Memory and justice

This child’s drawing showing the traumatic representation of the killings highlights the naked violence of the massacres in Rwanda. Tutsi children, most of them orphans and witnesses to atrocities, were deeply scarred by their experience.
Many of them, however, rebuilt themselves and were able to find their place in society by studying, working and starting a family.
This moral strength, or rather this ability to overcome the trauma that is referred to as resilience, highlights the personal work these people have undertaken on their own representations of their injuries.

The resilience that allows us to control and distance what happens to us is a process that is clearly helped by speech, drawing, and writing. Artistic practice also plays a major role in the ability to change traumatic memory and free oneself from the past.