This is a story about an archive that could sit in the heart of Appingedam, Groningen, commemorating two diasporic cultures which, against all the odds, found refuge in this quiet, mediaeval city.

The first Ashkenazi Jewish population saw its birth in Appingedam, Groningen in the early 17th century. Despite centuries of difficulties the community flourished in this small rural city for centuries until it was all but eliminated in the 1940s, starting with their forceful eviction to the Dutch concentration/transit camp Westerbork. My grandmother is the last survivor of this community.

After the war, Kamp Westerbork - renamed Schattenberg - saw the arrival of a new community, the Moluccans. Intended to be a temporary stay whilst the Dutch negotiated their independence as a state from Indonesia, the years saw little progress as it became evident that this temporary stay was quickly becoming permanent. In 1960 it was proclaimed that the Moluccan community would be rehoused permanently across the province of Groningen, with the first city of permanent dwelling being Appingedam. A city which can be walked across in 25 minutes now bore witness to the birth of two significant communities within the Netherlands, centuries apart. Although there could never have been any crossover (one community terminated prior to the other starting) this is the story of how to analyse the intrinsically spiritual connections between two vastly different communities, and how a new syncretic direction for commemoration - one the focuses on the power of a multiplicity of memory rather than the privacy and exclusivity of a single collective remembrance - can be brought forward.

Current approaches of abstraction and conceptuality in the discourse of memorialisation can be useful to commemorate contemporary events, but the inherent flaws and
shortcomings in the misuse of abstraction are insufficient in the quest of establishing a connection with the distant past. This thesis acts as a call for a different direction for the
crystallisation of memory. By looking beyond contemporary history, we can understand more about our spiritual connection with our ancestors from bygone eras. To aid the
strengthening of our spiritual ties to history I have diagnosed a new spatial typology of memory; the encounter-monument. The encounter-monument is the accidental monument; the fossilised memory; the physical and spiritual encounter with history. The encounter-monument is the scar tissue etched into stone that has survived, morphed and re-moulded over the centuries. The encounter-monument is the relic that we may come across in our day-to-day lives that jolts us back through history. They are the encounter with a stranger’s signature and date in the cover of a book that has been lying in the attic for decades. They are the slowly dissolving names on forgotten gravestones. Encounter-monuments are the sense of histories both recent and distant, passing before our very eyes. They plug us into the timeline of existence. This thesis explores the Domplein in Utrecht as a case study for the ineffective use of abstraction to commemorate its profound history, and through the use of various artistic media, propose a new direction for its focus. Through photographs, plaster casts and frottage drawings, I present a spiritual argument for tactility as a method of commemoration.