In Manisa, western Turkey, the Liberation Museum by Yalin Architectural Design is a memory space shaped by absence, loss, and collective resilience. Developed for the Greater City Municipality of Manisa, the 3,800-square-meter project narrates the local civil resistance movement that emerged independently of central authority between 1918 and 1923, during and after the First World War. The museum is conceived as an experiential landscape, guiding visitors through a spatial narrative of occupation, destruction, liberation, and rebuilding.
A single photograph from the day, in 1970, that four students there were killed by the Ohio National Guard is so powerful that, whenever I hear any mention of Kent State-its basketball team or its engineering program-the picture flashes in my mind. I'm sure I'm not alone. Kent State was reduced to a single photo because the press was far more centralized at the time, and had the power and the influence to edit, curate, and promote a particular version of an event.
I was standing onstage at the University of Puget Sound, preparing to give a talk about anti-Chinese violence in the American West, when a man I'd never met stepped up beside me. He was introduced as a member of the Tacoma City Council. Without preamble, he turned to the audience-and then to me. "I tell my kids reconciliation begins with an apology," he said. "On behalf of the city of Tacoma, I am sorry."