from a gesture of friendship that has fallen into disrepair

Tashkent and Seattle created the first US-Soviet sister city partnership in 1973, a relationship which has continued despite the dissolution of the USSR and shifting geopolitical tensions. As both cities seek to distance themselves from their Soviet-era associations, their peace parks have faded from public memory. This fragment comes from one of 10,000 tiles created by American schoolchildren and sent to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, where they were installed in the Seattle Peace Park as a gesture of friendship during the Cold War. The mosaics have fallen into disrepair. The messages on the surviving tiles, like МИP (“peace”), are a reminder of a hope for connection that is slowly being lost to time.

Ottilie Cooper-Ohm in Tashkent