On January 14, 2025, an online workshop will be held, dedicated to global practices of memorializing war crimes and human rights violations. The event will take place from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (Kyiv time) on the Zoom platform, and the working language will be English.
The workshop will address key questions:
How can memory of tragedies be preserved in a way that empowers society?
How can attention be drawn to human rights without politicizing the issue?
How do we maintain the memory of crimes in the context of ongoing violence and structural inequality?
What role do victims and their families play in creating memorials?
How can mistakes in memorialization be avoided, and how can museums be created that are embraced by society?
What alternative practices exist, and what role does art play in this process?
Participants include practitioners and human rights defenders from various countries working to preserve memory of conflicts and wars in Ukraine, South Korea, South Africa, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. The workshop will consist of two panels exploring best practices in memorialization, examples of successful museums, challenges encountered, and innovative approaches in the field.
Panel 1: Chile-Argentina-South Africa: promoting human rights instead of just remembering atrocities.
This panel will showcase the experiences of the Museum of Memory & Human Rights in Chile, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (TBC), the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre in South Africa, as well as the experiences of Argentina, from the perspective of Memoria Abierta, a national and regional reference organization.
When visiting human rights museums, we can see what the founders chose to showcase, but what was their underlying logic? What decisions did they make about what to avoid, and why? We will explore how to create memorials that are both accepted and embraced by societies that have endured extreme trauma, particularly in countries where memories are at risk of being politicised.
Speakers:
María Luisa Sepúlveda is the founder of the Museum of Memory & Human Rights (MMDH) in Santiago de Chile.
Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC), a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust and genocide education, memory, reconciliation, and human rights.
Verónica Torras is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). She is Executive Director of Memoria Abierta, an alliance of historical human rights organizations in Argentina specialized in memory projects and archives that coordinates the Network of Latin American and Caribbean Sites of Memory (RESLAC).
Panel 2: How can we preserve memories when atrocities are still ongoing, and what new practices are emerging?
Ukrainians are contemplating building memorials just a few years after the full-scale invasion, a time when some might argue it’s too early, too sensitive, or too political. Human rights violations in North Korea began over 70 years ago, yet they continue to this day. How can we commemorate these violations while witnesses are still with us? What is their role in this process? What is the balance between the local community’s involvement and the expertise of curators and professionals? What are alternative practices of memorialisation, such as the online museum dedicated to murdered journalists in Mexico or the Commission of the Disappeared? And what role does art play in this process?
Speakers:
Hanna Song is the Executive Director of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), the largest repository of human rights records on North Korea.
Kerry Whigham is an assistant professor of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University and co-director of its Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP).
Karla I. Quintana Osuna is the former National Commissioner for the Search of Disappeared Persons in Mexico, and an International expert for the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP) in Colombia.
Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul is the Executive Director of Defensores de la Democracia (DDLD), a nonprofit that preserves the work of journalists killed in Mexico to prevent violence against reporters via memory-building and narratives for social change.
The workshop will be moderated by Nataliya Gumenyuk – a Ukrainian journalist and author specializing in conflict reporting. She is the founder and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, which co-founded The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies to document war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia.
The Public Interest Journalism Lab invites you to join this important event to explore global best practices and rethink approaches to preserving memory.
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