 So we've seen some responses to tragedy and memory and I was thinking of Picasso's Guernica and how that is a well-known painting about memory about memorializing the bombardment of a town in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. But it you could look at it as a memorial piece, but you could also look at it as activist piece because of its history. I remember when Colin Powell delivered his lies to the United Nations Security Council and they veiled the Guernica painting. It was behind him so that the message of that painting couldn't be seen while he was making up his stories about weapons of mass destruction. So I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask everybody when these attacks happen, these attacks being like the Almuts Nabi attack. So many attacks since then. We often say never forget. And all of this life is, this loss of life is worth memorializing, but it's interesting just to think about how this particular project has garnered a lot of support and a lot of people have responded to it. I wonder if anybody has anything to say about what it is about this particular attack that strikes them. Anybody? Well, I guess my initial instinct is that when I was asked to be a part of it, but basically it was learning about what it was and then also just how much it was like an attack on all humanity when those kind of things happen, like it affects all of us on such a deep level. I know for myself I was thinking about reading and the access to books and all that. My parents, you know, both of my parents had no education, did not read or write. We didn't have books in our house when I was growing up until we got into school. Then we got books and we read, but I think learning has always been like a really critical thing for me and for my life and for my family, for my whatever I do, it's always connected to that because my parents couldn't do it because they were deprived of that, not because they didn't want to do it. So I think that that's the human part of it that's really for me, it's just like you have to respond to those, just something like that. There's just no way you can. As an artist, it just has a human being. Yeah, I just wanted to continue what you were saying about this. It seems particularly heinous somehow, heinous attack, this element with an Abbey attack, this bombing, because it goes beyond just the physical erasing of people, but it goes deeper, it tries to erase a culture, a civilization. I remember the words shock and awe that started this whole thing. It meant to shock and awe and destroy in a way that was spectacular, not just the usual destruction. It was shock and awe. I was still dealing with it. Many years, what, 13 years later, I was still shocked and awed by the ramification, the reverberations, all the consequences that initial attack, and it's I think very telling that this happens in the cradle of civilization, what we've always called cradle of civilization. So it's a very pointed attack on civilization itself. Either of you want to say something? Yeah, well, I was just thinking that you know, like attacking a bookseller, I mean, everybody, like, you know, like the spot that all the publishers were and the booksellers were, not that you're killing the people, but it seems like attack on something that now we are lucky that we can reproduce things, but there are things that have completely been destroyed, like historical sites in Syria and in Iraq, and I think literature and art is something that is very important to preserve. And if you take away even that, how can people, you know, refer to history, to what that had brought them today, to who they are? That's why I thought it was very important to to do something about it, to this act of solidargery to the people. Do you want to say anything? Oh, well, I think that we have said what I feel. Just to add that, you know, attacking books or art or monuments to me, it's like attacking my humanity, you know, all that is rich about being a human being is under attack, and I think that's why we feel so viscerally about this particular bombing, you know, because there are bombings all over the place, but this particular one, it just feels like it's attacking who you are as a higher human being, and that's why I felt really drawn to this project. Well, I'd like to pull that apart a little bit, because there's this, it's very common to say, you know, we are in a battle between culture and barbarian. And I like to think that that there is a culture, but is the culture of, I don't know, Hollywood and McDonald's that we're defending? Is the barbarian only the suicide bomber? There seems to be such a possibility of a duality here between like, we're good, they're bad. I just wonder if we could pull apart like, what is the culture that is worth defending, or is defensible, and what is it that we perhaps are against? I think it's a great point. Just recently, a few days ago, I don't remember who the intellectual, French intellectual who made this point said, talking about this, you hear a lot about the clash of civilizations. It's actually a clash of barbarities, two barbarian impulses coming at each other. There is no culture versus barbarity. It's barbarity against barbarity. And people get stuck between the two. It's not as if the American people, for example, are the barbarians or the civilized ones, and the opposite can be said about the Iraqis, let's say. It isn't the case. It's the peoples who are stuck between these barbarians from the west and these barbarians who are indigenous barbarians. So it's a very good question. Where is the barbarity? Where is the civilization? It's not what we think, what we're accustomed to. This country versus that country. The good country against the bad country. Do you want to take that, Nancy? I don't see it. I create mandalas where everything is included. So I don't see, oh, this was done to this. I mean, there were all kinds of books destroyed there, including probably some from Hollywood, Walt Disney cartoons or whatever. It is the destruction, I think, what I feel is the destruction of freedom, the freedom of having a choice of books or having a choice of anything that something has been taken away from me because they said I can't have this street where I can peruse all kinds of books. It's dangerous. And so that is destroyed. No matter who destroys it, I feel that that's what I'm talking about. We're so used to having choices in this country, although we really don't. But we're so used to feeling like we can walk in anywhere and buy this and buy that. But what I'm trying to say is to have a place where it's so precious to gain knowledge or to even look at a cartoon, to have that whole street destroyed is what I was reacting to. Right. But maybe more broadly than this specific incident, this idea of culture versus barbarity. I think you're referring to a wider idea of the clash of civilizations, not specifically the Almutnavi Street. But Juan, you want to say something? I don't know. When I thought about it in terms of your question or your other questions as well, I was like, okay, we make art, but we're not necessarily, I don't consider myself an intellectual in terms of the way I break stuff down. But I was thinking about culture and American culture. And American culture is, I don't know, to me it's like this conglomerate of so many things that make it, have made it rich. But those are the very things that are being under attack. And I think that the culture that is repulsive to me now is the idea of white supremacy and that white people own everything and take everything and have a right to everything. That's what we are experiencing now, more so than ever. And it's just like an insult as a person of color in this country to have to feel it. And go through it. I mean, how do you define culture when it's constantly ripped from you? And you see it ripped from you, from your family, from the way you live and things you try to do. It's just constant. It's been constant. And when you try to be part of this society, you try to grow and have your family grow and raise kids and do things that are part of what you should be doing to enjoy your life, but it's just constantly attacked. You know what I mean? So the cultural definition for me, it's like really complex because do I have to pick sides and make choices? I don't know. It's very complicated. You want to jump in, Goldman? No. Maybe we can talk about the idea of the use of memorial in the contemporary cultural world. How you see memorials functioning. A lot of art, like activist art might be more asking for something from the viewer, maybe a kind of solidarity or some kind of action. Maybe memorial art is a subset of activism, a kind of activist art. But maybe you touched Goldman a bit on the idea of memory as a personal thing and how art can carry that memory. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the art as memorial? I mean most of my work has always been personal. I mean there have been a few times that I have done things that are more outside of me. But I think I see it more in a way that for me it's hard to talk about it because I'm constantly thinking about the fact that I've been uprooted and I don't belong. I constantly feel I don't belong or where do I belong and it's nothing to do with America or any specific thing. It's just not knowing what to refer to. That's why I feel memories are very important even if it's not a particular event. It's just something that you can tie to and you can feel that you exist and that's how I see it. An example I can say that is more outside of my thing was we had a great professor at San Francisco Art Institute. When I started there I couldn't like, it was very hard to be in a new place and this person's class was really amazing. It was philosophy. So it seemed like you just go to somebody's intimate class and you just listen to him. And at the time I felt like being at his class was the reason that I was there. And after a year unfortunately we heard that he passed away. And so the class I'd taken with him was canceled and I had another class and fortunately it was a lithography class. And so every Thursday I started and it was my first time working on a stone and I created this piece. It was called The Disappearance of the Master. So every Thursday I would think of everything that he used to tell us or what he would tell us on those days. And I just worked slowly on that stone and the fact that that stone also was holding all this history of everybody else who worked on it. I felt like it just helped. It was a healing process. So I see like art is a memory and that memory can be healing. I don't know if that answers the question. That's beautiful, yes. Nancy, I mean the interaction between the personal and the cultural, social, wider social seems to be part of your mandala. Definitely. And to piggyback off of you, the healing part is a very deep part of the art that I do. It's a matter of, I mean every one of those mandalas that I've shown today, it starts with the personal. You know, Brenda Wang Aoki's grandfather started Japantown and he's in the mandala. So it starts with a personal experience of somebody who went through the camps but then it grows larger than that where we have hundreds of pictures of the entire camp experience and how that affects present day Japantown. So, you know, and of course Day of the Dead has my own parents in there as well as famous figures. But seeing it all together, knowing that you are grounded in history and you are also in present day is a very healing kind of experience even when talking about a kind of a devastating topic, the internments. So we had a lot of people who came, who actually went through the camps but seeing that and also seeing that the community is still there and seeing all the changes and then knowing that the young kids are taking on the, you know, the telling of the story. Because one of the fears is that what they went through will be forgotten or it may be repeated. And that's one of the ways that these mandalas really ground everybody in history and also keep the story alive. I was just thinking of memorials. There's so many memorials in this country and very few of them represent the people from this country. And of course there's generals on top. Yeah, there's one right here in front of the library that has the early settlers and it's a tribute to their settlement here. And there's an Indian man kind of almost laying down and the friar is like pointing to him and pointing to the heavens. I mean it's just an insult to even have it here but it's here. On 280 there's a hideous looking sculpture that somebody did out of cement or something of Jennifer Ossera that they're trying to canonize. I guess the Pope is. They probably did but it's just the atrocities that he's a part of here in the Americas. It's just I don't know it's like another affront to who we are in our existence. I mean the memorial that they did in Washington D.C. I think I'm not sure what the artist's name was. I think it's Maya Lin. The Vietnam Wall was really impactful and I mean it really resonated for a lot of people and for myself. In terms of just the listing of so many victims that were killed there. But I don't know it's just I mean I think they're necessary and there's a need for it but very few of them reflect us. You want to say something Khalil about your community? Yeah I think you're bringing up the question of memory versus power. Memory runs into power so you get people who are representing power instead of the actual victims of what happened and unfortunately victims are the majority. So you have a few people you have a lot of monuments in this country in other countries that represent the minority that won. And hardly anything about the majority of people were massacred. Maya Lin actually did that if I'm not mistaken that memorial was for the soldiers. The U.S. soldiers not the 4 million Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians were killed which is atrocious to me. I mean I'm nothing against 50,000 people who died fighting there because they're not the elites of this country. They're just there as tools of the elites here. But how about the 4 million people who died? So the victims are not represented. I was involved in a project of Cesar Chavez in LA trying to do a sculpture honoring him. And I went to that placita over the street to see what were the statues already there. And they're all about the conquerors, the king of Spain and nobody from here. You know we always hear about never again but we don't hear about the Holocaust that happened here. We only hear about what happened in Europe because we're not guilty of it as a country. We did not kill 6 million Jews so that's very interesting what happened in Europe. How about what happened here? Not a peep. So it's all about power and memory has this challenge of budding up against power. Well that's a good place to end this and maybe we'll throw it out for any questions. There's somebody right there.