Perpetrators, Victims, and the Fragile Architecture of Memory
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- May 13
- 5 min read
Written By: Frazer Macdonald Hay
Quick Read:
The Gun Violence Memorial Project is a powerful, multi-city exhibition that transforms the staggering scale of gun violence in America into a deeply personal and spatial experience. Through four glass-brick houses filled with remembrance objects contributed by victims’ families, the memorial humanizes loss and challenges the reduction of lives to statistics. Set within culturally significant and often elite spaces, the project juxtaposes narratives of trauma with sites of wealth and power, amplifying its message. At its core, the memorial explores the fluid and layered nature of memory—personal, communal, public, and national—while also acknowledging the complex, often uncomfortable need to interrogate the socio-political conditions that produce violence. As a call for national recognition and healing, the project invites both remembrance and critical reflection, making visible not only who we mourn, but also how and why violence persists.
Full Text:
Gun violence in America is not just a political issue or a talking point on the evening news. It is a daily, lived experience—one that leaves families fractured, communities traumatized, and public promises hollow. In the face of this relentless national epidemic, statistics have become a cold shorthand for grief, reducing tens of thousands of lives each year to impersonal data points. The Gun Violence Memorial Project resists this flattening. It offers not numbers, but names. Not arguments, but remembrance. Not abstraction, but space.
Launched at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Gun Violence Memorial Project is a fascinating exhibition from many levels—political, spatial, emotional, and architectural. Designed by MASS Design Group in collaboration with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas and advocacy organizations Everytown for Gun Safety and Purpose Over Pain, the installation features four translucent houses constructed from 700 glass bricks. Each house represents the average number of lives lost to gun violence each week in the United States.
But these houses do more than visualize a grim statistic. Within each glass brick lies a remembrance object—a photo, a toy, a book, a necklace—offered by families who have lost loved ones. Accompanied by the name, birth year, and death year of the person remembered, these artifacts are embedded in the walls themselves, transforming architectural structure into a vessel for memory. These are not walls of division; they are transparent boundaries that invite intimacy and confrontation, grief and connection.
The use of the house as a symbolic form—traditionally a site of safety and intimacy—adds yet another layer of meaning. These are homes of grief, of unresolved absence. In presenting everyday personal items within these familiar forms, the memorial amplifies the tragic loss of the ordinary. The bricks are not just building material; they are emotional containers. This is architecture not of grand gesture, but of quiet insistence: Look. Remember. Mourn.
What makes this project especially profound is its spatial and cultural context. Installed in cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, and now Detroit, the memorial often sits within or adjacent to culturally significant spaces, frequently marked by legacies of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and institutional power. The contrast is deliberate—and powerful. The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), on view from May 2 through August 29, 2026, juxtaposes the personal traumas of gun violence with a space traditionally associated with elite cultural narratives. This tension between the top-down language of art institutions and the bottom-up pain of communities affected by violence exposes a wider critique: the dissonance between lived suffering and the environments that too often aestheticize or overlook it.
This installation is also a study in memory, and how it is mediated through space, object, and narrative. Memory itself is not singular. There are multiple types: official and unofficial, public and private, collective, communal, local, national, societal, historical, emotional, postmemory, literal, and exemplary. These memories exist on a scale. At one end is individual or private memory, often rooted in personal experience, loss, and trauma (Burk 2003: 317). At the communal level, memory draws from shared events that have shaped close-knit groups. Societal or national memory reflects broader historical narratives that speak to loosely connected populations. Somewhere in between lies public memory—a concept which, as Bodnar (1992: 13) argues, arises from the “intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions,” and as Shackel (2003: 11) asserts, reflects the political and social relationships of the present. Till (1999: 254) goes further to describe public memory as “a fluid process” that is negotiated not only by governments or heritage institutions, but also by media, academics, and local communities.
The Gun Violence Memorial Project lives at this intersection—where private grief becomes public testimony, where vernacular objects shape national discourse, and where memory is actively negotiated through both material and spatial form.
At the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge a complex and sometimes uncomfortable subject: the perpetrator–victim dichotomy. While the memorial rightly centers the grief and humanity of victims and their families, there is also an argument—often difficult but necessary—that this dichotomy can obscure more than it reveals. Emphasizing the roles of perpetrators versus victims risks entrenching an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset, reducing individuals to fixed categories and bypassing the broader societal dynamics that contribute to violence.
As Todorov (2009) writes, all human beings “have an equal potential for good and evil” (pp. 454–455). To empathize with victims is essential—but we must also, as he insists, “attract attention to the mechanisms of the production of evil” (p. 455). The causes of gun violence are not only about individual actions, but also about social conditions, inequality, histories of neglect, marginalization, racism, and economic exclusion. This does not excuse violence—it contextualizes it. A full reckoning with memory and justice demands that we explore how certain environments, policies, and ideologies contribute to shaping the conditions under which violence becomes thinkable, and tragically, enactable.
In many ways, this project points toward the urgent need for a national, permanent memorial to gun violence victims. The traveling installations are powerful, but temporary. What they call for—quietly but resolutely—is a country ready to acknowledge its collective loss, to enshrine remembrance in permanence, and to shift from symbolic recognition to structural change.
In an America where political will is too often paralyzed, the memorial offers something both radical and simple: space. Space to remember. Space to mourn. Space to reflect. And, perhaps, space to begin healing.
Through the accumulation of small, everyday objects placed with care and grief, the Gun Violence Memorial Project redefines what memorial architecture can be. It does not monumentalize. It humanizes. It does not declare closure. It demands attention. And in doing so, it builds something desperately needed in our fractured landscape—a house of memory, fragile but unignorable, built brick by brick from the lives that should still be with us.
