[Oberlist] US* Fwd: CFP: Chicago Torture - Justice Memorials Project (Forward Widely)

[us vladimir]

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From: Daniel tucker <tucker.daniel at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 8:22 PM
Subject: CFP: Chicago Torture - Justice Memorials Project (Forward Widely)
To:


Call For Proposals
Attention Artists, Architects, Photographers, Writers, Poets, Musicians,
 Performers and everyone concerned with justice!

An Open Call for Submissions
The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials
We invite artists and those who seek justice of all kinds to  submit
proposals for a  speculative monument to memorialize the Chicago Police
torture cases.  Our goal is to honor the survivors of torture, their family
members and the African American communities affected by the torture.  The
monument will also recall and honor the nearly two-decades long struggle for
justice waged  by torture survivors and their families, attorneys, community
organizers, and people from every neighborhood and walk of life in Chicago.

These memorial projects will serve as a public reckoning with police torture
in Chicago and honor those who fought to stop it.  We hope to make visible
the social and political conditions that made torture possible, as well as
the acts of courage that ended – or at least brought to light — the culture
of impunity that thwarted justice for so long in this instance.  Every
submission will be an act of solidarity with torture survivors.  We welcome
proposals that exhibit radical imagination – they may critically examine the
usefulness and limitations of monuments themselves while exploring the
issues of reparations, truth and reconciliation, and restorative justice.
 For example, one submission might consist of the blueprint for a
compensation committee for torture survivors, another might be an annual
walking tour of Area 2 Police Headquarters (where the majority of tortures
occurred), while still another might be a large public sculpture set on a
pedestal or in a public square.  These memorials should also be understood
as a locus of public empathy, making concrete the profound suffering of
people like Anthony Holmes, tortured and made to confess to a crime he did
not commit. In his recent testimony, Holmes describes internal injuries
“from the electricity shot through me with the black box” and instances of
Burge “choking me with the plastic bag.”  Though Holmes makes clear that
“[Burge] tried to kill me,” he claims that “what really hurt me is that no
one really listened to what I had to say.  No one believed in me.”

All submitted proposals will be exhibited at one or more of the following
venues: Chicago area art galleries, community centers, and a dedicated
website.  The proposals, exhibition, and what we hope to become some
permanent monument(s) will honor the survivors of police torture,
acknowledge the communities most affected by police criminality as well as
inform the world about the history of the police torture in Chicago under
former Commander Burge.  We recognize that this is not the only police
torture that has been or continues to be committed in the City of Chicago.
 We hope this project will build a social movement strong enough to deter
these and other acts of torture and transform our broken criminal justice
system.

*Sponsor:*  Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project (CTJM Project) [For
more details see http://torturememorial.wordpress.com/who-is-involved/]
*Deadline:*  December 10, 2011
*Venue:*  Sites throughout the Chicagoland area and a website
*Curators:*  A panel of prominent area critics, artists, and community
members will curate the submissions into roving exhibitions.
*Eligibility:*  Submissions may be made by a person of any age and
nationality.
*Criteria for proposals:*
A proposed monument may take any form – from architecture to haiku, from
website to mural, from community organization to performance, from bronze
plaque to large-scale memorial.
*Submission process:* the submission can be in the form of a PDF, PPT,
webpage, or other accessible electronic format.  Non-electronic submissions
will also be accepted; please contact justicememorials at gmail.com to arrange
delivery or mail to:

Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project (CTJM Project)

c/o People’s Law Office

1180 N. Milwaukee

Chicago, Illinois  60642

Website: http://torturememorial.wordpress.com/

*Historical background:*  Between 1972 and 1991, over 100 African-American
men and women were tortured by white police detectives under the command of
former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge at Area 2 and 3 Police
Headquarters on Chicago’s South Side. The torture included electric shock,
sexual abuse, suffocation and beatings.  Those tortured were also subjected
to racial epithets and death threats.  Coerced confessions resulted in
scores of convictions and long prison terms, and 11 sentences of death.
 Many of the survivors have since been exonerated and released, and all
those sentenced to death have either been freed or removed from death row.
 Over 20 Burge police torture survivors remain incarcerated.  In 2010, 30
years after the first reported acts of brutality, Burge was convicted of
perjury and obstruction of justice for denying the torture he and others
committed.  He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.  Except for
this single federal conviction, no other Chicago police officer, state’s
attorney, or city official has been held accountable (nor apologized) for
the many acts of torture that occurred by their hand or under their watch.

Prior monuments to victims of oppression:  Monuments to state-sanctioned
crimes, abuses of power, and systemic injustices are rare, particularly in
the United States.  More often than not, monuments recall triumphs of one
kind or another and commemorate victors in war or other contests.  But there
are times when nations or communities find it right or expedient to recall,
mourn, and honor the struggles of those whom it has victimized, injured or
destroyed.  As a tribute to the thousands of Cherokee Indians killed during
a notorious forced march in 1838, the National Park Service administers a
more than 2,000-mile Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.

The era of Jim Crow and the lynching of African-Americans in the 20th
century are commemorated by a number of small plaques and historical
markers, as well as by a memorial plaza and sculptural group in Duluth,
Minnesota dedicated in 2003.  That monument however, recalling the lynching
of three black men in 1920, was already superseded by a less tangible
monument conceived a generation earlier in Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row”
(1965) which contains a twelve-line verse dedicated to the event.  Dylan’s
song, in turn, recalls “Strange Fruit,” the great, anti-lynching anthem
written by Abel Meerpol and first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.  Other
notable monuments to working class victims of oppression include the
monument to the murdered Homestead iron and steel workers, (erected in 1941
by the Steel Workers Union), the Haymarket Martyr’s Memorial in Forest Home
Cemetery, and the uncompleted monument at Haymarket Square in Chicago.  In
Santiago, Chile, a Museum of Memory and Human Rights recently opened,
memorializing the torture committed under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Some monuments to victims and survivors reverse established or official
perspectives on a conflict.  For example, while Maya Lin’s famous Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, commemorates U.S. soldiers who died in
the US War against Vietnam with a wall of names that you can touch, Harrell
Fletcher’s memorial titled The American War brings a Vietnamese perspective
to the conflict by exhibiting photographs from the War Remnants Museum in Ho
Chi Minh City.  (There, the Vietnam war is referred to as “the American
War.”)

The best known victim monuments are of course those dedicated to the
murdered Jews of Europe, the most famous of which is Peter Eisenman’s Berlin
Holocaust Memorial, consisting of 2, 711 rectangular, concrete slabs of
varying heights arranged in a grid on a nearly five-acre site near the
Brandenburg gate,  costing approximately 25 million Euros to build.  However
Berlin also contains a far less monumental and expensive remembrance of the
victims of Nazism: Gunter Demnig’s Stoplersteine or stumbling blocks.  These
are small, brass-covered concrete blocks inscribed with the name, date of
birth, date of deportation and final fate (if known) of people seized by the
Nazis.  There are now about 3,000 in Berlin alone, and another 20,000 in
towns and cities across Europe.  Each monument, set flush with the pavement
in front of the victim’s house, is paid for by private donations, costing
about 100 Euros a piece.  Micha Ulman’s Bibliotek Monument on Bebelplatz
Square in Berlin is a different kind of  Holocaust memorial, commemorating
the Nazi book burnings that began in 1933, and the destruction of art,
literature and wisdom itself.

As the summary above indicates, monuments to the victims of violence and
oppression can take many forms.  We might have added that there are
innumerable small ex votos (or votive offerings) in churches or homes
dedicated to saints or deities, made in honor of a deceased loved one.  In
addition, there are roadside commemorations – sometimes consisting of
nothing more than bouquets, balloons or stuffed animals — of people killed
by car crashes, bicycle accidents, crimes and political violence.  In
Argentina beginning in 1977, the Mothers of the Disappeared marched every
day at the Plaza de Mayo in silent protest over the government’s abduction
of their children.  They became a living monument, and their almost three
decades of protest helped not only to galvanize opposition to the Argentine
dictatorship, but to help launch many other protest movements – especially
for women’s rights and gay rights.

*Program for Chicago Torture Justice Memorials:* The word monument,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a noun, signifying a tomb, a
structure of historical importance, a written document, a memorial, an
enduring example of something, a reminder of a person or event, and a
classic work of art or literature.  The proposed Justice Monument can
therefore take any form – stone, concrete, bronze, paint, song, ritual
performance, website – so long as it is long-lasting.  But the word monument
also has a second, more uncommon usage as a transitive verb, signifying
commemoration, remembrance and actively bringing something to mind.  This
sense of the word — as in “the survivors of police Commander Burge and his
crew wish to memorialize their torture and abuse” – is what the sponsors of
the Monument particularly embrace.  Not only could the Monument force into
mind and memory the decades of police torture and its consequences, it could
encourage engagement, action, protest, revival and renewal.  We seek
submissions that will remind the Chicagoland community and the world that
terrible crimes were committed under the cover of law, and that encourage
people and organizations to imagine new ways to end racist oppression and
police violence.

-- 
* * * *
My site: http://miscprojects.com
Office/Studio: 2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. 2nd Floor Chicago, IL 60647
google voicemail: (773) 359-3703 <https://www.google.com/voice#phones> or
skype: dtuckerchicago
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danieltuckerchicago




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