Monuments, documents, and records of collective trauma exist to stand for and contain that which has happened. But in an attempt to lighten the burden of atrocity and barbarism, these mementos simultaneously distance us from the context that birthed them. Through the act of burying and depositing history in monuments and artefacts and by grouping victims into categories and statistics, we are letting a passive silence do the work an active memory should engage. The moment a violence of the past resurfaces, we detach in disbelief and in repetition.  

The publication intertwines two archives that bear witness to the violence of the twentieth century: photographic records (witnesses) and literary reflections (the work of mourning). With facts eschewed to an index in the back, the visual and literary representations affect the reader as they echo the histories that contain them. The project proposes a reflection on trauma and the administration of a regime of tragedy that ensued within as well as characterised the twentieth century.  

Within the installation the publication is accompanied by a collection of photographs which display sites of former concentration and transit camps across Eastern Europe. Eighty years later, as testament to the negligence towards our collective memories, these forlorn sites have become fragmented representations of an inexpressible absence. It is through monuments that a language of heroism rewrites senseless death as martyrdom, thereby annulling the necessity of a work of memory.