Green Commemorations

events Program

How to deal with places of difficult heritage? How to include green spaces in commemorating the Holocaust? How to create open, respectful spaces enabling symbolic dialogue between victims and survivors and research, activist, artistic and local communities? How to consciously use the potential of non-human memory actors in times of the ongoing climate crisis?

We will be looking for the answers for these and many other questions during the webinar "Green Commemoration", focused on specific examples of interdisciplinary initiatives and projects from different parts of Poland: Green Gwarna (Wrocław), Esther’s Willow (Chrzanów), Medicinal Plants of Plaszow and Still Standing (Kraków) and Roots of the Uprising (Warsaw).

The discussion will be prompted by the one-year anniversary of publishing our e-book “Green Commemoration. Towards new strategies for remembering in public space”. Together, we will try to figure out what kind of useful tools – theoretical, but also practical – can be provided by the environmental history of the Holocaust, which has been developing since the 1990s and is becoming more and more popular around the world and in Poland. Using the experience we’ve managed to gain so far, we will also draw attention to potential pitfalls, the most common dilemmas and problems accompanying the implementation of this type of initiatives.