“Charting Lives: Memorial Histogram for Queer Men Imprisoned in Nazi Germany 1933-1945” uses cotton yarn, wood beads, and colored pins to make material the lifelines of nearly 800 men persecuted under the law known as Paragraph 175. The exhibit intentionally blurs the lines between data visualization and art installation.
Dr. Fisher, who earned her PhD in Philosophy: Visual and Performing Arts, now serves the Bass School as research project manager. During her academic journey, she worked as a research assistant for three years at the UT Dallas Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. Her work focused on the intersections of environmental crises, traumatic memory, and landscapes.
Each string in the exhibit depicts the life of a queer man persecuted during the Holocaust — the length of the yarn serves as a direct representation of their living years: from birth to the last recorded detail in the camp records. The wooden beads and colorful pins are carefully placed in accordance with the concentration camp they had been sent to, and their fate at said camp.
“I like to think in terms of lines. What can a line do? Lines are so powerful — we write with lines. We follow lines home at the end of the day,” Dr. Fisher said. “I thought, how can I put the most information in a single line, and then recognize a person’s life in that just by hanging a thread?”
Round beads represented individuals who had been imprisoned within the Dachau Concentration Camp — one of the first and longest-running. Round beads with scored lines represented the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, located in remote Eastern Germany. The decahedron beads delineate victims within the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where 52,000 prisoners were held during its operation.
“I would call it an alternative visualization. This is me as an artist saying, ‘We have the data cleaned. We have the traditional visualizations. Now, how can I say something with my voice and style as an artist that still speaks to the data behind it – not just to have an emotional impact, but for it to actually represent the lives that are a part of the visualization.’” Dr. Fisher said.
Dr. Fisher’s team of 11 volunteers, research assistants, and student workers spent four days installing the 27-foot-long data visualization in the third-floor gallery of the O’Donnell Building at the Bass School. They worked up to 12 hours daily to ensure every detail about the lives that were memorialized was depicted.
Research Assistant Jennifer Cantrell-Sutor PhD’25 and Memorial Volunteer Servant Sebastian Ambrosch — as well as student workers Amol Bhadane MS’24, Prajakta Patankar MS’25, and Mallikarjun Nagaraja MS’25 were particularly instrumental in ensuring that all 792 threads were meticulously placed along the wall.
“Dr. Fisher resists the prevailing urge to amalgamate victim data based on shared experiences in favor of a humanistic and individualistic approach,” Cantrell-Sutor said when discussing the importance of this project. “Her painstaking efforts to represent individual experiences via carefully selected materials further promote audience engagement on the individual level, as bead shapes and sizes are examined, strings eyed with curiosity, and names carefully read.”
“Charting Lives” opens the discussion of these difficult topics within the UT Dallas community, prompting awareness, response, and understanding. “Memorializations like this help bring hidden histories to light. We are representing how these individuals were imprisoned, and what they endured. This gives the UT Dallas community a chance to engage with an important, and often overlooked, chapter of history,” Nagaraja explained.
At the exhibit opening, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Nils Roemer, dean of the Bass School and director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, discussed with audience members the importance of utilizing the data collected during these historical atrocities — recorded by oppressors for the sake of furthering their persecution.
“The aftermath of mass violence leaves not just erasure behind, but usually also an abundance of data,” Dr. Roemer said. “The data, most often, was put together for the purpose of harassment, intimidation, persecution, internment, enslavement, and mass murder.”
“It quickly turns into a paradox insofar as this originally was put together for that reason; however, in its aftermath, it serves to historicize the event, document the scale of destruction, and commemorate some of the individuals who ended up in these camps,” he added.
Dr. Fisher cites her ongoing management of the Digital Studies project conducted by the Ackerman Center and directed by Dr. Roemer as the source of “Charting Lives.” Through this project, they studied records kept by the Third Reich as well as those digitized by Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
The Digital Studies project, directed by Dr. Nils Roemer, has been in operation for nearly seven years—three of which have included Dr. Fisher’s participation — and strives to apply different analysis techniques and cross-references to publicly available Holocaust data sets, using the numbers to tell larger stories.
Student Assistant
Olivia is a communications assistant who works alongside the creative team to showcase the incredible talent of the Bass School Community. When she’s not photographing events or attending classes—she loves to write sci-fi fantasy fiction stories and play D&D.