The Book of genocides

The Book of Genocides, an interactive art installation and a graphic history | disaster comic (under contract with Harvard University Press) provides a way to interact with this history and to process it emotionally.  The project moves genocide beyond massacre to show its systemic roots. The original installation, made in 2016, illustrated nine genocides of the past five hundred years: The First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Indigenous Australians, Armenians, The Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Bosnian Genocide, and the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar.  The disaster comic adds the genocide of Palestinians.

 Created on the altered pages of a mid-twentieth century zoology text that had belonged to my brown-skinned mother when she was a graduate student, each section begins with a portrait of a person from that genocide’s inception. Pages are cut into thirds—the head, the torso, and the legs—to create a turn-the-flap book that can generate 2,187 versions of that story of genocide. Turning each third of a page separately transforms the images back and forth between human, beast, predator, vermin, parasite and various chimera mirroring what might take place in someone’s mind as they dehumanize another person. Metric markings around each human portrait reflect the deep histories of medical experimentation and scientific racism that accompany genocide.  The page opposite each drawing reprints an extract from the zoology textbook redacted in such a way as to amplify each genocide’s story. The images and redactions reflect the hate rhetoric, history, myths, and local details of each genocide.   Each of these interactive sections is preceded by a brief graphic history of that genocide.

The Book of Genocides has birthed two animations, Between the Wall and the Sides (2024) and the virtual reality animation Girl Earth Fire Time (beta build completed in 2025) .