Recently Read: The Future of Nostalgia
September 14, 2008
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym introduces several interesting theories regarding both the history and future of nostalgia. She distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia, explaining that restorative nostalgia works on the assumption of a past “truth” and the goal of re-instating that past. Alternatively, reflective nostalgia deals with the feeling of longing and loss associated with nostalgia but does not actually try to recapture the past. The word nostalgia, Boym explains, is from the Greek “nostros” or home and algia or “longing.” Restorative nostalgia then is a desire to rebuild and return to this home, whereas reflective nostalgia is a constant deferral of a homecoming, incorporating the enjoyment of the distance between past and present, which savors the inability of return.
Early in the book, Boym introduces the concept of “off-modern,” explaining that the adverb “off” focuses our attention on a non-linear exploration of time and space. As opposed to the suffix “post,” it does not suggest a linear idea of progress, allowing for detours and roadblocks to be embraced and explored. By focusing on several different cities including Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin, the reader gets a sense that the exploration of nostalgia is one that traverses both space and time, a journey beyond physical borders. Boym’s explorations of these cities are often introduced through her own experiences there. She successfully integrates her own personal experiences in these cities-in-transition with larger political and cultural narratives of nostalgia.
Dark Tourism and the Power of the Image
September 10, 2008
I attended a talk tonight at the Center for Architecture in New York called Memorial and Meaning. The panelists, Michael Arad (who designed the World Trade Center Memorial), Frederic Schwartz (architect of several 9/11 memorials including the Westchester Memorial), and Louis Nelson (architect of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C), spoke eloquently and often emotionally about their work. But the highlight of the show came in the form of a photography exhibition that lined walls of the Centre for Architecture. The the work of Julie Dermansky, a photographer who has traveled around the world capturing images of memorials built to remember genocide and massacre in many different contexts, is both fascinating and unsettling.
The exhibit, entitled “Memorial Sites: New York to Nairobi,” contains an array of images that pointedly recount the story of atrocities committed by humankind around the world. Dermansky’s photos are often jarring: stacks of skulls in Cambodia and bloody clothes hanging on a wire in Rwanda. Others show more abstract images of human-caused tragedy: structures of steel or stone that represent loss and absence, that portray sadness and pain in conceptual form.
In her artist statement, she mentioned that there is now a term for this type of travel, for trips that take people to visit these memorial sites. “Dark tourism,” she explains, is becoming more prevalent.” A walk around the World Trade Center in New York can attest to this.
After the talk, I stayed behind to ask Dermansky a question. I thought her photos were amazing: simple in style yet burdened by the weight of their meaning. “How do these photos speak to the atrocities occurring now?” I asked. I suppose I was afraid that her project would perhaps be primarily about the past in a way that didn’t engage with the present or the future. She smiled and said, “Oh, it’s all about now. It’s about the Sudan; it’s about China.”
She explained further that current atrocities must be brought to the public eyes in different ways. People often feel overwhelmed, guilty, or don’t know what to do when faced with the enormity of international conflict and destruction. But the images she takes are a way to reference the present without pointing a finger. They allow people to ask how this violence can be prevented or stopped. It enables them to raise these questions themselves. No preaching, no blame, and perhaps a new awareness.
To see Julie Dermansky’s photos and read more about her work, visit: www.jsdart.com.
The Berlin Wall in New York
September 9, 2008
It was the Police Memorial that I saw first. It was standing against the innocuous background of the boardwalk in Battery Park City. It stood facing the absence of the World Trade Center. The piece of the Berlin Wall stood inconspicuously nearby – so inconspicuous in fact that I had trouble finding it. Eventually, I tapped on the window of the security booth located outside the World Financial Center. “I’m looking for the piece of the Berlin wall. I think it’s near here,” I said. The guard, a large man with a West African accent, pointed in the general direction of the water. “See that painted wall with the face? That’s it,” he said. As I walked away, he mumbled, “It’s just a wall, why would someone want to look at it?” and laughed to himself, puzzled.
I was glad though to have found it. The wall had been painted: on one side – a large green cartoon-ish face with deep red lips; on the other side – a more subdued but still whimsical abstract design in hushed nude tones. It represented several important moments in history: the construction of the wall after World War II, when it came down in 1989, and the years in-between where families and old friends were suddenly separated by both physical and ideological realities. There seemed to me something beautiful about this fragment of concrete. Perhaps it was in part that the wall had made its way to New York, that it stood here, not far from the Police Memorial as a reminder of a larger, global context.
As I raised my camera to take a picture, I felt the tension between viewing this site as a witness and viewing it as a tourist. The difference between the two subject positions is vast: one commands a position that is engaged, the other suggests a removed distance, an outsider observing but not acting. In snapping a photo, was I actively engaging with this history? Or merely collecting it for display alongside less emotionally and historically charged landmarks: the Empire State Building or Central Park. Leaving the question unanswered, I took the picture and continued walking south.
At this point, it had started to get dark and by the time I walked back towards the World Trade Center site, the sky had turned from light blue to pink, then to navy. I noticed people on the street, walking quickly past the site, engaged in their everyday lives. Others stopped and posed for pictures in front of the backdrop of cranes, fences and rubble. Again, I felt a sense of disruption: the tension between the everyday and the traumatic, the enormity of history, and the intersection of past and present.
Recently Read: Beclouded Visions
September 4, 2008
Kyo MacLear’s main focus in Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness is the intersection of art and collective memory in relation to traumatic events. Artwork that attempts to represent the atomic bombings raise questions including, “How are we implicated in our looking?” and “How can we create a living context for memories and meanings generated through art?”
The images included in Beclouded Visions are largely artistic representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are depictions of the “mushroom cloud” as well as of the suffering of those affected by the bombings, the hibakusha. For MacLear, artwork provides a more productive way to deal with memory than does photography.
Arguments about image-saturation of past events and their relation to more recent collective traumas, including Bosnia and Rwanda, are raised early in his writing, setting the stage for a study in both historical responsibility and current practices of witnessing. He links imagination with the act of witnessing and posits that witnessing is an act that requires a constant gaze and vigilance. Witnessing trauma, both directly and through art, MacLear reminds us, is a participatory act.
Reflections on Cultural Memory
September 2, 2008
In the last three decades there has been a “memory boom,” a period marked by an increase in awareness about traumatic pasts and a drive towards memorialization. Museum spaces have increasingly become sites for the representation of traumatic histories including the Holocaust, civil war and genocides around the world.
But visual representations of traumatic memory often spill out of museum spaces, creating new forms of interaction between city inhabitants, tourists, artists, architects and students. From Hiroshima to Maputo, modern cities embody their troubled histories.
Cultural memory as an academic field is relatively new, but there has been an explosion of research in recent decades. Topics include trauma, repression, history vs. memory, public and private space, victim and victimizer, the archive and the witness, and consumer culture. My hope is that this website will help explore the international entanglements of cultural memory.
In particular, I am interested in the ways in which Truth Commissions reveal a dialectical relationship between history and memory, allowing for memory to rectify some of the intentional absences of history. There have been dozens of Truth Commissions implemented around the world as a way to deal with transitional justice. I hope to closely watch the development of the Canadian Truth And Reconciliation Commission announced in June of 2008 as a contemporary example where discourses of human rights, cultural memory and the project of nation-building are illuminated.
