Dear Julia Clark, (Independent Curator & Historia)

it's an interesting research you're doing:

"I am interested in similar sites with 'difficult' histories. I am also
interested in challenging exhibitions that deal with controversial and
shocking topics.".

I would like to hear about your results. It is obviously complicated to deal
with the dark sides of our own history.

I cannot help you on sites in US or Canada. But in Europe, we do have those
sites by the dozens: sites like Auschwitz, like Dachau in Germany, like
Bergen-Belsen in the Netherlands, like The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam,
like Mauthausen in Austria etc. where millions of innocents (Jews) were killed.

I do not know if there are similar sites about the Civil War concentration
camps in the US, about the slavery which took place in the South of the US
(and in other places), about the killing of millions of Indians in America,
about the Mayas and Incas killed to near extinction in Mexico by Spanish
conquerors ....

Will the Serbian or Bosnian population once in a time be able to create
monuments or museums or exhibitions about the cruel things they did to their
people? About the problem the refugees were confronted with in the
neighboring countries? In Nigeria, in Austria, in Pakistan, in Marocco?

The question is: Isn't the reason for allocating money to create museums
(and exhibitions) to comfort the public, to reassure them, to make them
proud of their past? Does anyone with money and power wants to take the
opposite stand: to make the public think, to discomfort them, to make them
uneasy about their past, their parents etc.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity for these cultural important thoughts.
Art and Culture are not created to make us feel at ease! Or?

Peter, the Rebernik

....





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