ABSTRACT
On 11 November 2018, 100 years after the signing of the Armistice to end the First World War, the author, New Zealand artist Kingsley Baird, was in Ieper (Ypres), Belgium, contributing an artwork to the Assembly Memorial Chairs project, an exhibition conceived by In Flanders Fields Museum and Briton, Val Carman, the museum’s 2018 artist in residence. Over 100 chairs from countries and regions involved in the First World War in Flanders, and symbolising those who served in the West Flanders front region and did not return home, were sent to Ieper for exhibition from 9 to 11 November. Based on interviews with visitors, the author gauged their responses to the outdoor exhibition of temporary memorials in a city inextricably linked to human and material destruction in the war of 1914–18. This chapter explores how, in the process of remembering, the exhibition and its visitors revealed a ‘transitory fictive kinship.’
