Memory
Mary asks how controversial memory is; and about the connection between London's Trafalgar Square as a memorial to 19th century Empire, and as a democratised space where we gather to celebrate, protest, and remake our national identity.
While many are thinking about how we'll memorialise the pandemic (a statue of Chris Whitty? Red hearts daubed on riverbank walls?), Mary will be asking what counts as a successful site of memory when she talks to David Adjaye, and visits his new memorial to Cherry Groce, an innocent woman who was shot by the Metropolitan Police in her Brixton home in 1985.
Visual artist Cornelia Parker will be at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with a preview of a new exhibition Breaking the Mould, remembering the work of female sculptors in Britain since the Second World War, and thinking about how we reconfigure our landscape as an act of remembrance.
In discussion with Edmund de Waal, Elif Shafak and Lemn Sissay, she'll be asking how and what we choose to forget - how we edit our ideas of our past, and how sometimes others do the editing for us. And there will be one or two throwbacks to the ancient romans, who were expert at remembering and forgetting.
This memorable start to the new series is rounded off with actor Jane Horrocks giving us a tour of her Memory Shop, a space she's created at the heart of the winding Georgian lanes of Brighton for this year's Festival, interrogating how different generations remember the same family events in strikingly different ways.
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