Remember Their Names

December 06, 2019

Earlier in the semester, a group of Harvard students began brainstorming an installation dedicated to honoring those who had suffered directly as part of the opioid epidemic. First and foremost, our purpose was to honor these lives as individuals, and to communicate through visual means the spaces that they had left behind and incomprehensible number of people taken.

The resulting idea was to collect the names of loved ones who had passed as a result of opioids concentrating in the Massachusetts region and create a participatory installation that would display these names, indicating rememberance and a community of support. The display would be done with the Arthur M. Sackler building, and would essentially encase the surface area of the stairs and lobby with lives and stories tied to a responsibility held by the building namesake.

Of course, the temporality of this display was taken into consideration: after all, we may only be able to display these names for a week, but the pain felt by friends and families is eternal. Therefore, the physical installation is only a single part of our larger goal of working towards a permanent plaque within the Sackler building memorializing those affected by the opioid crisis in perpetuity. This website too is meant to be an eternal display of the lives lost. Below, each rectangle stands in place of a life. Collectively, the rectangles imitate the form of our installation, which evokes the purple ribbon used to symbolize opioid addiction awareness. To view details on an individual, hover over the respective shape.

If you would like to contribute the name of a lost one, the form remains open here.