Every Woman A Monument
A Community Monument
In the winter and spring of 2023/2024, I was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp Memorial in Fürstenberg, Germany.
The Ravensbrück concentration camp, built by the SS in 1939, was the largest women’s concentration camp in the German Reich. Between 1939 and 1945 approximately 120,000 women and children, as well as 1,200 adolescent girls, were registered as prisoners at the camp.
During my residency, I wanted to set new impulses through art and bring the story of this historical place into the future in an accessible and meaningful way.
As soon as I arrived at the Ravensbrück Memorial, I instinctively started to begin crafting what would become Every Woman A Monument. I started cutting female silhouettes out of all the paper and cardboard materials I could find, creating a individual, tiny monument for each woman. I wanted to honor every woman who was imprisoned in the camp, offering a silent tribute to lives marked by unimaginable suffering.
The women deported to Ravensbrück came from more than 30 nations, among them Jewish women as well as Sinti and Roma. As I immersed myself in their stories – listening to interviews, reading biographies, watching videos, looking at photographs, studying the history, and walking through the memorial grounds, trying to imagine what had taken place there – I continued cutting. Gradually, my studio was filled with countless small monuments of women. Each silhouette differed in color and material, yet all were connected in form, each representing a quiet homage to the women imprisoned within those harrowing walls.
Knowing that between 1939 and 1945 approximately 120,000 women and children, as well as 1,200 adolescent girls, were registered as prisoners at the camp and tens of thousands of women died there as a result of brutal conditions, starvation, disease, executions, medical experiments, forced labor, and mass killing operations
I held on to the attempt of giving every single one of them a monument. I invited students and visitors to join me in creating this collective memorial. Throughout the creative process, we all understood that our efforts could never be enough to succeed and fully honor each and every one of them. Yet this impossible attempt of creating Every Woman A Monument brought us together in our shared act of remembrance and by creating a monument for everyone of the woman it made the vast dimension of the horror that took place here very visible.
Every Woman A Monument is a never-ending attempt to keep the stories of the women of Ravensbrück alive and to honor each one of them.
This is only the beginning…
