Abstract
Design elements, the physical or architectural choices that determine the character of space, can have a dramatic effect on visitor experience at museums and memorial sites. At those employing strategies of embodiment, viewer experience takes on added significance. Many contemporary memorial sites employ physical touchstones that evoke emotional experiences, giving viewers a deeper empathy for injustice or humanitarian tragedy. This visual essay examines design elements—such as architectural details and the placement of objects—that evoke embodiment at three sites: the Bisesero genocide memorial in Rwanda and the Apartheid Museum and Prestwich Memorial museum in South Africa. Each of these sites manifests design elements that encourage visitors to engage physically and emotionally with the victims of historical atrocities. Moving visitors beyond a detached, intellectual understanding of traumatic histories toward a physical/emotional engagement may engender a deeper connection with humanitarian tragedy and the struggle for healing and reconciliation.
Design elements, the physical or architectural choices that determine the character of space, can have a dramatic effect on visitor experience at museums and memorial sites. At sites employing strategies of embodiment, viewer experience takes on added significance. Many contemporary memorial sites employ physical touchstones that evoke emotional experiences, giving viewers a deeper empathy for injustice or humanitarian tragedy.
In Africa, as is the global pattern, memorials have largely transitioned from traditional granite and bronze structures with figurative elements to experiential and site-specific presentations. A catalyst for this change can be traced to the 1982 unveiling of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Doss, 2010; Stevens and Franck, 2016). Lin’s use of a massive, reflective, black granite wall—a nontraditional memorial material—combined with the experience of interacting with the site created a memorial so powerful that others sought to replicate its aesthetic strategies (Doss, 2010; Stevens and Franck, 2016).
Sodaro (2018) outlines three broad functions of memorial museums; to preserve and document history or “truth,” to function as a space for mourning and remembrance, and to serve as a warning or “never again” message. She describes memorial museums as a “prosthetic conscience” for societies grappling with humanitarian tragedy, their ultimate message inevitably affected by the values and politics of those who create them. Memorials mean different things to different people, yet as contemporary African memorials evolve within this global paradigm, they have begun to incorporate design elements emphasizing embodiment, considered here as the tangible, physical representation of ideas and feelings incorporated into the design of a museum or memorial space.
This visual essay examines design elements—such as architectural details and the placement of objects—that evoke embodiment at three sites: the Bisesero genocide memorial in Rwanda and the Apartheid Museum and Prestwich Memorial museum in South Africa. Each of these sites manifests embodied design elements that encourage visitors to engage physically and emotionally with the victims of historical atrocities.
Stevens and Francke (2016), in a discussion of visitor engagement with memorials, posit that even in the most didactic presentations visitors are not dictated an interpretation of the site, they must discover it by virtue of engagement with the space and information presented. Using factual information alongside physical or visual elements, the sites considered here employ physical structures, body positioning, and visitor movement to bring visitors beyond simple intellectual understanding of historical events toward a more embodied empathy for victims. Design elements at each site offer visitors the opportunity to engage the historical/physical/epistemic dimensions of the site. Moving visitors beyond a detached, intellectual understanding of traumatic histories toward a physical/emotional engagement may engender a deeper understanding of humanitarian tragedy and the struggle for healing and reconciliation.
The three sites considered here each deal with difficult chapters in national history but employ different strategies to evoke viewer engagement. South Africa’s Apartheid Museum traces apartheid from its inception through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Cape Town’s Prestwich Memorial preserves the remains of Cape Colony–era slaves uncovered during contemporary urban development. Rwanda’s Bisesero National Genocide Memorial preserves human remains and other evidence of the 1994 genocide. Bisesero is site specific, documenting the genocide victims who retreated to a hilltop to defend themselves. The South African museums are largely independent of site and focus on aspects of historical oppression. All three sites deploy intentional strategies to engage visitors’ bodies and movement as they encounter the difficult histories commemorated.
Each site references key events from its respective nation’s history and evidences a spectrum of subject matter, cultural purpose, aesthetics, and viewer experience, but all of them utilize design elements to provoke an emotional response. This response can create a human connection in which viewers come to embody historical trauma and loss. The extent of embodied experience varies according to different levels of visitor identification with the events referenced. Yet, each site allows the opportunity for visitors to engage with the material in ways that can motivate opposition, intervention, or assistance in the face of similar instances of violence.
Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, traces the history and abuses of apartheid from its inception through the truth and reconciliation process. Built as a part of a casino and entertainment complex designed to attract tourism (https://www.apartheidmuseum.org/about-the-museum), the museum nonetheless presents a detailed consideration of Apartheid and its legacy. Visitor experience is framed by physical references to imprisonment, abuse, and restriction of individual liberties. Visitors pass through exhibits revealing a comprehensive history of apartheid, while elements of the museum design reinforce experiences of segregation, oppression, and imprisonment.
An embodied theme of imprisonment begins on the outdoor pathway to the entrance lined by tall, heavy walls of caged stones where museum visitors walk past life-sized images of contemporary South Africans (Figure 1). The stones metaphorically evoke the multitude of South Africans negatively impacted by Apartheid while the individual figures evoke post-apartheid freedoms such as those experienced by South African visitors to the museum. On this pathway, museum visitors symbolically walk alongside everyday South Africans who have experienced Apartheid and its legacy.
Entrance pathway at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
Inside the museum (Figure 2), themes of confinement set the stage as visitors must choose either the “white” or “non-white” entrance to the museum; through the process of choosing the “white” or “non-white” entrance, visitors are introduced to apartheid’s complex system of race classification. Throughout the museum, visitors encounter metal grates and bars. These design elements suggest imprisonment or segregation and, through their transparency, evoke possibilities of different futures. This theme is carried throughout the labyrinthine museum, and periodically visitors see, through barriers, into sections detailing the dismantling of the Apartheid system, as if seeing beyond past abuses and into the future. These visitor experiences reflect the hardships of people who lived under apartheid and the complex, labyrinthine task of dismantling institutionalized racism.
Apartheid Museum entrance. Information in this entrance corridor illustrates the complexity of apartheid’s race classification system. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
The museum section titled “The Turn to Violence” documents injustice, abuse, and murder during anti-apartheid resistance in the 1950s and 1960s. In this section, the bars and grates seen throughout the museum become replica of an actual prison cell. This mock cell recreates conditions of solitary confinement for dissidents while nooses hang above visitors, evoking the violence experienced by the multitudes lynched under the Apartheid system (Figure 3).
Prison cells and nooses stand in for victims and embody consequences of dissent during Apartheid. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
The Apartheid Museum largely attracts tourists and an international audience. While a museum experience can never fully convey the injustices of Apartheid, the Apartheid Museum’s design elements work in concert with documentary information and timeline components to embody the individual and societal impacts of Apartheid for an international audience.
Prestwich Memorial
Cape Town’s Prestwich Memorial comprises a large, stone and brick rectangular building containing several narrative displays about the history of the Cape Colony and an ossuary containing the remains of unidentified Cape Colony–era laborers uncovered during construction projects in the Green Point neighborhood in 2003. Co-located inside the memorial is a high-end coffee shop called TRUTH, creating a fascinating urban space joining commerce, social interaction, and somber remembrance in a single space.
The site attracts a predominantly local, Cape Townian, clientele, who come to enjoy the relaxed atmosphere, coffee, and food in the cafe. Little do most patrons know that the establishment is co-located with an ossuary containing the remains of enslaved people. Many visitors ignore the prominent signage indicating the memorial function of the space. Some curious coffee shop customers may read the narrative displays to learn about the history of Cape Town and Green Point, the enslaved people interred at the site, the discovery of their remains, and ensuing debates over how to handle them. The site occasionally draws local, South African, or foreign visitors primarily interested in the Prestwich Memorial or Cape Town history.
Visitors to the Prestwich Memorial must first pass through the coffee shop (Figure 4) to access the informational exhibit and ossuary in the back. The trendy, urban aesthetic of the café can generate confusion for those seeking the memorial. After reading the information displays, visitors can duck through a small, half-sized door to view boxes of bones through a locked, slatted doorway (Figure 5). A sign in three languages—English, Afrikaans, and isiXhosa—invites visitors to “reflect upon the ancestors” of Cape Town (Figure 6). The rows of plain cardboard boxes bring remembrance into the active urban space; their quantity suggests the magnitude of past suffering endured by the ancestors and enslaved laborers laid to rest here.
Entrance to TRUTH Coffee and Prestwich Memorial; informational displays at left. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
View through slatted door at boxes of bones at Prestwich Memorial. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
Sign in the ossuaries at Prestwich Memorial invites visitors to “reflect upon the ancestors” of Cape Town. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
This unusual pairing of memorial and trendy coffee shop would likely be considered odd or disrespectful in many cultures. Development of the Prestwich Memorial was not without controversy regarding appropriateness of development, disposition and research on the remains, and purpose of the memorial space (Kashe-Katiya, 2010). In part, the unusual pairing of a commercial coffee shop with the memorial was a pragmatic, economic solution to support the ongoing cost of maintaining the memorial and respectful interment of human remains inconveniently uncovered during urban development. The pleasant coffee shop ensures people return to the site again and again in lieu of the one-off visit common to relatively small historical memorials. In addition, the café generates revenue to ensure ongoing maintenance of the memorial and conservation of remains.
The installation at Prestwich Memorial does not explicitly consider African cultural beliefs regarding death or treatment of the dead. Yet the co-location of an active social space in the presence of the dead is consistent with African belief in the co-existence and interdependence of the living and the dead (Baloyi and Makobe-Rabothata, 2014). From this perspective, the Prestwich Memorial embodies the belief, common across many African cultures, of the intermingling of ancestor spirits with the daily life of the living (Lee and Vaughn, 2008). From this perspective, the coffee shop enlivens the memorial by bringing regular visitors and social interaction. For those visitors who pay attention, the memorial and coffee shop bring past and present together, facilitating a quiet physical and potentially metaphysical connection between the enslaved individuals who built the city and its present-day inhabitants.
Bisesero Genocide Memorial
Bisesero Genocide Memorial in Rwanda sits at the site where over 40,000 Rwandans died after defending themselves using stones to fight off attackers. Considered a “National Resistance Memorial” (Meierhenrich and Lagace, 2010), elements of Bisesero’s design allow visitors to trace the experience of the victims as they move up and down the hilltop memorial and its ossuaries. Visitor experiences cannot possibly mirror the horror of genocide, but their embodied movements around the site evoke a sense of physical precarity and moral or emotional imbalance. Through embodiment, the memorial offers a curated, largely sanitized glimpse of what the victims experienced.
At Bisesero, a series of ossuary buildings reflect the terrain along the steep hillside. The interior hallways of the ossuaries also echo the terrain as visitors traverse uneven stairs up or down when entering rooms that display victims’ remains (Figure 7). The position of visitors relative to the human remains changes at the entry point to each room. In some the viewer looks down upon the bones, while in others the entry brings viewers face to face with the skulls of victims (Figure 8). This changing perspective has the effect of creating an uncomfortable imbalance, shifting viewer perspective from that of an outside observer to that of a face-to-face witness, embodying the harshest of victim experience in visitors via visible wounds present on the bones.
Steps leading up to an eye-level view of bones at Bisesero. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
Victims’ skulls, Bisesero. Photo by Ruth Stanford.
Moving through the memorial site, visitors may themselves embody elements of the experience of the victims memorialized here. Upon exiting the ossuary buildings, visitors climb a zig-zag stone staircase to a mass grave. Meierhenrich and Lagace (2010) posit that the shape of the staircase mimics the changing direction of victims as they attempted to flee attackers. As viewers ascend these stairs, they must also physically negotiate large stones protruding from the stair steps (Figure 9). Visitors must carefully watch their step to avoid harm by tripping over the only weapons the victims had to defend themselves. The placement of stones in the path force visitors’ attention squarely on the immediacy of the site, the people who died there, and the simultaneous fortitude and futility of fighting heavily armed attackers with stones. This design element emphasizes for viewers, in a directly physical manner, the precarious position victims at Bisesero found themselves in. Negotiating the stones creates a sense of precarity and imbalance, fear, and danger. An awareness of the vulnerability of the physical self, evoked by the physical form of the space, speaks to what some of the victims may have experienced, albeit in an abstracted manner lacking mortal danger.
Visitor avoids tripping over stones embedded in Bisesero stairway.
Victims at Bisesero chose the hilltop location because its presence as the highest hilltop in the local landscape that provided a significant advantage of defensibility. For visitors, however, it may be difficult to reconcile the sheer beauty of the 360-degree view from the hilltop with the magnitude of the genocidal attacks that happened there. The design elements incorporated into the displays of human remains and the stairs to the mass grave serve to position viewer experience alongside that of the victims, placing visitors eye-to-eye with victims’ remains and replicating aspects of victim experience in the staircase to the mass grave.
Conclusion
Much like the reflective surface of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial invites visitors to look themselves in the eye as they read the names of the dead, these African memorials create opportunities for visitors to connect body, emotion, and historical fact in powerful ways. Whether intentional or not, and whether or not all visitors are perceptive enough to make conscious connections, these details of memorial design can have a meaningful effect. Design elements of these memorial sites animate real-life suffering caused by injustice and atrocity and illuminate the ongoing coexistence of the living and dead common among African cultures. Through embodiment—both tactile and emotional responses created by the sites—visitors may gain the courage to respond to acts of injustice wherever they occur. It’s one thing to know historical facts; it’s quite another to understand how history affects actual human beings. Embodiment can effect an evolution of spirit that may strengthen communities and nurture the potential to prevent future atrocities.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
Author biography
) is an associate professor of sculpture at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Stanford received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her zoology degrees are from UT Austin (BS) and Arizona State University (MS). Her work has appeared in museums and galleries including the National Art Gallery Zambia; Namibian Arts Association Gallery in Windhoek, Namibia; the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, GA; Agnes Scott College in Atlanta; Saratoga Art Center in Saratoga Springs, NY; William and Mary University in Williamsburg, VA; and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA.