A’ simple People Who Want a Simple Memorial’

About halfway down Rossville Street in Derry’s Bogside stands a memorial to the thirteen civilians shot dead on Bloody Sunday. The site of the memorial, known locally as “Speaker’s Corner”, was an obvious, logical and highly symbolic one, 1 given that the victims had died on the spot or close by, in Glenfada Park, and had used the already-existing concrete platform at the corner to take cover on the day of the tragic shootings. The event commemorated by this memorial was a highly contested event and stands as a good example of a “difficult past” 2 that gave rise to emotionally and politically charged and competing impulses to remember and to forget among both victims and perpetrators. At the time of its erection, it stood before the high Rossville flats and there was a curious congruence between the vertical memorial and the buildings behind it. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Event (particle physics) · Shot (pellet) · Simple (philosophy) · Visual arts · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy