The Community Memorialisation Initiative and the Herstories Project

Rendez-vous du dimanche - Sunday conference

Sunday, 11. december 2016, 15h
at the Dudelange-Usines Railway station

In the framework of our project « Racontez votre histoire / Tell your story », the CDMH invites you to a Sunday conference by Radhika Hettiarachchi from Sri Lanka, who will present the Community Memorialisation Initiative and the Herstories Project, two connected projects she has curated in Sri Lanka.

The proposed presentation will share this researcher’s reflections and experiences on the process and impact of dealing with our shared and contested past through oral histories and inter-generational story telling. Through a series of exhibitions in diaspora ‘hubs’ (London, Toronto, New York, India), the Herstories Project shared stories from Sri Lanka – unmediated, unedited accounts of mothers’ who had lived through the war. These stories enabled a process of storytelling, as a catalyst to break the silence, or challenge the narrative, or create a discourse about ‘history’, memory, loss, migration, and violence between first and second generation diaspora, which may lead to a more nuanced understanding of the ‘home country’ and its needs for a just peace.

Find more information on herstoryarchive.org.

Presentation in English

Free entrance - Please register here.



Radhika Hettiarachchi is a researcher, curator and development practitioner. She is primarily engaged in the field of conflict transformation, with a focus on memorialisation, reconciliation and oral history; and works through the Arts to create civil society discourse on issues of gender, security, memory and reconciliation. She has curated the Colomboscope Festival, the Herstories Project and the on-going Community Memorialisation Project.

Presentation in English – Free entrance