How Do You Make a Site of Conscience?

A week or so ago, the memory site, 23.5 of the Hrant Dink Foundation opened to the public in Istanbul, Turkey. I've had the opportunity to visit this site twice, once a year ago, and once in late March of this year, and I wanted to share the site and their development process in the hopes it might be useful to anyone thinking about opening any kind of historic site--not just a site of conscience.

To begin--who was Hrant Dink?  He was a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist, persecuted several times for his beliefs, and assassinated in 2007 on the steps of the office of the newspaper he edited, Agos.  It is these offices that are now 23.5,  the site of memory.  Why 23.5?  April 23rd is Children's Day in Turkey and many places around the world.  April 24 is the day in 1915 when the Turkish government began rounding up and disappeared--the start of the Armenian genocide.  So this public site straddles both the joy of children and the pain of genocide--with the hope of reconciliation.

A year ago when I visited the site, it still felt like an office.  Big notebooks of the ongoing assassination case files lined one wall, and Dink's office itself looked as he left it.  Nayat Karaköse and the team from the Hrant Dink Foundation sat and talked with us about the plans for the site.  There was a big story to tell, in a relatively small space.  How would it work?

First, there were a series of community consultations, asking the questions. In the memory site, what do you want to see? what do you want to discover? what issues are to be emphasized? what are the deficiencies that you expect to be corrected? what kind of educational and visitor programs do you wish to see? what are the themes and approaches you would never want to see?  Participating in these were artists, sociologists, communication specialists, curators, Agos newspaper employees, members of the Dink family, representatives of various civil society organizations, academics and students.

Nayat had visited dozens of Sites of Conscience around the world.  It might not be possible for you to visit all these places, but the Foundation's report is exceptionally useful (and free to download!).  These visits helped solidify what this memory site would be, in part by identifying some key characteristics of meaningful sites. The most compelling sites:

• "have guides who take part in linking truths to present realities with a dynamic narrative, providing commentary and hold a dialogue with the visitor; 
• have objects exposed that embody the past, rendering it visible, so that small stories on which big narratives cast a shadow can come to the fore; 
• promote hope and incorporate messages that encourage visitors to contribute to a better future; incorporate visitors into the memorialisation process, providing a space for their experiences, ideas, feelings and suggestions; and
• are dynamic, constantly being updated, opening the way to new exhibits and thus able to present different experiences to visitors at different times."

When I came back this spring, as the team worked madly to get the space partly ready to share with those of us who were there for the conference Memory Sites, Memory Paths: Towards Another Future which brought together experts from memory sites and academia to share their work.  On that visit, I could see the ideas come to life--and to see how, as it often is, developing strong interpretation is often a process of pruning away ideas, until the strong branches of the concept come into view.  Now, a visitor is encouraged to reflect;  they meet Hrant Dink as not just a heroic figure, but as a human, struggling with ideas and the world. Visitors see the impact his work and life had--and ponder how they can have an impact as well.

Any historic site must wrestle with many of these same questions and ideas.  The answers you find will be different--but the asking of questions, rather than a certainty, must be an integral part of the process. 

When we visited this year, it was just days before this year's election for the mayor of Istanbul mayor.  Giant election posters from the ruling party could be seen everywhere.  The results of that election--the victory of reformer Ekrem İmamoğlu were overturned and a second election was just held in June. The result: an even bigger victory margin for İmamoğlu and a hopeful sense of possibility away from a government that has imprisoned thousands for their beliefs.  Human rights are still endangered in Turkey, as they are in many places around the world, but the opening of this site, like so many other Sites of Conscience, is cause for optimism.  As Hrant Dink wrote,

"Perceptions on both sides can only change in an environment of contact and dialogue. Therefore, ‘solving history’ is not actually a real concept, or a problem. There is nothing to be solved about history anyway… There is only a part of it that has to be understood. And understanding necessitates a process of learning, enlightenment and comprehension, spread out over time."

My best wishes and great admiration to the entire team of this project!

What Does Forgiveness Look Like?

Over the past almost two years in my work at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, I have traveled around the world, and even more importantly, listened to and worked with survivors and activists from all over.   As you might have noticed, I've blogged less--both because of time and because much of this is hard to write about--to do full justice to what I want to convey.  But in late August in Rwanda, I had an experience that I know my writing skills will fail me on, but at the same time, it was a museum experience that I know I'll think about, in both emotional and intellectual terms, for a long, long time so I wanted to try and share.

I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial with a group of Sites of Conscience members and activists from Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. I had previously visited the Memorial--which is both a museum and the resting place of more than 250,000 Rwandans killed during the genocide of 1994. It's moving and complicated, with a story that reaches much further back than 1994 and providing visitors a distinct sense of the long process of "othering" people and the deadly consequences of such work.

But this time, after touring the exhibits, we sat down in a large room and three people came and sat in front of us.  After introductions, the woman stood up and began to tell her story (and many thanks to the Memorial staff who translated into both English and French for all of us).  I didn't take notes or photos, because the story itself was so compelling, so my apologies for any mistakes.  She begins the story when she was young, and as a Tutsi, she remembers being treated differently in school, and even remembers making clubs in school, but not being told what they were for.  And then, of course, the killing begins and her entire family is killed--somehow she manages to survive.

And at this point, she reached down and tightly grasped the hand of the older man sitting next to her, and pulled up him to stand next to her.  Standing together, hands clasped, she said, "This is the man who killed my family.  We are friends and neighbors.  We help each other. I have forgiven him."  There was, I think, an audible intake of breath from many of us in the room.  And he begins his story.  I don't remember many details, but I do remember that he talked about propaganda (not referred to as such) and feeling like it was his responsibility to kill.  But then he talked about coming to the point where he felt the need to ask for forgiveness--and his appreciation that it was granted by her.

I've never had an experience like this.  Over the past two years at the Coalition I've met many inspiring survivors.  But this was the first time I heard directly from a perpetrator.  It reinforced for me the complex nature of victims and perpetrators.  Perpetrators become victims; victims become perpetrators, and there is often a gray line, particularly when people are exploited by leaders. There are many viewpoints on Rwanda's reconciliation and trial process --some positive, some negative. But this was a personal experience.  Both speakers expressed thanks to the government for making their lives better and it's clear that the government has played a strong role in this process.

I'm writing this on a day when much seems broken--that the ability to bridge across difference seems ever harder.  But these two people are powerful evidence that reconciliation can happen--and the Kigali Genocide Memorial a powerful example that museums have a role to play in this effort.

I'm on History Hit!

It was a great pleasure to talk about our work and the work of our members at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience for Dan Snow's podcast, History Hit.  I hope you'll take a listen.

Plus, I'm now working my way through some of Dan's other episodes:  from the history of spying to Brexit to making comedy from history, there's so much to listen to.  Enjoy!

Caring for Visitors

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  It's a former high school that was used as a security prison (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime during its murderous rule from 1975-79.  Not surprisingly, it's a tough place to visit:  rooms where torture happened, the photographs of victims (and torturers who often then became victims themselves), and the reminder that only 7 people of the roughly 17,000 imprisoned there survived.

It's an incredibly important story and as with all Sites of Conscience, one all of us need to listen to.  However, I was particularly struck by the gentle care that the museum took to provide space, both mentally and physically, to allow visitors to process these events, which feel like a kind of horrible madness.  The excellent audio tour includes both narrative and historical testimony, including from the trial of the prison chief Duch (who, lest you think this is the distant past, was only convicted in 2010 by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and sentenced to life imprisonment).

Until just a few years ago, the center courtyard was just a paved space.  But now it's green and lovely. Each time you leave a building you have a chance to take a deep breath, sit and reflect.  The tour gives you a heads-up before you come to stops that may be really difficult to hear.  The effective narrative reminds you that it is always humans--committing the genocide, resisting the genocide, and providing the testimony.   Every day there is a dialogue forum with a survivor of the Pol Pot regime and the White Lotus Room provides visitors a chance to meditate in a cool, quiet room and listen to Khmer traditional music.  The audio tour also provides traditional music that you can dip into and out of.

Upcoming on May 20 is the annual Remembrance Day, in memory of the spirits of the victims and when, according to the museum website, "Food and other offerings are made to the monks and as charitable acts to the poor."

The message of the site itself is the most important--as Tuol Sleng's director, Chhay Visoth notes:

My goal is for visitors to understand what happened here so that it never happens again—innocent people, including children, being imprisoned, tortured and killed. I want them to learn about the cruelty of this regime and remember the victims who died here, who were forced to make confessions for things they didn’t do and then put to death without mercy.

But it's constructive for other museum workers to note that the same compassion for victims extends, in a very different way, to a kind of compassion for visitors--and that this compassion is done with such simple tools:  green spaces, cool rooms to rest, music--that have such power, power that helps ensure that visitors will always remember the experience and some of the faces and stories of the victims. It's worth noting that this care, this compassion for visitors comes from victims, as virtually every Cambodian of a certain age was affected, one way or another by the Khmer Rouge's actions. With that remembrance and that care, we can, as we daily remind ourselves at the Coalition of Sites of Conscience, "turn memory into action."

The "Repression Machine:" Telling Albania's Story

In March, I spent a week in Tirana, Albania, at the invitation of the United States Embassy in Tirana, facilitating conversations and workshops about possibilities for a rejuvenated National History Museum.  More on that experience later, but first to discuss a bit about Albania's history and the stories that museums and archives are sharing with visitors and my learning at two historic sites and one archive.

If you're like me, you don't know much about Albania's complex and fascinating history, but the part this post focuses on is the Enver Hoxha communist regime, established after the defeat of the Nazis in 1945.  This regime was initially allied with the Soviet Union, but broke away and became unaligned, and isolated from almost everywhere. The only way I can describe it is as a paranoid state that distrusted everyone, but most of all its own citizens.  In the years since the early 1990s, Albania, like many other states, has been coming to terms with its Communist legacy.  It's not an easy task, particularly as this did not involve an invader or outside oppressor, say as in the Czech Republic, but an entirely home-grown system of repression.

I learned about this history by visiting three places doing exceptional work:  the House of Leaves, Spaç Prison, and the State Security Archives.  Each one provided food for thought for anyone thinking about ways to interpret difficult issues, in this case, the "machine of repression," as Genta Sula, head of the archives, described it.

The House of Leaves is right in the center of Tirana and only opened as a museum less than a year ago. But the House itself has been long-known to Albanians.  It's the former headquarters of the state surveillance service, sequestered behind a high wall covered with leaves.  It's now a museum devoted to helping visitors understand surveillance: who did, how they did it, why they did it, and more.  From the House of Leaves I remember how much the graphic black and white design served the story.  There were loads and loads of charts--ordinarily something I might not be attracted to--but room-sized, they actually drew you in.  The mechanics of the surveillance were fascinating--and also unsettling.  You could see how some people just saw the surveillance as a technical problem to be solved, not a human rights question. And then that began to raise some unsettling questions about the state of surveillance today in the larger world.

But most importantly for me, was the sense that, throughout the entire museum, that the exhibits were based on real, individual stories.  This was brought home to me as I entered one room that listed all the people imprisoned or killed by the regime.  An Albanian colleague with me went quiet, looked up, and said, "here's my grandfather."  Those stories, one by one, are a large part of what gave the museum its exceptional power to me. The other power came from what was unsaid:  that we think about this state-sponsored surveillance, but about how we're just starting to think about the kind of corporate surveillance that we willingly surrender to.

Some of the raw material for the content of this exhibit comes from the state security archives, newly opened after more than twenty-five years.  You can come to the archives and see your own file--some of them thousands and thousands of pages.  The total archives is more than 22 million pages.  You begin to understand the web of connections:  the government spied on you, and then convince you to spy on others--and so much information was fundamentally useless--but still used to intimidate and imprison others.  Genta Sula, the director of the Authority for the Information on Former Communist Police Secret Files (that's the archives official name) views the archives also as an activist tool.  The archives are working with artist Alketa Xhafa Mripa, who is producing "Even the Walls have Ears,"  testimonies from the archives to be projected on public buildings this spring.  If there's one thing I've learned in my year at Sites of Conscience,  it's that archives can be really powerful.  These archives are a great example of both documentation and activism.

The last site of note was not quite a museum yet--and it took me far out of Tirana.  Three staff members of Cultural Heritage without Borders, a Sites of Conscience member, took me out to visit Spaç Prison. Far up in the mountains, the prison and labor camp was established by the regime and housed a number of Albanian intellectuals and opponents of the Hoxha regime.  It's been designated as a heritage site, but sadly neglected and Cultural Heritage without Borders has taken on the effort to turn it into a site of memory and a museum.  For me, several important elements stood out here:  first, the power of place.  Although most of the way to the prison is now a paved road, it used to be a very long drive to get to this remote place.  And once here, you understand that the regime's goal of isolating you and attempting to control every aspect of your life.  "Inspirational" quotes from Hoxha are still on the walls juxtaposed with one prisoner's list of movie stars on a cell wall.

But this site also reveals the challenge of dealing with the past.  The site is owned by the government and the mine itself has been leased to a Turkish company, who is rapidly changing everything around the "red line" of the historic site, as you can see in the above photo.  The buildings at the top of the photo are all new. This region, like all of Albania, is interested in economic development--hence the mine lease.  Which will win out?  Cultural  Heritage without Borders has developed a thoughtful plan for the ongoing development of the site as a site of memory--and a place where young people can not only learn about the past and but also shape a more just future.

I found one commonality in all these experiences: virtually everyone I met, of course, had their own story of these times and their family or personal experiences.  It's the integration of these personal voices that provides the strength of these places and the involvement of those affected by the regime is critical.  Everyone noted that Albanian society has a long way to go in the complex process of reconciliation, but each of these experiences showed the power that museums, historic sites, and archives can have in moving towards that reconciliation if they are unafraid.

A Museum for Labor Day: Who Tells the Story?

Labor Day weekend here in the United States seems a good time to share my visit to the Plantation Tea Workers Museum outside Kandy, Sri Lanka, from a few weeks ago on the Old Peacock Tea Estate. I was in Sri Lanka for my work at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and I had spent much of the preceding week in a hotel conference room, in an intense workshop experience (perhaps recounted in a later post) so I looked forward to hearing up into the green hill country by train.  Up and up we went, and then the next day, up even further to the tea museum, which was founded by the Institute for Social Development, a Coalition member and an organization dedicated to improving both work and social conditions for tea workers and Hill Country Tamils.

As I thought about this museum and its founding, I thought about the other industry-specific museums I know--the vast majority of the ones we know well are corporate ones, telling a story from a specific point of view.  Their founding (and their funding) reflects the point of view of owners, rather than workers.  As I pondered this, I realized I should give a long overdue shout out to Patricia West, whose book Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House, published in almost twenty years ago, was really the first work that encouraged me to understand historic houses and museums in a more political context.

This museum has a clear mission, tied to the Institute's mission. The institute focuses on:

"rights issues of hill country Tamil people in plantation sector for last 25 years.  We enlighten them to claim their basic and fundamental rights by advocating the civil society organizations and politicians of the community while lobbying the policy makers of the country. Although the hill country Tamils were not directly involved in 30 years protracted ethnic conflict, it impacted on plantation community and made them most vulnerable and excluded from the mainstream development interventions." 

It's a small museum but the labels were in multiple languages, including English, and my visit (including the trip all the way up) was greatly enhanced by R. Nanthakumar, Programme Manager at ISD, who grew up in a line house on a tea plantation and shared a bit of his own history, updates on the current efforts to ensure full civil rights for this community, and the history of the larger community.

This was a museum where the story, except for the end product of the work, a cup of tea, was entirely new to me.  I didn't know how tea was harvested, I didn't know how the workers had come from India, recruited by the British, to work on the plantations, I didn't know they were essentially stateless for decades and decades. I didn't know about labor organizing, or about activists, including poets, for full civil rights for Hill Country Tamils. I was your average visitor who knew nothing.

But I learned alot! How often do workers really get to tell their story?  Sometimes local, city or regional museums take on telling workers' stories, and I've worked on a few of these projects as well--they're often a bit of a balancing act.  A bit of googling led me to some other workers' museums that I'm now curious about:

The Workers' Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa
The Labor Museum & Labor Movement Library and Archive, Denmark
The Workers History Museum, Canada
Amuri Museum of Workers' Housing, Finland
(FYI, none really came up in the United States--please share additions!)

Do you tell stories of workers at your museum?  How do you think about workers' rights? As the museum field slowly becomes more attentive to workers' rights in museums (see #Museumworkersspeak and the recent protests by interpreters at Plimouth Plantation), how much do we think about how we can encourage a broader campaign for workers' rights?

The Plantation Tea Workers Museum is not just about the past.  It's very much connected to present-day struggles for human rights and as part of ISD, in an action-oriented manner.  It's a small museum a long way away from anywhere but it changed my own perspective.  My next cups of tea will be accompanied by some thinking about the people who made that cup possible and their struggle for human rights.  And of course, in the same way the Coalition's members do every day,  I'll try to turn memory into action.

"I am an activist" From Walden to Sites of Conscience

This Fourth of July celebration seemed different than others, somehow.  My social media feeds were filled with reminders of both the potential of the United States (tweeting the Declaration of Independence) and of the distance we still have to go (Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July speech in Rochester, NY).  Reading those tweets and speeches pushed me to finally write a small bit about my experiences with International Coalition Sites of Conscience members at our Africa and Middle East and North Africa meetings in May. Those two weeks were deeply meaningful to me as an introduction to Coalition members' work around the world. Whether it was sitting by the water in Tunis, drinking tea late at night or somberly trying to make sense together of a visit to a genocide memorial, those connections will long resonate for me. Somehow those reflections had the unexpected result of bringing me back around to an exhibition at the Morgan Library, just down the block from my office in New York City.

So let's start at the exhibit. It's This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, featuring Henry David Thoreau's journals along with a stellar collection of Thoreau-related artifacts, many from the Concord Museum, where the show will travel later this year.  Thoreau kept a journal---lots of journals, filled with all kinds of things, from the weather to politics.

In the exhibit, big quotations on the wall pull you in to learn more.  And somehow, although I knew this exhibition has been in the planning for quite some time, the quotes seemed incredibly timely.

As I looked at the lock and key from the Concord jail where he spent one single night for his failure to pay the poll tax, I read this quotation,  "I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."  That simple quote led me back to my colleagues in Africa and the Middle East.

Before I began work at the Coalition, I thought of Sites of Conscience in primarily US-focused terms: sites like Lincoln's Cottage, or the Levine and Wing Luke Museums, or national parks like Seneca Falls and Manzanar.  These are organizations that operate as relatively traditional (but inspirational) museums. But many of our Coalition members have come to memory work, the work of archives, museums and memory, from very different places and their organizations are often very young.  I'm just beginning to puzzle out how to share the vital knowledge and practice of these new organizations with the more traditional museum field in the US and elsewhere, in ways that may have the potential to transform our museum practice. And of course, at the same time, I'm working to find more ways to assist all of our members around the world in building on their own strengths.

Here's a bit of what I've been thinking (in no particular cohesive framework--I'm still thinking!).

Because many people working in these organizations come from human rights, social activism, law, and other fields, the gatherings represent a diversity of perspectives not always found in US museum work. It's a reminder that by privileging the knowledge of a museum studies graduate degree, we lose out on important knowledge, skills and perspectives. 

I was reminded of the power of archives, even more than artifacts.  Gonzalo Conte, from Memoria Abierta in Argentina, shared their incredible ongoing archival work, integrating oral histories, images, maps and more to build the ongoing work of justice.  Sites everywhere are doing the same--those oral histories and archives are valued for the ways in which they can speak truths, and in so doing, build justice and reconciliation.  But archives are only valuable when they are accessible. 

When we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which includes the mass grave of 250,000 Rwandans murdered during the 1994 genocide, I found myself balancing between the absorption of complicated information and emotion.  That challenge exists in almost every history exhibit, and the experience is different for every visitor. There are no easy answers, but as exhibition developers, working with those whose story we are telling is critical.  We know this, yet too often we neglect it. We need to find more ways to make those voices heard and more ways to support museum staff who work every day with trauma.  The Memorial seems to do an exemplary job of supporting both staff and visitors.

And lastly, I went away from both meetings struck by the potential power of museums and historic places that are sites of conscience.  In Tunis, we stopped at the site of the former 9th of April Prison (above), now a dusty parking lot and a place where our Tunisian members are working to have designated as a memorial or museum. As we stood there, one of the participants moved a bit over, and stood in a place, saying, "This is exactly where my cell was."  I asked how it felt to stand there. He said, "I do not let this define me.  I am not a victim.  I am an activist."

We need more activists in all our museums to keep from settling for the role of, as Thoreau described museums, "catacombs,"  for dead things, rather than places for the living power of change. 

2017: New Challenges, New Changes

Regular blog readers will know two things: one, that I've been pondering, post-election, the ways I might be able to make more of a contribution in the world; and two, that my career has taken all sorts of unexpected paths.  2017 will be a big year of change and challenge for me as both those items come into play. I'm incredibly pleased to announce that on February 1, I begin a full-time position as Global Networks Program Director for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

If you're not familiar with the Sites of Conscience, it's a vital and important organization with a great team. As a network of more than 200 sites and organizations in 55 countries, it has the mission of "activating the power of places of memory to engage the public in connecting past and present in order to envision and shape a more just and humane future."  I've used the Coalition's resources in a variety of ways to help shape dialogue-based conversations in Ukraine and with other clients;  it's an honor to take this step of full involvement in their work.

The Coalition’s regional programmatic efforts are focused in seven regional networks: Asia, Africa, Russia, Latin America, Europe, North America, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  My team's work will be focused on developing opportunities for learning in all kinds of ways, including peer-to-peer. We'll encourage effective advocacy, and develop other creative, mission-based ways for sites to work and learn together.  Together we will facilitate plans for regional and cross-regional collaborations and work on expanded ways to share ideas and information.

There's much for me to learn. I look forward to sharing my learning process with all of you in blog entries in the coming year. To end this new beginnings post, I wanted to share a dialogue question from a participant in a Ukrainian workshop a few years ago. In this times, it's a good thing to keep those dreams for a peaceful, just world fully in our sights.