FORGE

Today I’m starting work on a new project, FORGE. I’m sitting in Metal, Peterborough, beginning to figure out what it is, and where my brain is at. Here are some opening tumbles:

I have never been to Auschwitz.

My grandparents were refugees. I don’t have someone seeking refuge living in my house.

There is going to be a new Holocaust memorial on the Thames in London. I’m not into it.

Why do people visit spaces where humans have committed atrocities? What are we after?

In 2014 one of the two 100kg iron 'welcome' gates was stolen from Dachau concentration camp. A local blacksmith made a replica. It was exactly like the original. And it wasn’t at all.

When places where terrible shit has happened start to decay, should we leave them to rot?

Grindr Remembers The Holocaust.

Is it a good idea to hand over memorialisation of atrocities to the very forces that helped them happen – states, industry, capital?

Why are so many memorials/memorial museums all concrete, steel, spirals, shards?

I work in words. Light. Images. Music. Ideas. Disappearing things.

Female welders are hot.

There are Memorial Architecture conferences. For Memorial Architects.

What’s an appropriate café to have at an ex-torture centre? Benugo?

What if you want to stop remembering?

What doesn’t even get to be remembered?

What time lines are different communities’ histories on with regard to memorial?

Villa Grimaldi. Chile.

If you have a memorial far away from the place where a thing happened, what space is it really?

What if I was done remembering, done with that identity and then lots of people got shot up in a Synagogue, and colleagues tell me anti-semitism isn’t really a thing so much.

Whataboutery.

How can you both pull down a statue and not erase the trouble associated with that history, those acts?

Should they rename ‘Colston Hall’ ‘Not Colston Hall’?

We have memorial museums. We keep committing atrocities.

Remembering is honouring. Surely.

Vilina Vlas is a spa hotel in Visegrad, Bosnia. Also, previously, a rape and torture centre. Three out of Five on Trip Advisor.

Appropriate Behaviour. Ethical Behaviour. The difference and who decides.

Flashdance.

The performance of contemplation. Of solemnity.

What if you are so busy remembering you aren’t doing anything useful in the present?

Daniel Libeskind, you and your gaps and empty spaces.

Gunter Demnig's Stolpersteine.

Rachel Whiteread.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery Alabama. Those Corten Steel hanging columns. Jesus. It wasn’t a state planned memorial though - it was the passion project of one man.

This all sounds IMPORTANT. Nothing wrong with Important. Andbut, tell me about entertainment, again.

(for details of who is supporting/working on the project - please go HERE)