Artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko: The monuments belong to the victors at expense of those forgotten—the nameless.
My name is Krzysztof Wodiczko. Most of my work is focusing on animation of public monuments, and they’re animated by people who are willing to speak of the difficult experiences being survivor of war.
What we’re seeing are my sketches to imagine this projection on the monument in Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bombing happened on 6th of August 1945. The monument itself—it’s a wounded building. It’s already saying a lot: “The bomb exploded straight above me. I survived.” But there’s more that this monument could say.
What the monument could say is that some of those people who were killed were Koreans, war slaves—that the victims can also be perpetrators, that the war crime is a complex thing. Or it could say people were jumping to the river, burned by radiation.
I invite people who are willing to speak, actively encouraging them to say things that are very difficult. One of the youngest people who volunteered to speak was talking about her grandfather. And she’s trying to undo the trauma that was installed in her by previous generations.
I have to admit, I’m very skeptical about the effectiveness of this kind of work. But it can heal the numbness of people towards experiences and events for which there's no normal language to speak about or to express.