The Garden of Heroes

Pencil on paper, Photograph, 2017

During my research, I emphasised the personal ritual I performed at each memorial I visit. Rubbings was one of my main rituals. Making rubbings consists of several stages, the first is covering the memorial with blank paper. Before the rubbings are made and the texture of the memorial is traced, the memorial is hidden, buried under the white paper, looking like a blank surface.
The first site I performed my rubbing ritual at was The Garden of Heroes in my home town: it is a very small park, opposite City Hall, with a paved square. The town’s memorial ceremonies are held in this square every year, on the Memorial Day of the Fallen Soldiers.
During my schooldays I attended the ceremony every year, as an active member of a youth group. I even continued to attend the ceremony for a few years after graduating from high school and leaving my home town, as a kind of reunion, a gathering, a chance to meet up with old school mates.
When I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, I participated in the Memorial Day ceremony itself. I was my youth group’s representative at the honorary guard for the ceremony, where a representative from each part of the community stands in front of the Wall of Names of the Fallen during the ceremony. As a ceremony participant I needed to attend rehearsals, and on the day itself stand still throughout the ceremony, in front of this Wall of Names. As part of my research project, I wanted to go and ‘collect’ textures of walls of names. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember if my home town had one of those walls. I had no recollection of this place. Eventually, I called one of my childhood friends to ask if she remembered such a wall in our town. She reminded me of the Garden of Heroes: I had completely forgotten the place existed. So I went and copied the wall’s texture. This was my first attempt to do so, and I went in the dark, to avoid anyone thinking I was vandalising or desecrating the wall: these walls are untouchable.
I returned to the Garden of Heroes a couple of years later, as the last of my  MPhil research journeys. I wanted to go back to the first site I had visited and perform the rubbing ritual again, this time in daylight. The garden was empty of visitors. I spent quite a long time there, and apart from a few dog walkers it stayed unoccupied. The garden is centrally located, and I imagined it would be used by parents and babies, by children playing or just by passers-by resting on the grass. But throughout the whole afternoon I spent there, it stayed empty.  I decided this time to cover the wall of names and photograph it like that, covered in white paper, its true purpose buried and waiting to be revealed with my pencil. I covered the wall in a very specific way, creating patterns with the paper. The wall remained covered for a little while, until I finished photographing it. Unlike other sites where I covered a wall of names, here there were no public reactions. I did expect someone to come and say something, as the garden is located right in front of the city hall, but it seemed that no one cared about my deed.