Art, Human Rights, and Memory Activism: Poetry, Music, and Testimony from the Fortunoff Archive

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet, musician, essayist, activist, and human rights advocate. Since 2025 he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. A former coordinator of Amnesty International’s Gdańsk branch, he is an essayist for The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and World Literature Today, and he co-curates the interdisciplinary series “What About Exclusion?” at the University of Oxford. As a member of Trupa Trupa, an internationally acclaimed band whose work confronts memory, trauma, and responsibility, has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, and has earned fans like Iggy Pop and Henry Rollins, he treats music as integral to rights advocacy. He has developed what he calls a “memory art project”: an interdisciplinary practice that brings together poetry, music, testimony, activism, and public communication as tools against hatred, erasure, authoritarianism, and moral indifference.

This event presents the memory art project in full scope as a reflection on art as an ethical and civic practice. More than a conventional reading, Kwiatkowski will show how poetry, music, and polyphony can resist dehumanization, sustain democratic plurality, and remain faithful to suffering without turning it into a spectacle. He will read from his work, including Peter Constantine’s English rendering of Fortunoff Poems, a collection shaped by Holocaust survivor testimonies from the archive.

This work is deeply rooted in family history. His grandfather was imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp and forced to carry away the dead, while his wife’s Jewish family survived the war in hiding in the forests. It is also rooted in Gdańsk itself, the city where the Second World War began and where Solidarity was born. Drawing on these histories, the event frames memory not only as mourning but as solidarity and active defense of pluralism, shared space, and democratic culture against the return of authoritarian temptation.

Kwiatkowski’s civic practice includes advocacy for the preservation of nearly half a million shoes from the Stutthof concentration camp, memorializing the Jewish ghetto in Gdańsk, protecting endangered Jewish heritage sites and cemeteries, supporting the installation of Stolpersteine, and responding to acts of vandalism directed at places of burial and memory.

Professor Minow, the 300^th Anniversary University Professor at HLS, will introduce the event, with Abadir M. Ibrahim serving as moderator.