what they would have done in each situation. This kind of imagining is the first step in inspiring people to take action. Q: How often do the Coalition members meet, and what generally results from such consultations? Hosted by a different Member Site each year, Sites of Conscience Summits build the capacity of the host site through an evaluation and workshop on its programs and facilities; offer in-depth professional exchange opportunities for Member Sites; and serve as the annual meeting for the Coalition's Steering Committee, where Coalition governance issues are decided upon and programs evaluated. Aside from the annual summits, Coalition members participate independently in on going, one-on-one, on-site project development consultations and staff exchanges. Q: How does the Coalition office in New York assist and enhance the capacity of the members? How can a group become a member of the Coalition? The Coalition Secretariat office in New York City functions as an information clearinghouse for strengthening and building Sites of Conscience. We achieve this through providing communications, administrative and logistical support to foster project collaborations and regional activities among sites; coordinating learning exchanges, ranging from day-long conferences to week-long seminars; offering an open forum for sharing strategies, tools and resources to a wide range of audiences through our multilingual Web site (www.sitesofconscience.org) and quarterly e-newsletter, Matters of Conscience; and fundraising to support new, innovative activities that promote civic engagement. To become a member, email us at coalition@tenement.org or visit our website at www.sitesofconscience.org Q: Do you have any advice to readers interested in creating a Site of Conscience? One way interested individuals and groups can start is by becoming members of the Coalition and receiving our free quarterly e-newsletter, Matters of Conscience. This publication offers a current, in-depth look at emerging and established Sites of Conscience around the world, shares pressing news items, and contains tools and resources for starting your own memorialization project. Groups that are exploring how a place of memory could help address a human rights issue in their community might begin by bringing key constituencies together for a discussion of the following questions:
About "What's Being Done On . . . ?" For several months at a time, we highlight the activities of various organizations in different global regions, and links to important resources, that are focused on a particular theme or area of democracy work. Each new theme is announced via DemocracyNews, and the information from the previous installment is placed in the "What's Being Done On . . . ?" archives. We hope to receive and post information about the work you or others may be doing that is focused on these issues. Send information via e-mail to the or by fax to (202) 378-9889. |
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