Memory Building in Chicago’s Community Center for Survivors and Families of Police Torture

Memory Building in Chicago’s Community Center for Survivors and Families of Police Torture - by Maria Acosta​

The initial proposal for this fellowship projected the second step of a larger project related to memory building initiatives for police torture survivors in the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) and in connection to the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials collective (CTJM). The first part of the project (2016-2018) was focused on designing the main strategies connected to the memory building areas of CTJC, specifically the creation and implementation of sites for storytelling and testimony-sharing. This involved the design of training programs for those who are now conducting workshops with survivors. In the second part, which we undertook the past academic year (2018-2019), we focused on the design and coordination of historical memory workshops for survivors and their families, and more specifically, on an oral histories project with survivors. This part of the project has been devoted exclusively to the implementation of these workshops and to the ways in which they can inform and become the point of departure for what needs to turn into a living archive that makes visible and audible, in responsible and effective ways, the testimonies and the history of this case, as well as its entanglement with larger logics of race-targeted and police violence in the city of Chicago.

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