How Can We Remember – Lecture
February 1, 2010
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 – 6pm – 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY
Upcoming Event: Truth-Tellers
February 22, 2009
“When the smoke clears, can we handle the truth?”
Full Spectrum and New York Theatre Workshop present THE TRUTH-TELLERS, a free panel discussion with five creators who dig beneath the official story to the complex, gritty underside. On February 26th, from 6:30-9:30, panelists Milagros de la Torre [artist/photographer], Alberto Ferreras [author/filmmaker/ performance artist], David Henderson [poet/author/activist], Meg McLagan [filmmaker/cultural anthropologist] and Liza Jessie Peterson [actress/poet/playwright] will discuss the ideas and experiences behind their work, and explore the larger question to us as a society, “When the smoke clears, can we handle the truth?”. The panel will be moderated by K. Neycha Herford [musician/transformational counselor/new media journalist].
This free event will begin with a screening of excerpts of The Peculiar Patriot by Liza Jessie Peterson; and Lioness by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers.
NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP - www.nytw.org
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.
