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Instead of memory-acts that collapse the distinction between themselves and the past, therefore [she] proposes acts of remembance that expose this gulf between what happened in the past and how it now gets remembered. Whether it is national myth and idealization … that blurs the distinction between actual past and present memory of it, or whether it is only the muteness of the cityscape that hides its history … [she] makes as her object of memory the distance between then and now, the way that even her own act of remembrance cannot but gesture indirectly to what was lost and how we now recall it.
James Young's articulate discussion of memory and history in relation to memorials to the Holocaust by Shimon Attie has great resonances for discussions about contemporary memorials for victims of transatlantic slavery. Questions of national myths, the past and various differing multivocal memories of it, the conservative nature of cityscapes and most crucially of how to articulate loss in an amnesiac culture are all germane for the Black artist in her memorial praxis. Lubaina Himid's interest in memorialising the slave trade is not confined to the museum or gallery space, and in a series of interventions since the early 1990s, Himid has sought to promote debates about the need for physical memorials to honour the victims of the slave trade in British landscapes through artistic pieces that project possible memorials, and occasionally in statements, interviews and comment pieces. As she says herself, her interest in memorials, though spawned in London, was piqued afresh when she moved to the north-west of England in 1988, by their seeming absence. She says:
My interest in monuments and statues was born in London … they were crucial landmarks in the everyday. Moving to the north west of England and feeling too visible and too invisible as a black woman artist marooned hundreds of miles from the familiar and extraordinary madness of what is London … I missed these politically loaded signifiers of oppression, theft, heroism and empire. It was 1988 when I tried to devise ways of making visible the very human reality, the essential contribution and the hidden foundations of the wealth of the north-west.
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