You are Not Alone:Feminist memorialisation and the present tense of gender-based violence in the Monument Quilt

In recent years a new tide of memorials dedicated to victim-survivors of gender-based violence has started to rise across the world. In this article, we analyse a significant example of this memorialisation movement: the Monument Quilt, a large-scale, collaborative, textile-based craftivist project based in Baltimore and Mexico City. Unlike permanent installations, like statues or parks, the Monument Quilt is a deliberately temporary project with multiple creators. We argue that because of its form, the Monument Quilt opens space for community building, narrative complexity, and an approach to temporality that foregrounds the chronicity of gender-based violence. Bringing together the voices of around 3000 creators, the Quilt foregrounds diversity and intersectionality and enables the expression of unresolved emotions and forms of survivorship not usually represented in public memorials. In addition, while scholars have demonstrated that most state-led memorials narrate violence through a linear temporality and therefore shore up the status quo of power relations, the Monument Quilt’s engagement with the present tense of gender-based violence enables it to work towards prefiguring a world without it. In this article, we draw upon individual and group interviews as well as textual and visual analysis to explore what the Quilt can teach us about how feminist and anti-racist political movements might usefully mobilise mnemonic resources.