"Silence was a Mistake"
Artist
Statement
This visual poem was created in response to listening. Not to a single story, but to the emotional terrain that emerges when people speak about living in relation to someone who has taken a life. The stories I heard were anonymous, but the weight of them was not. They carried silence, rupture, contradiction, and an ongoing sense of being suspended between what was and what might still be possible.
The line “Silence was a mistake” became an entry point. Not as accusation, but as recognition. Silence appears throughout this work as both absence and pressure, something that isolates and distorts while also protecting what feels impossible to name. The poem holds that tension without resolving it. Love and fury are allowed to coexist. Forgiveness is questioned, not demanded. The work resists neat moral conclusions in favour of emotional truth.
As a video work, pacing and breath are central. Pauses, repetitions, and restraint mirror the way difficult truths surface slowly, often sideways. The voice moves through moments of weight and release, grounded in the body rather than explanation. Visual elements remain sparse, allowing space for the viewer to enter the work without being directed toward a single interpretation. This openness is intentional. The poem was not written to represent another person’s story, but to respond to how those stories felt in my body while listening.
Several lines in the poem are drawn directly from interview excerpts. I treated these phrases as anchors, returning to them repeatedly while writing and editing. Around them, the poem builds a landscape of being in between: between anger and love, stillness and motion, departure and arrival. Images of transit, grounding, and forward momentum recur as a way of thinking about what it means to continue living in the aftermath of harm, without denying its force.
This work does not offer closure. Instead, it gestures toward the possibility of reclamation. A chance at breathing again. A moment of contact with something ordinary and human. The fragile emergence of a new existence that does not erase what came before, but learns how to stand with it. The poem remains unresolved by design, holding space for empathy, relation, and the quiet work of becoming.
Analysis
Em seems to have approached this assignment with the reminder from the Elder at Kwìkwèxwelhp, that we will remember how we felt long after we forget what we saw or heard, at the forefront of her mind. She truly leaned into what it felt like to hear and embody the experience of relational victimhood. In using “Silence was a mistake” as an anchor, Em builds imagery alluding to the shame that can be attached to the families of those who have taken a life. This aligns with findings from the pilot study, where emotion had a significant impact on relationships. Emotional experiences, such as shame, can have devastating impacts on belonging via silence and secrecy (Brown, 2006/2010), and healing improves relationships by confirming a sense of belonging. This again speaks to the importance of healing in community, versus the silence that can surround shame.
Em explores the complexity of emotions within the context of relational victimhood, once again pointing to love and fury in their ability to co-exist. What strikes me is how Em states these two diametrically opposed emotions not only can coexist, but are allowed to be held simultaneously. Many of the artists drew attention to this duality of emotion, mentioning words like “complex” and “layered”, and carving the theme of holding many emotional states at once.
Em explores the grayness and uncertainty that occurs after a traumatic experience, even in the context of forgiveness, in that it is questioned, and not demanded. In her piece she states, “I don’t know if forgiveness is mine to give, but I know it is mine to claim and reclaim, if there is a chance at something new.” Her discussion aligns closely with the literature in restorative justice, that forgiveness is neither an obligation nor prerequisite to participation. Rather than framing forgiveness as something owed, it is reframed as an internal process, one that may shift and change as time marches on (Braithwaite, 2002; Zehr, 2015a). Em’s statement around claiming and reclaiming accentuates agency in healing as essential. Many of the interview participants spoke of healing and forgiveness as a choice, from Claudia who highlighted acceptance over forgiveness, Kristine who discussed forgiveness as an everyday decision, Stan who spoke to an “embodied choice”, and Abby who frames healing not as closure but integration. Em inhabits the gray space in her exploration of relational victimhood, where healing is non-linear and the possibility of a future exists without absolution.
Many of the artists mentioned ideas of before and after, that stark boundary of tragedy that marks the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Em speaks to this fragmentation of life and identity, but chooses to focus on that space amid then and now: the in-between. The word she chose is “suspended”, evoking images of instantaneous “absence and pressure”, capturing the rupture trauma creates between before and after. Abby explains, “I felt like I lost a life right there — like one of my nine lives was gone”, a statement made in the context of opening the door to a gun drawn on her by a responding police officer. This experience was amid those moments of suspension; a man is dead, her husband took his life to protect the family, and yet Abby remains physically present, suspended between survival and loss. In this moment, life is fragmented not only by death, but by a break in continuity; identity, safety, and time collapse into a space where meaning cannot be made (Bruner, 1957; Ellemers & Haslam, 2012; Hirschberger, 2018). It is a space where the self is free-falling between what has ended and what does not yet exist.
Across the interviews, healing consistently emerges not as closure or resolution, but as an act of reclamation, of self, meaning, and relational orientation after harm. Kyla’s use of the mirror to trace shock and shame toward strength reflects a process described in social identity and trauma literature as re-authoring the self following identity estrangement, where agency is slowly restored through self-recognition rather than erasure of the past (Breakwell, 1986/2015; Muldoon, 2020). Stan’s assertion that healing occurs when one chooses love over hate similarly reflects a claiming of moral and relational identity, framing healing as the reassertion of values and belonging in the wake of injustice (Boyes-Watson & Pranis, 2010; Llewellyn, 2012). Sara’s reclaimed materials (glass from domestic objects, repurposed into leaves) extend this metaphor materially, suggesting that recovery is neither linear nor pristine, but composed of fragments that are repurposed and reimagined. Em’s refusal of closure further situates healing within trauma theory and restorative justice, where meaning-making is understood as impermanent and relational, allowing space to sit with what was lost while cautiously looking toward what might still be possible (Hirschberger, 2018).
Together, these narratives position reclamation not as forgetting or forgiveness, but as the intentional claiming of life, relation, and identity after tragedy, a form of justice through the choice to remain human, connected, and open to becoming. Relational victimhood, and indeed, all forms of victimhood and healing are iterative processes, revisiting spaces that have been visited before, similar to how Lederach and Lederach (2010) centre love and explore the concept of healing as a circular motion rooted in relational and creative practices. These mechanisms of healing are ultimately not about closure, but integration.
I deeply admire Em’s refusal to explain or resolve the relational victim experience, a stance that is fundamentally informed by ethical storytelling.
Rather than offering closure or a neat narrative, Em’s work holds space for what remains unresolved, resisting the pressure to make these experiences legible, digestible, or complete. This refusal aligns closely with the intended benefit to participants in this study: the opportunity for storytelling grounded in voice, dignity, respect, and concern. As Pranis (2005) explains, storytelling opens the listener in ways that factual explanation cannot. When people present information as facts, listeners often engage in a screening process; evaluating accuracy, forming counterarguments, and preparing responses. Storytelling interrupts this reflex. It invites the listener to relax and absorb the narrative before responding, creating conditions for emotional resonance rather than judgment.
Storytelling is relational work. The sharing of stories creates opportunities for connection through a shared experience of feeling, and in spaces of safety, this shared emotional engagement makes it difficult to position anyone as “other.” Instead, listeners come to recognize themselves, their fears, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties within the experiences of another. For the storyteller, often narrating these events aloud for the first time, storytelling can facilitate deeper understanding by allowing space to sort through what happened and to unpack layers of uncertainty. Through this process, storytelling becomes a practice of recognition and respect rather than explanation or resolution.
This understanding of storytelling resonates with Indigenous scholarship that positions story as identity-affirming and resistant. Reiger et al. (2020) note that storytelling plays a crucial role within Indigenous communities, serving as a powerful form of resistance by reminding people of who they are, where they come from, and what they understand. Just as crime can create a relationship that never existed (Zehr, 2015a), storytelling has the potential to forge new and meaningful connections. Donald (2012) suggests hearing the stories of others can allow those stories to become part of our own, and transform how we understand ourselves and the world. In this sense, storytelling becomes a practice of active empathy, an intentional effort to deeply understand and responsibly carry another’s experience.
I hope that by sharing these stories, this work promotes healing through processes of “restorying.” Zehr (2015b) describes truth-telling as a therapeutic release that transcends individual pain through communal acknowledgement. Re-storying does not erase what has occurred; it reframes experiences of shame and isolation into narratives laced with acceptance, empathy, community, and belonging. In weaving the stories of interviewees and artists, this study has created connections beyond what I initially imagined possible, connections that reflect integration rather than closure, and relationship rather than resolution. This approach is further grounded in Aluli-Meyer’s (2013) Indigenous epistemology, that emphasizes relational knowing, embodied understanding, and ethical responsibility in knowledge creation. Taken together, these commitments position storytelling in this study not as a means of explanation or conclusion, but as a relational practice that honors continuity, connection, and the ongoing work of becoming.