Three tons of mourners’ flowers to be transformed into art memorializing Bondi Beach shooting

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — In the days following the antisemitic attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach that left 15 people dead, a memorial site quickly filled with candles, stuffed toys, handwritten notes and thousands, perhaps even millions, of flowers.

Such spontaneous memorials are typically removed and their contents quietly disposed of. But Jewish artist Nina Sanadze saw a chance to immortalize the bouquets, even as their petals faded and decomposed. Before knowing precisely what she would do with them, she asked the Sydney Jewish Museum to help collect every flower from the site — more than three tons and counting — to transform into artworks commemorating Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in almost 30 years.

Even though authorities have now formally closed the memorials, flowers are still being laid, Sanadze said over the phone. “We’re going there, collecting fresh ones and preserving them,” she added, saying that “nothing is thrown away,” including leaves and seeds.

Drying and storing the rapidly deteriorating flowers was a huge logistical undertaking. The museum secured warehouse space and trucks to transport the plants in large black plastic bags, which Sanadze said “looked like body bags.” More than 100 volunteers have since helped dry the flowers, ironing them between tissues before sorting them “petal by petal, color by color,” she added. The artist also worked with professional florists to identify the various plant species.

“Some flowers are good at keeping color and look good when they’re dried, and some look brown. But it’s all part of the story.”

The pain of last month’s tragedy is still raw among the volunteers, many of whom hail from Sydney’s 44,000-strong Jewish community. The project has, however, proven therapeutic for many — including Sanadze herself.

“Honestly, we’re not talking about the attack at all. We’re just talking about flowers,” said the artist, who is based in Melbourne but spent weeks in the Sydney warehouse overseeing volunteers who’d come to help.

“Sometimes people just cry or come for a hug with a heavy, heavy heart.”

“I felt visceral anger,” she added of her reaction to the shooting, which Australia marks with a National Day of Mourning on Thursday. “But working with the flowers softened me again and softened my heart. It helped me, in that way, to process my anger.

“I cannot afford to fall apart. I think the minute I sit down, because I’m exhausted or feel really upset, I cannot get up from the couch. So it’s helped me keep going.”

Rising tide of antisemitism

With the preservation and sorting wrapping up earlier this week, Sanadze’s attention must now turn to more artistic matters. She has been given a year to complete the works ahead of the reopening of Sydney Jewish Museum, which is currently undergoing a major redevelopment and expansion.

Although best known as a sculptor, Sanadze envisages the project as a collection of mixed-media works, each using the flowers in different ways. She is, for instance, planning a series of paintings, based on photographs of the attack’s aftermath, that use pigments extracted from the petals.

The artist is also considering artworks featuring messages left by mourners, as well as an indoor garden grown from some of the recovered seeds. Decomposing plant matter will meanwhile be composted and used to make seats, flooring and tiles for the museum.

“I’m wondering whether we can have multiple rooms in the museum, where you go from room to room and the work unfolds with a variety of installations,” she said, adding that she is “going with the flow.”

Another of Sanadze’s ideas intersects with her longstanding quest to collect newspaper articles documenting antisemitism in Australia, including reports of vandalism and an arson attack on her local synagogue. She hopes to glue the clippings together into a parchment-like paper that incorporates some of the flowers.

“I can imagine one room that is nothing but floor-to-ceiling, everywhere, these newspapers with the flowers from Bondi embedded into them.”

Sanadze wants the artwork to put December’s attack in its broader context. The historical newspaper clippings speak to her belief that the shooting was not a one-off tragedy but rather the latest symptom of resurgent antisemitism.

In the years since Israel launched its war on Hamas in Gaza in response to the militant group’s October 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel, antisemitic attacks have surged five-fold in Australia.

Opposition to the war grew in Australia along with the Palestinian death toll, and last September the government angered Israeli leaders by supporting other like-minded Western nations, including Canada and the United Kingdom, by formally recognizing Palestinian statehood.

Australia ejected the Iranian ambassador after arson attacks on a synagogue and Jewish restaurant were linked to the Iranian regime, but the Jewish community urged the government to do more.

“We have been screaming and warning and talking about the danger that our community is in,” she said. “That has been the pattern Jewish communities have experienced for centuries: dehumanization, isolation and then the violence that always follows. The attack wasn’t entirely surprising. We felt that something terrible was going to happen.”

Witness to trauma

As a material, the wilting flowers are a natural fit for Sanadze’s artistic practice. Born in Soviet-controlled Georgia in 1976 before immigrating to Australia in the 1990s, she has often used found objects in largescale sculptures that address issues of conflict and reconciliation.

Her 2021 work “Apotheosis,” for instance, was made using rubble from the studio of a Georgian sculptor whose work was torn down following the collapse of the Soviet regime. “I typically work with materials that come from the sites of trauma and with witnesses and evidence of seismic events,” she explained.

For Sanadze, the “story” of last month’s Bondi Beach massacre is in the flowers themselves. “I think the power of these flowers is that they go way beyond words, and they speak beyond religions and nationalities and words and our divisions,” she said, adding that she wants to make art that “unites us all, brings us together and understands that this is not OK.”

Describing the endeavor as “way, way beyond an art project,” Sanadze also hopes to continue working with volunteers and local communities as she begins producing the artworks. And while her artmaking has, in one sense, only just begun, she believes that “half the project is already done just by saving the flowers.”

“The volunteers want to know what the artwork will be without realizing they are in the artwork already.”

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