When Memory Ceases to be Testimony

Almost eight decades after World War Two (WWII), how can events be "remembered" by generations who never experienced them directly?

The experiences of the "comfort women", like the Holocaust can never be remembered as it happened. All that is present is what the victims and survivors have passed down. The further events of WWII recede, the more prominent its memorials become.

Some people want to forget where they've been, other people want to remember where they've never been.

- Eli Cohen and Gila Almagor

For the Statue of Peace and its siblings, I would like to cite James E. Young who argued in Texture of Memory that public memory and its meanings depend not just on the forms and figures in the monument itself, but also on the viewer's response to the monument... how it is used politically and religiously in the communist, how its figures enter other media and are recast in new surroundings (Young, 1993).

As such, while the Peace Statue in Berlin-Mitte was installed by sculptors Kim Seo-kyung (1965-) and Kim Eun-sung (1964-) to memorialise the suffering of women who were raped by Japanese men in military brothels set up between 1937 and 1945, activists and others have used the same statue to promote peace and rights of women around the world.

In this sense, when memory ceases to be testimony, the public monument comes into play. According to Marianne Doezema, a public monument "has a responsibility apart from being a work of art... it is also created for the public, to generate human reactions" (Doezema, 1977).

Yet, the public monument in itself is in turmoil. As different people bring their own baggage of expectations when gazing at the monument, their encounters constantly destabilize its representational stability, rendering it into a site of competing ideas and desires.

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