A Bridge, A Stitch, A Compass 🩻
A memorial for the past, present, and future
Today’s newsletter has lots of images so it might be truncated in your email. Click on the title above or “view entire message” at the bottom of this email to see the whole post. Since there’s scarce text, instead of a voiceover I’ll be sharing audio snippets of the ceremony. Thanks for reading!
This year was the fifth and final Naming the Lost Memorial at Green-Wood Cemetery. The public art included handmade contributions from over 20 diverse communities in New York spanning 200 feet across the gothic gates. This year’s installation also included 46,955 lights, one for each person who died of COVID-19 in New York City. There were at least 1.2 million covid deaths in the U.S. and 7 million worldwide but these are underestimates and don’t include those still suffering from long covid. Check out Marked by Covid for digital remembrances.
The visual memorial was interactive, with space for people to add their own names, stories, and objects. The ephemeral project culminated in a community ritual with a procession, second line, drummers, vocalists, poets, dancers, curanderas, activists, and artists. Below I’ve shared images of the gateway and field recordings from the performances. You can watch the activation ceremony through City Lore.
procession with brooklyn’s background noise:
second line jazz:
Nature Boy sung live:
rattles & shells:
libations:
I also volunteered at last year’s edition if you’d like to see more artwork, hear the music from past iterations, or use NTLM’s templates and toolkits for honoring your own mourning:
SENSE: Covid Edition 🦠
‘Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethin…
Yesterday I shared a bittersweet (heavy on the bitter) update on my Palestinian family in Gaza which you can read here. If you’d like to support me in my own grieving process please consider contributing to their survival. Alternatively, sharing is caring 🫶
Finally, at the archive we hosted a know your rights propaganda party. You can find multilingual materials to print and distribute in your communities, including what to do if a loved one is detained by immigration officers.
