Destroy This Memory

In an era inundated with news of tragedy, we can often struggle to engage meaningfully with our present scale of loss. Inspired by Richard Misrach’s photo-series of the same name, Destroy This Memory offers a memorial-based, world-building experience in the Fall of 2025. Each installation begins with a lesser-known or deliberately hidden narrative from Hurricane Katrina. Through sculpture, ritual, public gatherings, and interviews, these stories are transformed into an embodied monument. Each memorial incorporates a contextualized tribute to every life remembered with 1,833 individually hand-cut crosses. Born of the desire for a more engaged and visceral reckoning of grief, this project provides an opportunity to be tactilely engaged in the experience of memorials and abandons the traditional simplicity and sanitation of monuments in this country. 

Structured like a museum, Destroy This Memory guides visitors through reimagined memorial forms (a fountain, a reflecting pool, a statue, a wall) blended with archival photos, architectural aesthetics, and personal testimony. Throughout this process, we are invited to reimagine how we approach the creation of memory together—not as passive archivists, but as active participants in expressing history. 

While rooted in the specific events of Hurricane Katrina, the project speaks to how disasters are recorded, whose stories are preserved and how they are told, especially when governing institutions dictate the narrative. I have felt personally called to explore this work hoping to uncover how intimate we can become with this particular thousand. Destroy This Memory asks us to make personal the tragedies of the past, and invites us to reflect on grief as a global experience. 

Your contributions would help support this immersive experience that acts not only as my first public presentation of visual arts work, but ultimately culminates as a celebration of our ability to come together and hold the things that may be difficult. Your support will help bring this vision to life by establishing a dedicated viewing space and supporting the work of several Chicago-based visual and performance artists. With your help, we can create a shared experience of remembrance, one that honors loss not with detachment, but with care, honesty, and presence.