100 Days

“They did not kill me because I was covered in blood and they thought they had already killed me. They came back and a Hutu soldier stepped on my head and shook me and said “This thing is dead” and they left. I lived among the dead for a long time. At night the dogs came to eat the dead bodies. I don’t want the daylight to come because I don’t want to see…” These are the words of a Tutsi school girl, just twelve years old, when her world was shattered by the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide. I want to honor and commemorate the survivors of genocide by adding artistic impact to their testimonies, by bringing their words to life through my senior thesis project. After countless hours of reading testimonies, watching documentaries and sifting though my research I have rearranged and compiled their words into one, cohesive narrative which will take the form of a fifteen foot long laser cut scroll. I didn’t want to shock the viewer with horrific or brutal imagery, and instead, I want the viewer to discover the hidden stories within the sea of text, therefore recreating the individuality of each person’s story that was once lost in the mass of seemingly entangled letters. As a result, the viewer will have a personal and interactive experience with my piece and hopefully be impacted in a meaningful and sentient way. My goal is to inform, illustrate and clearly show the terrors of genocide though tasteful, respectful and beautiful artwork in cut paper. I want to bring to the inhumanity and harrowing stories of the Rwandan Genocide into the daylight, because what we do not wish it see is often times what we need to see the most. As Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently stated, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silent of our friends.”