The Focus on Memory Culture centers around the rigorous exploration of historical events. The Goethe-Institut North America actively fosters new perspectives and forward-looking approaches through innovative projects, exhibitions, symposia, and educational materials. Through these measures, the Focus on Memory Culture creates as a vibrant platform for transatlantic dialogue.
Digital download or physical order: “Monuments of the Future?” card set
Are you an educator, cultural mediator, historian, artist, professional development specialist and/or interested in remembrance work? If you would like to facilitate a workshop on the topic of monuments or remembrance culture, consider using the “Monuments of the Future?” card set. This resource provides thought-provoking prompts, encourages discussions, and offers inspiring examples for engaging activities and creative exploration.
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The card set comprises a total of 45 cards, categorized as “Discuss”, “Explore”, and “Imagine”.
The card set is part of the “Monumental Bag” – a bag containing additional suggestions and tools for engaging with monuments. The “Monumental Bag” was developed as a result of the “Monuments of the Future?” symposium.
Current debates about memorial culture in urban space call for new educational formats that encourage young people to engage with their immediate surroundings. In this context the Goethe-Institut Washington created the “Monumental Bag.”
In a public landscape haunted by visible and invisible memories, can Art and Design transform monuments into vessels that uncover what was previously unspoken? How can we answer the call for sites of multi-directional memory? And how can we find solutions that evolve as society changes over time?
Shaping the Past features work by artists, activists, and collectives from North America and Germany that illuminates ongoing memory interventions, reimagines civil society, and offer reparative models that actively shape the past and our paths forward.
Conversation Series Counter-Memories
The Counter-Memories conversation series investigates a number of international monuments and places of remembrance whose symbolic significance often reveals a great deal about our relationship to history.
In 1943, hundreds of non-Jewish women defied the Nazi regime. They demanded the release of their Jewish husbands who had been incarcerated by the Nazi regime, only succeeding by putting their own lives on the line. They showed how ordinary people can become heroes by defying authority and taking risks, day by day.
How does the past take shape, and what happens in the process of coming to terms with the past? What social repercussions are associated with the rooting of history in monuments and memorials? How can those narratives be shifted or upended through alternative, innovative approaches to memorialization?
