Monuments and the Future of Memory

Supported by a USC Arts-in-Action grant, this project is a collaboration between USC’s MLA+U and LA Commons, a non-profit community arts organization focused on South Los Angeles, and Willowbrook Inclusion Network. As part of a triad of “memorials” generated to challenge the traditional memorial as an inert monument dedicated to completed events of the past, the project, originally titled Memorial to Black Lives, reflects both on lives lost and lives lived – moving from trauma to resistance to resilience to liberation and joy, and ultimately serving as a vehicle for mobilization. Focusing on South Los Angeles, and specifically the Willowbrook neighborhood, physical and new media monuments will acknowledge histories and legacies of state violence and simultaneously celebrate histories of Black achievement, expression and Joy in the public realm.

Negotiating sites and narratives of trauma and resilience as a starting point to consider practices of memorialization in the 21st-century, students from across the School of Architecture are collaborating with Hirsch/Gabrielian and LA Commons in community storycircles and participatory workshops to develop immersive storylines about particular places, as well as prototypes for physical markings in collaboration with local artists. In addition to the physical and new media monuments creating a Memory Infrastructure in Willowbrook, final programming in Fall 2021 included a performative procession through the sites of significance.

Collaborating with LACMA, Willowbrook Inclusion Network (WIN), LA Commons, Los Angeles County Department of Arts + Culture and Los Angeles County Department of Parks + Recreation, we worked to curate the first ever Willowbrook Art Hop in August 2021. Part of this included a series of multi-media memory portals celebrating local artists. Taking inspiration from assemblage art practice critical to the history portals artistic expression in the Willowbrook-Watts-Compton area, these theaters – combining physical artifacts, sound, light and narrative – became a kind of assemblage mini-monument themselves and part of the larger process of elevating the memories of Willowbrook into narrative monuments through which the community can tell its own story. With a student-led assemblage workshop, the Willowbrook Art Hop provided the opportunity for further workshopping around monuments, memory and memorialization in Willowbrook. This has continued through the Willowbrook Story Summit and other events leading up to the procession. Beyond the procession, the intention is to work with local artists, LA Commons, Willowbrook Inclusion Network and LA Metro to develop the physical monuments along the 120th Street corridor.