Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a Polish poet\, musician\, essayist\, activ ist\, and human rights advocate. Since 2025 he has been an Artist-in-Reside nce at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holoc aust Testimonies. A former coordinator of Amnesty International’s Gdańsk br anch\, he is an essayist for The Guardian\, Project Syndicate\, and World L iterature Today\, and he co-curates the interdisciplinary series “What Abou t Exclusion?” at the University of Oxford. As a member of Trupa Trupa\, an internationally acclaimed band whose wo rk confronts memory\, trauma\, and responsibility\, has been featured on NP R’s Tiny Desk\, and has earned fans like Iggy Pop and Henry Rollins\, he tr eats music as integral to rights advocacy. He has developed what he calls a “memory art project”: an interdisciplinary practice that brings together p oetry\, music\, testimony\, activism\, and public communication as tools ag ainst hatred\, erasure\, authoritarianism\, and moral indifference.
This event presents the memory art project in ful l scope as a reflection on art as an ethical and civic practice. More than a conventional reading\, Kwiatkowski will show how poetry\, music\, and pol yphony can resist dehumanization\, sustain democratic plurality\, and remai n faithful to suffering without turning it into a spectacle. He will read f rom his work\, including Peter Constantine’s English rendering of Fortunoff Poems\, a collection shaped by Holocaust survivor testimonies from the arc hive.
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 survive d the war in hiding in the forests. It is also rooted in Gdańsk itself\, th e 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 plural ism\, shared space\, and democratic culture against the return of authorita rian temptation.
Kwiatkowski’s civic pract ice includes advocacy for the preservation of nearly half a million shoes f rom the Stutthof concentration camp\, memorializing the Jewish ghetto in Gd ańsk\, protecting endangered Jewish heritage sites and cemeteries\, support ing the installation of Stolpersteine\, and responding to acts of vandalism directed at places of burial and memory.
Professor Minow\, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at HLS\, will introduce the event\, with Abadir M. Ibrahim serving as moderato r.
CATEGORIES:Speaker/Panel LOCATION:Griswold Hall\; 110 Classroom GEO:0;0 ORGANIZER;CN="Valenia Bergier":MAILTO:vbergier@law.harvard.edu URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/art-human-rights-and-memory-ac tivism-poetry-music-and-testimony-from-the-fortunoff-archive/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://hls.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Untitled-April-08-2026-at-15.59.12-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20260308T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR