The Dispersed Memorial is a multisite, participatory intervention into practices of collective mourning. Sergio Beltrán-García designs do-it-yourself memorial kits that are low-cost, modular, and accompanied by digital interfaces in order to prototype new platforms for commemoration. Beltrán-García began this project to mourn victims of human rights violations in Mexico. The Dispersed Memorial resists traditional practices of state-sanctioned memorialization, democratizing the process of mourning toward new possibilities that bridge personal grief with collective action.
For the first phase of The Dispersed Memorial, Beltrán-García constructed flatpack memorial kits and shipped them to select partners across the world for self-assembly. Together, in remote collaboration, the artist and his collaborators registered individual, communal, and global losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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