Silenced Voices. Memory of Rape in Wartimes Women as Victims of Sexual Violence

Abstract

In 2021, when the Municipality of Budapest invited professionals and civilians alike to tender for the design and eventual creation of a monument dedicated to women raped in times of war, we did not yet know how topical it would be in Europe today. The competition was part of a complex project titled Elhallgatva (Silenced Voices]). By creating a memorial site and meticulously preparing the competition, the project aimed to shape consensus on remembrance policy, as well as society’s perception of wartime violence against women. The project’s website offers a research space; thematic studies and interviews on the realization of the project are available, as well as pictures of the scale models of the winning entries. A collection of studies has also been published in a single volume, and several exhibitions have been organised from the works the jury had selected from the thirty-six entries. Thus, the whole project has high visibility – yet reviews are few and far between. In my paper, I review the competition and the entries, as well as the issues and critical points raised by the monument – specifically, the „monument of rape”. By presenting the entries, I take a practical approach. My analysis is centered on the problems of places of remembrance in general; more specifically, on the possibilities of visually representing the memories of women who had been raped. I also examine how pre-existing contemporary monuments may have served as experience to the applicants for the Budapest monument, and how their submitted works can be interpreted in this context.