Monumenta Quotes

“There wasn't enough property in the world to memorialise the dead.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“It was easy, perhaps, to not know things, when things were going well.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“There is a fine line, a very fine line. Between memorialisation and erasure.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“People were much more confusing in person. On the phone, she was only for him.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“Since my brother died, I have wanted to change the world. Not in a nineties way, you understand. But I can't bear to simply replicate the way things were when he was here.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“The monument I am proposing is specific to Belgrade, but in many ways could apply to any city in the world, because the massacre I wish to remember is the failure of memorialisation itself”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“The plans made him feel guilty. No, worse than that. The guilt of the whole of Western Europe. Followed by the shame of the whole of Western Europe, because the guilt he felt was rather fleeting.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“We need to stop denying that Serbia waged in ethno-racist war and that Serbia lost this war and find a way of representing our response ability and grief and the despair of the victims. Until we do that, Serbia cannot come to terms with the present of the future”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“But now, up close, she recognised another quality in Hilde and reassigned her. Survivor. Perhaps it was always going to be this way now: she would spot them in crowds and on aeroplanes and in waiting rooms, " her countrywomen (because they were, more often, women) whose country was pain.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta

“There was a word for women like this. She held out her hand for the architect to shake, and as their hands met, the word came. Self-contained. Women who have meticulously prepared for every eventuality, every negative, positive and plausible reaction in between, and shut it out. Neutralised it. It was a quality people tried, and often failed, to learn at business school.”
― Lara Haworth, Monumenta