News
WASHINGTON (June 30, 2021) — Cultural Vistas and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C. are pleased to announce the start of the new transatlantic professional exchange New Transatlantic Synergies: Building a Diverse and Inclusive Culture of Remembrance (DAICOR).
DAICOR is a reciprocal transatlantic exchange program for individuals with a professional interest in the promotion of an inclusive and progressive culture of remembrance in public spaces in Germany and the United States.
The program is funded by the Transatlantic Program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, as well as our partner the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
Implemented in two cohorts (2021 and 2022) DAICOR will build a new transatlantic network of 16 experts each year–from both the US and Germany–to explore how diversity, equity, and inclusion are currently being implemented in the memorial cultures in both countries.
Protests throughout the U.S. and Germany in 2020 have prompted governments, activists, and concerned citizens to examine historical legacies from the times of slavery and colonialism. With DAICOR, Cultural Vistas aims to tackle this topic that has once again moved to the center of social discussions in both countries, exploring how the U.S. and Germany can support each other in coming to terms with this heritage.
The DAICOR fellows of the year 2021 will discuss how public space can be opened to more diverse and inclusive forms of representation in two joint programs. One part will focus on remembrance and memorial culture in Germany and the other will focus on memorial culture in the U.S. The goal of both programs is to understand how multiple historical viewpoints can be represented in public spaces and how the past can be memorialized both honestly and critically.
The 2021 DAICOR program began with an introductory meeting with our German participants on June 16th. In eight sessions the experts will discuss current initiatives to diversify memorialization in public space with experts and practitioners from organizations in Berlin and Hamburg. From July 20th to August 4th, the U.S. program will consist of virtual meetings with resources in Washington, D.C., Richmond or Charlottesville, Va., and Montgomery, Ala.
By the end of the program, the fellows will devise practical approaches, campaigns, or action plans that further contribute to an inclusive and tolerant culture of remembrance and aim for joint cooperative projects.
While the 2021 DAICOR program is implemented as a virtual exchange, in 2022 DAICOR will physically lead the experts to the United States and Germany.
Links:
https://culturalvistas.org/programs/specialty/daicor/
Meet the Fellows of the DAICOR program 2021:
German Cohort:
Katharina Austilat is a student of American Studies and Cultural Sciences at the University of Leipzig. Her work and volunteer experiences have allowed her to explore several forms of promoting commemorative culture and gain experience in transmitting memory in different contexts. Currently, she serves as an intern at the Network for Democratic Culture in Wurzen where she supports and explores concepts for educational programs for young adults in the county. She hopes to extend her knowledge and range of perspectives of participatory forms and frames of commemorative culture in public spaces throughout the DAICOR program.
Prof. Dr. Jacob Eder teaches Modern and Contemporary History at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. His research as a historian deals with the politics of memory, antisemitism, transatlantic relations, humanitarianism, and migration. In 2007, he received an M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he held a Fulbright Scholarship. He received an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Eder has held fellowships at the Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and twice at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2011-12, he was the Mellon Foundation Fellow at the IERES/Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he also coordinated the Program on Conducting Archival Research. In 2017 and 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
His book “Holocaust Angst” was a finalist for several awards and received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History of the Wiener Library, the Marko Feingold Prize (Salzburg), and the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2018, Eder received Jena University’s teaching award for a seminar on memory in Germany and Israel, which brought together students from Jena and Jerusalem.
Annika Hirsekorn has been part of the curatorial team at the Berlin exhibition space neurotitan since 2014. As a curator, she is dedicated to socio-political issues with a focus on memory cultures, human rights education, and urban development. In 2018, she initiated the group Denk.mal Inklusiv to develop strategies for an inclusive culture of memory together with a group of inclusion consultants and artists with and without disabilities. In 2020, the group was awarded by the Internationales Bildungs- und Begegnungswerk for the development of an inclusive website on places of remembrance. In addition to art and educational programs she created in her focus areas and which she carries out with international partner organizations, she further proposes performative appropriations of sites of memory in the series “Encounter with Monument”.
Nora Hogrefe is head of Aktives Museum’s coordinating office for historical markers in Berlin. The office organizes participative projects and the exchange of information on commemorative plaques, information panels, and other memorials. In networking and debating the possibility of a contemporary public culture of remembrance, Nora Hogrefe deals with questions, such as: What is the underlying concept of culture and memory in “culture of remembrance?” Who defines these concepts and has the sovereignty of interpretation? How can different or opposing understandings of the past and present exist simultaneously in a diverse city like Berlin?
Studying European Ethnology (Social and Cultural Anthropology) at Humboldt University Berlin, Nora Hogrefe focused on the history of epistemology and culture, postcolonial theory, gender and queer studies, and migration. As a member of the mediation team of the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), Nora Hogrefe conceptualized guided tours debating current socio-political situations through an engagement with contemporary art. In the emerging area of Education and Outreach of Berlin’s Brücke-Museum, Nora Hogrefe worked as an assistant curator on a new orientation of the museum’s program (2018–2020). The concept of outreach intends to challenge museum collections in terms of their political relevance and social impact through innovative formats and diverse audiences, including the museums’ neighborhoods.
Suy Lan Hopmann is currently Curator for Special Projects and Diversity at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Arts and Cultures of the World, Hamburg, Germany. She has previously worked as Research Associate at the Chair of Politics and Economics of China at Freie Universität Berlin and the Collaborative Research Center 700 – Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood. She studied China Studies, Gender Studies, and Sociology at Hamburg University and has lived, worked, and researched in various countries in East and South Asia and Bristol.
Prof. Dr. Meike Hopp studied art history, theater studies, and classical archaeology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she received her doctorate in 2012 on the topic of “Art Trade under National Socialism”. Since 2009, she has led various projects in the field of provenance research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI), Munich, and has worked on several exhibition and catalog projects, such as “Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the Kunstmuseum Bern (2017). In 2018, she was awarded a research fellowship in the Cluster of Excellence TOPOI at the Technical University of Berlin on “Networks of the German Antiques Trade between 1914 and 1949.” Since November 2018, she has served as chair of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V., a non-profit association that brings together nearly 400 international researchers in the field; in November 2019, Meike Hopp was appointed Professor of Digital Provenance at the Technical University of Berlin. She is an associate member of the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) and one of the PIs in the Grand Challenge Project of the Berlin University Alliance “Museums and Society. Mapping the Social” (https://museumsandsociety.net/). Most recently, she has been appointed as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation).
Dr. Tania Mancheno has lived in Hamburg since 2003 and has taught at the University of Hamburg in the field of social sciences and geography on postcolonial theory and decolonial thought since 2009. She studied sociology, political sciences, and social anthropology in Quito, Hamburg, and Paris. Her research is focused on urban space and violence, colonial history, and the analysis of its local and transnational consequences from a feminist perspective from the Global South, with a special focus on Black Caribbean political thinking. In 2019, she obtained her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the politics of translation and the debate on multiculturalism. Currently, Dr. Mancheno is an associate scholar at the research center “Hamburg’s (post)colonial heritage Hamburg and the early globalization” and is involved in several interdisciplinary projects on decolonial memory in the city. Her coming publications are two essays in edited volumes entitled: “Beyond coloniality in world heritage: Countermapping the colonial amnesia in Parisian landscapes” and ” The city plays harbor. On the colonial heritage in the HafenCity “.
Bonka von Bredow, born in Sofia/ Bulgaria has studied Near Eastern Archaeology, Assyriology, and Classical Archaeology at the Ruprecht- Karls University in Heidelberg. During her studies, she worked as an archaeologist in Kültepe-Kanish in Central Turkey. Currently, she is working on a project “Documentation of Migrant History in Mannheim”, which is initiated by the MARCHIVUM, the city archive of Mannheim. This project aims to collect materials and documents from migrants, their clubs and associations, cultural and religious places, to represent the whole diverse society of Mannheim in the city archive as a collective heritage. Due to her project, she is participating in a workgroup of the city of Mannheim, which is planning to establish a “remembrance place” for the so-called “Gastarbeiter” of the first generation, who moved to the city due to the recruitment agreements for “guest workers” made by the Federal Republic of Germany. (1955-1968). Her main interest lies in the awakening processes within the city of Mannheim to remember, to remain migrant histories, to shape new remembrance places for migrants, and to build a stronger and more open society.
US Cohort:
Clarice Abdul-Bey is a native Arkansan, who loves her hometown and wants to see all neighborhoods and communities in Arkansas flourish. As a lifelong youth mentor and youth advocate, Clarice is ardent about coaching students in the areas of solutions-based journalism, interviewing skills, and what she likes to call active-empathetic listening techniques. Co-Director of the Washitaw Foothills Youth Media Arts & Literacy Collective (WFYMALC.org), and Co-Convener of the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement (APJMM.org). She is a Racial Justice Facilitator, Mental Health First Aider, Mindfulness Relationships Practitioner, and a proud AmeriCorps Alum, passionate about wellness integration in workspaces, advocacy, and social justice issues.
Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. Kenny’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Granta, The Believer, Kyoto Journal, LiteraryHub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in many other publications and anthologies. He wrote the Disability Beat column for How We Get To Next and developed the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, and Japanese.
Kenny is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany) and has received grants from the DAAD, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was an honoree on Diversability’s inaugural Disability Impact List.
His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts from which are featured in his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?
He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
Candace Bacchus Hollingsworth has a passion for service and improving the effectiveness of public sector organizations to advance their missions. She has 15 years of experience in the nonprofit sector having assumed roles ranging from grants manager to virtual CFO and has managed projects of all sizes. Candace serves as the Director of AmeriCorps Programs at The Corps Network, where she oversees an AmeriCorps program that engages over 900 opportunity youth in national service through conservation and environmental stewardship.
She most recently served as mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland where she was the youngest, and first African American mayor in the city’s history. As mayor, Candace championed policies and programs that improved outcomes for young people, expanded opportunities for marginalized communities, and charted a path toward shared prosperity. Candace stepped down as mayor in December 2020 to grow Our Black Party, a political organization established to help lead a national agenda to create lasting change in the everyday lives of Black people nationwide as its national co-chair.
Candace is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and received a Bachelor of Arts from Emory University and a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from Georgetown University. She is a board member for the Prince George’s County African American Museum and Cultural Center, a Sisters on the Planet Ambassador for Oxfam America, and a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Dr. Earl S. Mowatt earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Central Florida. He is a published author on race relations and has presented research at conferences throughout the United States. He has also developed effective HIV prevention strategies to reduce the adverse effects of social isolation and stigma for marginalized populations. His area of expertise is the intersection of social inequality and social psychology. Dr. Mowatt currently serves as the Vice President of Education at the National Pulse Memorial & Museum. He has a functional role in steering the foundation’s vision of acceptance, inclusion, and remembrance into the education programs. He develops evidence-based programs that are exciting, interesting, smart, and engaging to ensure that the intended outcomes are achieved. Programs target change at the individual, group, and community levels and cover a broad range of social issues, including queer equality, gender identity, social exclusion, and race.
Neysa Page-Lieberman is a curator, lecturer, writer, and educator with a focus on feminism, African diaspora, social practice, and public art. Based in Kansas City since 2020, she curates, produces, and consults on public art, street art, and monuments. With collaborator, Jane M. Saks, Neysa co-founded the project Monuments to Movements – In the House of Radical Feminist Practices, and currently serves as the M2M Co-Artistic Director. Before relocating to Kansas City, Neysa was the executive director of the Department of Exhibitions and Performance Spaces at Columbia College Chicago, the director and chief curator of the Wabash Arts Corridor, and a lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Neysa has produced over 300 exhibitions and public art projects nationally and internationally, including Inequality in Bronze: Monumental Plantation Legacies, a monument to Dinah, a formerly enslaved woman in Philadelphia; international mural exchanges with Sister Cities International in Casablanca, Morocco, and Toronto, Canada; Street Level: Wabash Arts Corridor Public Arts Festival; Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice; Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)generation, with the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond touring for 7 years to 9 museums; Vodou Riche: Contemporary Haitian Art and a recently launched a mural and monument project to Illinois Women’s Suffrage. Neysa has lectured and written extensively on public art & monuments, feminist art, the African diaspora, and socially engaged practices. Recently she co-authored with Melissa Potter the Feminist Social Practice Manifesto (John Hopkins University Press) and published Feminism in Your Face: Public Art Resistance in Where the Future Came From, edited by Meg Duguid (Soberscove Press).
Jumana Salamey, Au.D, is the Deputy Director, Manager of Operations at AANM. Jumana has dedicated over a decade of her professional career as a cultural administrator- holding space for artists and co-creating space for communities of color. She is a fellow of the Intercultural Leadership Institute and the chair of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion at her organization, which has nearly 300 staff. She is also a founding member of the International Sites of Conscience and an active member of her community. Dr. Salamey also leads initiatives related to accessibility and inclusion. She has a B.A. in Psychology and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an Au.D. in Audiology from Wayne State University. Dr. Salamey manages the day-to-day business operations of the museum and ensures program goals are completed.
Tsoleen Sarian is Executive Director of Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives. Currently, she serves leadership roles in the Armenian Memorial Church and the Friends of Armenian Heritage Park. Since 2002, Tsoleen has managed Peter Koutoujian’s election campaigns. Previous leadership roles include ANCA Eastern Region, Homenetmen Boston, and AGBU YP Boston. She holds a Batchelor’s degree in History from Merrimack College and a Master’s Degree in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University.
Nicholas Suárez Pástor is a documentary filmmaker and lawyer based in Berlin. He has been involved in human rights projects with local governments, civil society, and international organizations in Ecuador, Bolivia, the USA, and Germany. After working as a video producer for an international news organization in Washington D.C., he moved to Berlin for pursuing a Master in Arts in Documentary Filmmaking. His work focuses on access to truth as a means for achieving justice, especially after gross human rights violations. In this sense, he is convinced that documentary filmmaking can contribute to the construction of historical memory, justice, and long-lasting peace.