Discussion for the Paine Memorial
Rather than being designed by a single, professional designer, the Paine Memorial was created through a deeply participatory and consultative process. This approach not only aided in the healing process for families of victims, but also imbued the site with great power and beauty.
Access to this memorial is limited by its location on the outskirts of Paine, which is a small and remote city a long way from Chilean urban centers. Who visits this site? Has it succeeded, as the victims’ families hoped it would, in transcending its function as a de facto cemetery?
read and comment »
The citizens of Paine not only actively participated in the process of creating the memorial, they helped to design and build it. Over the course of a year, a group of government-financed artists worked with the families of the disappeared or dead to design the site. They chose to replace each missing “tree” with a mosaic, which the artists taught the families themselves how to create; together, they implemented the designs.
“My dad would be very proud of our mosaic: we’re showing the good part of who he was, not the sadness that remains with us,” one family participant said.
References
Rodriguez, Carmen. "A memory of Paine." New Internationalist 385 (December 2005): 8.
read and comment »
]]>