Rosa Parks home in Berlin (Photo: Fabia Mendoza)
Last summer, Berlin artist Ryan Mendoza quietly desconstructed a three-bedroom home at 2672 S. Deacon St. in Southwest Detroit where civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived. He then shipped it to Berlin where it was put back together.
Now, it seems to be a hit in Berlin. Germans are embracing the history of the home that first went on display in early April on Mendoza's property.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in 1956 (Wikimedia Commons)
Sally McGrane of the New York Times reports:
Inside, Ryan Mendoza, a Berlin-based American artist, has been putting on half-hour-long sound performances, including excerpts from a 1957 radio interview with Ms. Parks conducted in this very building. “It’s my job to keep the house alive,” Mr. Mendoza explained...
The house’s unlikely second life in Mr. Mendoza’s garden in Berlin has captured the city’s imagination, making front-page news and, for some, symbolizing Germany’s changing role in the world.
"With our history, we have so many years of guilt and a culture of practicing not forgetting,” Deike Diening, a journalist for Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, who wrote about the project, tells the Times. “Now, it might be a healing process to be able to turn it around, to give refuge to others. It feels good.”
