Lay-lah Lay-lah
Night Night
A mural at the
Horwitz-Wasserman
Holocaust Memorial Plaza,
Philadelphia 2025
In collaboration with the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia.
Photo: Steve Weinik
Mural Map
Project Overview and Timeline
In 2021, the PHRF approached Mural Arts Philadelphia to initiate the creation of a Holocaust remembrance mural for the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza. The goal was to add a new visual storytelling element to the site. Following an international selection process, I was invited to realize the mural, based on my proposal from March 2024. The proposal drew on texts gathered from members of the Stakeholder Committee through the Memory Forms and proposed extending this process across Philadelphia to gather contributions for the final design.
A residency at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg guided the development of distinct calligraphic styles, and the final work was painted in Berlin before being shipped to Philadelphia, using a custom-developed method titled Layering and Displacement, which systematically fragments and reassembles the contributed texts. After a month-long installation, the mural was dedicated on September 26, 2025, as the first publicly commissioned, large-scale Holocaust remembrance mural in a civic space in the United States.
Mural dedication on October 26th, 2025. Photos by Gustavo Garcia and Steve Weinik
The Domino of Displacement
The Domino of Displacement
Historical continuity
and construction
of collective memory
Layering and displacement in the Berlin Studio. June 2025
The Holocaust is often narrated as an ending: the destruction of European Jewry, the downfall of Nazi Germany. Yet every ending is also a beginning. Lay-lah Lay-lah approaches this history as an evolving force, continually unfolding. Displacement set in motion during the Holocaust reverberates across time and continents, shaping identities, languages, and cultures long after the events themselves. Just as individual memory is fluid and subjective, so is collective memory ever-evolving, reshaped by the narratives and silences of its time and place.
The forced uprooting that began in the 1930s and 40s did not stop with the liberation of camps or the end of the war. It propelled survivors into new geographies, reshaping cities, communities, and cultures far beyond Europe. That domino effect of displacement continues to shape the present, influencing how societies negotiate belonging, identity, and memory. The mural stands as a reminder that what began then is still unfolding.
The mural stands at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza, in dialogue with Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs. Erected in 1964 by survivors and community leaders, it was the first public Holocaust memorial in the United States, a work of grief and defiance that framed the Plaza as a civic space of mourning and resistance. Lay-lah Lay-lah extends this legacy, connecting remembrance to the complexities of the present.
Philadelphia As a Setting
Site-specific Context
Both a local and symbolic American
stage.
The mural is also in dialogue with Philadelphia’s most prominent landmarks along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway: City Hall with William Penn rising above its tower at one end, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the other. Positioned between these anchors, the Plaza situates Holocaust remembrance within the city’s civic landscape, placing memory alongside symbols of governance, democracy, and art.
It is the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, shaped by William Penn’s vision of tolerance, and home to the Liberty Bell, whose crack reminds that freedom is fragile. In this setting, Holocaust remembrance engages with both the promise of freedom, and the contradictions that have shaped it, and calls for the renewal of the unfinished work of tolerance, plurality, and coexistence.
During installation. Sep. 2025
Polyphony
of Voices
These contributions were gathered through Memory Forms, which invited people to record both genealogical details and textual traces passed down within families. The responses revealed how language and memory cross borders and generations, carrying the marks of displacement while also sustaining identity and belonging.
Memory Forms. Feb. 2024
Every line in the mural comes from Philadelphia’s residents. Through a citywide call, participants were asked to share fragments of their childhood: lullabies, poems, and prayers.
Inscribed in 28 languages
and 17 scripts
Community engagement and participatory process
The mural stages this process visually: overlapping, fractured, and partially hidden texts that invite viewers to recognize memory as collective, unstable, and always in formation. It asks what we choose to preserve, what we allow to fade, and how the stories of others enter into our own understanding of the past.
Public community meeting at WHYY . Dec. 2024
Some ancient and extinct, these fragments affirm cultural survival. Placed together, they form a shared archive, a living record of how memory is transmitted and reshaped in dialogue with others.
Research and calligraphy development in the studio of the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg. February 2025
This work was shaped through community gatherings across Philadelphia, where residents offered their languages and memories into the project.
During a residency at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg I developed distinct calligraphic styles for each contribution, situating them within the long history of written transmission. Later, in Berlin, I painted the mural on parachute cloth panels, then it was shipped across the Atlantic and installed in Philadelphia.
The creation process and installation itself became a metaphor for migration: fragments assembled into a whole.
Displacement as Method
Artistic strategies, layering, and calligraphic practice
The creation process mirrors the theme of uprooting. In the studio, my approach involved writing, fragmenting, shifting, and overwriting, generating a visual polyphony where texts are fractured and reassembled. This recalls the cut-up strategies of the Dadaists and of Burroughs, where fragments are recombined into new constellations of meaning.
Layering and displacement in the Berlin Studio. June 2025
The Domino of Displacement
Concept and Meaning: Historical continuity and construction of collective memory
The Holocaust is often narrated as an ending: the destruction of European Jewry, the downfall of Nazi Germany. Yet every ending is also a beginning. Lay-lah Lay-lah approaches this history as an evolving force, continually unfolding. Displacement set in motion during the Holocaust reverberates across time and continents, shaping identities, languages, and cultures long after the events themselves. Just as individual memory is fluid and subjective, so is collective memory ever-evolving, reshaped by the narratives and silences of its time and place.
The forced uprooting that began in the 1930s and 40s did not stop with the liberation of camps or the end of the war. It propelled survivors into new geographies, reshaping cities, communities, and cultures far beyond Europe. That domino effect of displacement continues to shape the present, influencing how societies negotiate belonging, identity, and memory. The mural stands as a reminder that what began then is still unfolding.
Philadelphia as a Setting
Site-specific Context
The mural stands at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza, in dialogue with Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs. Erected in 1964 by survivors and community leaders, it was the first public Holocaust memorial in the United States, a work of grief and defiance that framed the Plaza as a civic space of mourning and resistance. Lay-lah Lay-lah extends this legacy, connecting remembrance to the complexities of the present.
The mural is also in dialogue with Philadelphia’s most prominent landmarks along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway: City Hall with William Penn rising above its tower at one end, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the other. Positioned between these anchors, the Plaza situates Holocaust remembrance within the city’s civic landscape, placing memory alongside symbols of governance, democracy, and art.
Philadelphia is both a local and symbolic American stage.
It is the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, shaped by William Penn’s vision of tolerance, and home to the Liberty Bell, whose crack reminds that freedom is fragile. In this setting, Holocaust remembrance engages with both the promise of freedom, and the contradictions that have shaped it, and calls for the renewal of the unfinished work of tolerance, plurality, and coexistence.
During installation. Sep. 2025
Polyphony of Voices
Community engagement and participatory process
Memory Forms. Feb. 2024
Every line in the mural comes from Philadelphia’s residents. Through a citywide call, participants were asked to share fragments of their childhood: lullabies, poems, and prayers.
These contributions were gathered through Memory Forms, which invited people to record both genealogical details and textual traces passed down within families. The responses revealed how language and memory cross borders and generations, carrying the marks of displacement while also sustaining identity and belonging.
Inscribed in twenty-eight languages and seventeen scripts, some ancient and extinct, these fragments affirm cultural survival. Placed together, they form a shared archive, a living record of how memory is transmitted and reshaped in dialogue with others.
The mural stages this process visually: overlapping, fractured, and partially hidden texts that invite viewers to recognize memory as collective, unstable, and always in formation. It asks what we choose to preserve, what we allow to fade, and how the stories of others enter into our own understanding of the past.
Public community meeting at WHYY . Dec. 2024
Research and calligraphy development in the studio of the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg. February 2025
This work was shaped through community gatherings across Philadelphia, where residents offered their languages and memories into the project.
During a residency at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg I developed distinct calligraphic styles for each contribution, situating them within the long history of written transmission. Later, in Berlin, I painted the mural on parachute cloth panels, then it was shipped across the Atlantic and installed in Philadelphia.
The creation process and installation itself became a metaphor for migration: fragments assembled into a whole.
Displacement as Method
Artistic strategies, layering, and calligraphic practice
The creation process mirrors the theme of uprooting. In the studio, my approach involved writing, fragmenting, shifting, and overwriting, generating a visual polyphony where texts are fractured and reassembled. This recalls the cut-up strategies of the Dadaists and of Burroughs, where fragments are recombined into new constellations of meaning.
The act of layering becomes both a record of fracture and a gesture of repair, gathering scattered pieces into a fragile but enduring continuity.
Each layer of text stands independently yet also participates in the whole, like displaced identities that are reconstituted in a new context.
It reflects the instability of memory, comments on cultural erasure through assimilation, and exposes the manipulation of historical narratives, while at the same time affirming the persistence of cultures that survive despite displacement.
The palette moves between dusk and dawn, destruction and renewal. Its spectrum captures fragility and transformation: embers and ash, blooming meadow and twilight. Each layer, as in Japanese watercolor practice, is conceived as a complete composition on its own, yet only through their interrelation do they form the mural as a whole.
Painting in Berlin. Photos by Neomi Itzaky
Cinematography: Maya Steinberg
This work was made possible by:
