Youth artists and architect/activist Sergio Beltrán-García present their collaborative memorial
Our understanding of memory is grounded in the past. Historically, monuments were built to preserve only certain histories and legacies, erasing others from memory. How do we create space for multiple, alternative, and overlooked histories? What is our right to memory and how can we access it? How can we use art to bring history and memory into the present, speak to our evolving realities, and shape our future?
Artist Sergio Beltrán-García worked with youth artists from Boston to make sense of monuments, memorials, memory, representation, and justice. Through a series of collaborative art workshops, site visits, readings, and conversations, they explored how a memorial can become a tool for positive change and how to critique existing monuments. Together they researched, conceptualized, and built a collaborative memorial in public space that honors personal and collective histories that are important to them. In the process the students learned about inclusive and participatory approaches to monuments and memorialization, and how to think creatively about questions of history, representation, and accessibility.
An architect, activist, and researcher, Sergio Beltrán-García engages with aesthetic and political practices of transitional justice by using memory as an entry point. He has contributed to the development of eleven memorials for distinct events of violence—both in contestation of and in collaboration with different levels of the Mexican government. Among these are the memorials for the fatal 2008 police raid of the New's Divine nightclub in Mexico City, the forced disappearance of 109 peasants during the 1970s Mexican Counterinsurgency, and the collapses of buildings during the 2017 earthquakes in Mexico.
Sergio works closely with victims of human rights violations, their advocates and communities, to mobilize critical theories coupled with advanced technologies and transdisciplinary reasearch methods in a diversity of political, cultural, and legal forums. A Chevening scholar, he completed with distinction postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths University of London, and he currently researches with Forensic Architecture. He is a member of the Memory Studies Association, and has received fellowships at the Aspen Institute, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Monument Lab.
