‘If monuments and plinths have failed us, how do we properly mark the past? Claudia Koonz, in an analysis of the commemorative hinterland around the European concentration camps, suggests that space is the reality that endures. We know that written texts are infinitely malleable and readily abridged, films can be edited and photographs airbrushed. But the landscape feels immutable. Only geography, she argues, is capable of conveying the narrative of extermination. At these places of remembering, memory feels monolithic, unambiguous and terrible. The landscape itself is the memorial. This is the context in which we must view Phil Whiting’s somber but necessary paintings – testimony of an immutable recent history’. Professor Paul Gough, UWE, Bristol. ‘Anxiety of erasure’
Image: © Philip Whiting. The Trail of Tears
