An architectural, interactive work about genocide, for which the vast canopy of an old forest in Eastern Europe, in which a civilian massacre occurred during WWII will be transplanted, using thousands of ceremonial bells that will be hung at a new, permanent site. The canopy of bells will be animated (via wireless transmission) by the wind and weather at the original site.
Rimonim is a sonic/weather-based work about genocide that will open a space in the landscape that will, in turn, open a space within all of us for memory.
In the massacre at Rumbula, which occurred on November 30 and December 8, 1941, more than 25,000 Latvian Jews were walked from the Riga Ghetto in freezing temperatures to a remote forest clearing. After undressing completely they were systematically, unceasingly, unfathomably shot by Nazi SS and Latvian soldiers. To this day the killing site, still a forest, is commemorated only through a few passive plaques and stone markers.
As the rural landscape might be changed outwardly by the monument, we expect visitors to the monument to be changed inwardly by their visit. Rather than seeking to fix a particular memory in perpetuity, this work will have built into itself the capacity to accommodate different generations’ reasons for coming here to remember the victims of the Holocaust.
We remind ourselves here that while many communities hope their Holocaust monuments will inoculate themselves against the kind of hatred and bigotry resulting in the Holocaust, we do not want a work about genocide to be a substitute for action against contemporary persecutions, but rather a call to such action.
Access will be free. Everyone will be welcome.
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