Jimmy Fiume- Shrine

When this project was assigned I immediately knew what the subject of my shrine would be, and that it would be a very emotionally-charged process for me. In the spring of my senior year of high school, one of my closest friends, Madison Small, passed away very suddenly from Meningitis. Needless to say, this rocked the community and was extremely difficult for my friends and myself to handle. We didn’t go to school for at least a week, and spent all of time with each other and her family. This brought our friend group together, as well as the entire community in my town. Madison was a popular girl who had been playing softball since she was a little girl. She was well-known and well-liked, and this contributed to the widespread mourning of her passing. Being well-known in the softball community also connected her to a larger group of people, and this allowed her story to spread around. Immediately the hashtag “#WePlayFor24” was started, honoring her softball number, and athletes from all around were writing the hashtag or her number and their cleats and game tape. Later, she was memorialized through the renaming of a local softball field in her honor, as well as the placement of a large boulder with a plaque on it in front of our high school.

            Because her story touched so many people and became so publicized, her memory was shaped by the way she was memorialized physically, through events, and through social media. I felt it was important to make this shrine representative of the way I knew her. I never thought of her as “Madison the softball player”; to me, she was my friend, Madison. Because it brought her story to a wider audience, her connection to softball was emphasized in all the ways she was publicly remembered. However, being that she was a close friend of mine, my favorite memories of her and the way I remember have nothing to do with softball. I wanted to represent that with my shrine by focusing heavily on memory activation and creating something deeply personal. I chose images that trigger my most prominent memories of her, from good times and bad times. I chose several images that even some of our mutual friends would not draw any connection to. In this way I wanted to create a deeply personal display that has the most meaning to me.