I’m sitting on a park bench looking at this memorial and pondering why I find it uncompelling. I think first off is the figures being smaller than lifesize on a large base detracts, rather than adds, to the monument’s effect.
The three men, two women, and a boy are small and naked, their hair shorn. They are standing amid rubble, with staircases leading up to them. The rubble is surrounded by shiny new razor wire.
The figures and the wire are mounted atop two massive concrete blocks, out of which cool jets of water spurt, meeting the arcs of a ring of jets on the rim of the memorial. The fountain is refreshing on a warm July day like today, and kids play in and around the fountain.
The small figures are dwarfed by the size of the park around the memorial. It’s at the center of an open space here, but it does not dominate it. The figures strike me as a sort of afterthought. You could say the diminutive figures represent the extent to which victims of genocide are overwhelmed and powerless in the face of massive state violence, but I don’t find this convincing.
