A digital space for individual and collective mourning and resistance.
Over the last decades, survivors of right-wing terror in Germany and families of victims have fought to reclaim their right to remembrance in the public sphere.
These fights have been for street names, schools, parks, and monuments as well as space within politics and education. These fights have been for the right to be heard, to be seen, and to activate change in government, in justice and law enforcement systems, and in civil society. These fights have been for a better future.
WIR SIND HIER (WE ARE HERE), is a digital cartography project generated in close collaboration with initiatives and individuals combating racism and antisemitism across Germany. It invites users to imagine how remembrance, from city streets to monuments, could and should look like today as an active form of resistance and change. In cities like Berlin, Hanau, Halle, Hamburg, Mölln, Merseburg, and Munich, the project claims spaces of remembrance through the voices and demands of families, initiatives, and those affected by right-wing terror and police brutality who are all too often pushed to the background.
By scrolling over the names of victims, users of the platform can view maps of their cities and the spaces claimed or being claimed by families and initiatives today, and are given an overview of right-wing extremist attacks and police brutality in Germany and the former GDR within the last 40 years, including cases of violence that have not yet been properly investigated or recognised as hate crimes by state and local authorities.
With the names, users are also invited to listen to the cities, and to the voices of those building and fighting for justice, accountability, and investigation through the remembrance of those they have lost to racism and antisemitism. By actively listening to the voices of those affected, by recognizing their right for space within their cities and within commemoration politics, WIR SIND HIER asks users to imagine an alternative reality and an alternative future.
How can what exists in the digital world influence the real?