Fighting Amnesia

The murder of George Floyd tore the city fabric and its violent normalcy, creating a vibrant informal community in its wake.

The city fabric tried to re-conquer the site ever since, offering amnesia under the pretense of healing and returning to normal. Artworks, structures, and monuments - honest expressions of community outcry - are removed, erased with car traffic, or proposed to fold into a formal and easier-to-ignore monument.

This project is about fighting the advance of amnesia and embracing the peoples’ chosen way of healing.

Gas Station - Involuntary Folly

The shockwave from the George Floyd murder hit the Speedway gas station point-blank and blew the program out of it, turning it into an involuntary folly. Aptly renamed Peoples’ Way, the gas station became a purposeless decoration for the unrest and communal actions that continue to this day.

While the gas-station-with-no-gas lost its original purpose, the activities inhabiting it now are profound. The community meets there twice a day, every day since George Floyd’s murder. People discuss the recent news, personal issues, problems, struggles, joys, and losses. A brass band plays every Monday. A bonfire is lit - a continued act of rebellion against the gas station, anchoring it as a folly. Food is cooked and passed around.

Reestablishing the traditional city fabric would destroy the site’s unique program and alienate the community that created and upheld it. We should return to the site to see, not to be seen.

Kintsugi - anti-amnesia

Kintsugi (Japanese for “golden journey”) is the art of repairing broken objects by highlighting the damage with gold instead of hiding it. The damage is celebrated as a part of the object’s history and beauty. Kintsugi is the design philosophy of this proposal.

Protecting the community’s program

The site not only remembers in vivid detail George Floyd’s murder and what happened since but artistically records and keeps the stories of other similar murders. Our approach to such an emotionally-charged place must be very delicate.

Our aesthetic sophistication is associated with amnesia and met with skepticism and suspicion. However, our professional expertise is welcomed. The following intervention will be of a consulting nature - it will point out an untapped resource of the site and show the community how it could be used.

Milly City Auto Body frequently receives totaled cars and could divert some to the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. The art center, specializing in glass and metal, would instill the wrecks with a new life as functional works of art - urban furniture to be placed at the gas station.

Through preserving wrecks, the community protects and highlights tragedy as an integral part of the site’s program.

This is the peoples’ way of healing and it deserves our respect and consideration.