Unknown, Unknown: Provisional Architectures of Memory

At a moment when liberated citizens topple monuments erected to the power of despots and dictators abroad or when communities decide that monuments glorifying Confederate leaders, officers, and soldiers should be removed from public spaces in the U.S., what are the limits to the architectural forms and aesthetic gestures of modern commemoration? Can architecture of memorials and monuments accommodate what cannot be fully remembered or known because of the absence of evidence or what some call silences in the archives? Perhaps one way to address these absences, as the talk by Mabel O. Wilson will explore, is through different modes of provisional mark making, materialities, and sensorial experiences. These architectures of unknowing construct what geographer Katherine McKittrick imagines as a “totally different system of geographic knowledge that cannot replicate subordination precisely because it is born of and holds on to the unknowable?”