SKYWATCHERS: The MEMORIALS PROJECT
For decades an interfaith community in the Tenderloin gathered quietly at UN Plaza each year on the Winter Solstice to read the names of those neighbors who had died on San Francisco's streets that year, subject to the conditions and vulnerabilities of homelessness. It was a quiet but profound and important act of collective grief, a refusal to allow these names to remain unspoken in death. The number of names varied between 180-300.
Six years ago, SKYWATCHERS joined this event as part of our arts-based advocacy for housing and health justice in the Tenderloin. Each year we sew fabric banners for every loved one lost. The vigil now includes a singing processional through the neighborhood, with an interlude on the steps of City Hall before the memorial moves to UN Plaza at San Francisco Civic Center, a place where government buildings intersect with the City's most visible social problems.
The memorial vigil has grown larger and more visible but it remains an intentional interfaith ceremony that is an inclusive expression of collective grief and mourning.
