ABSTRACT
This chapter describes empirically the processes of memorialisation and elaborates from this description a schema for understanding the relationship between tragedy, memorialisation and politics. It is concerned with a third type of memorialisation, that sits somewhere between memorials that commemorate public events and memorials that mark personal loss onto the public landscape. Monuments may be interpreted as sites of sedimented history. The memorial worked simultaneously as a site for grieving fresh flowers were repeatedly replaced as they might be at a grave and a site to witness injustice. The ethical demands made by the inscription of the subjects' faces on their final memorials are circumscribed by the earlier failure of the melancholic moment to tie these deaths to political discourse. The mourning memorial can be resignified, sliding backwards and forwards between a past that is declared resolved and a past that remains steadfastly alive in the present.
