Babi Yar Park

Denver, Colorado | 2007 (competition) - 2008

Collaboration Ron Henderson, Athens Qin; Krzystof Wodiczko + Julian Bonder; Mundus Bishop; Oz Architecture

Recognition Winner, International Competition

Trees (40+)

Image credits: Lirio

Babi Yar Park is an extension and amplification of the original memorial park as the result of an international competition won by team led by Wodiczko+Bonder with Ron Henderson, landscape architect. The original park, by the office of Lawrence Halprin, organized a series of spaces — mound-enclosed gathering space, linden tree grove, and boxcar bridge across a ravine — connected by paths through a shortgrass prairie.

Babi Yar Park should function both as a vehicle for mourning, healing and engagement. As a Memorial, it should become a frame for evocative thinking and engaging in continuing acts of re-actualization of the past. It should invite emotional and intellectual reflection as well as sense of necessity for action: opening a door for joining projects and actions toward the world free of war, terror, and violence. As a site, the project should foster the evocative power of art to occur in public space and landscape, as framework for memory. It should become a “witness” of the past and of the “voice of memory”, embedded in everyday life, the voice which calls for pro-active transformative engagement toward better future.

WORKING MEMORIAL. Babi Yar Memorial Park should speak to and address a plurality of publics and generations, its’ becoming a site-specific vessel for testimonies, for emotions and thinking, for democratic and pedagogic discourses, for working-through, healing and awareness, as paths towards the possibility of a better world becomes a central issue Indeed, to develop its speech, and to elicit its questioning potential and ethical functioning will be central to its effectiveness.

MONUMENTAL SPEECH. To do so, a certain “Monumental Speech” should be developed; one that may integrate past (traumatic) events into present-day realities and experiences . It will be a site-specific speech act that may actualize this memorial park into cultural action, demanding responsibility and eliciting “response-ability” vis a vis the past and the future, in a specific site that will remind and remember through fostering and encouraging acts of memory: Memory-Works. (adopted from Wodiczko+Bonder, MemoryWorks)