|
| |
Memorial Therapy: Projected Testimonies and the Reanimation of Public Monuments
From: University of Michigan
| By:
Krysztof Wodiczko |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Internationally renowned artist, philosopher, and visionary Krysztof Wodiczko (right) projects images onto public monuments, animating the silent memorials with the testimonies of modern victims and raising provocative juxtapositions which speak to militarism, xenophobia, urban violence, domestic abuse and homelessness. |
Democracy and public space
![[Image]](3808_501.jpg)
Krysztof Wodiczko comments on the unique nature of the Hiroshima Project compared to his previous work.
(2:00 min)
|
The democratic process initiated towards the end of the eighteenth century destroyed the principal of a despotic and feudal system in which one could have superior powers and rights over many others. |
The modern stage for this democratic project is public space. But it is a contested space, one that provides no guarantee that the outcome of the social, political, and cultural struggles will not favor only the interests of some but not others. |
One of our principal responsibilities as humans and citizens--and aesthetic practitioners of public art especially--is to further extend an inquiry towards the critical transformation of the democratic project. |
In my own artistic work I have sought to contribute, as much as I can, to a fusion of opposing political and ethical attributes. This fusion combines the political symmetry of equal rights with the ethical asymmetry of the inequality in our obligations toward others (the ethics of enlarging the other as one who is more important than me). To do this, we must disturb the illusions of egalitarian society by creating an agonistic public space in which the contest of competing voices leads to the greater inclusion of those unequal others. |
Public space barricaded
![[Image]](3808_502.jpg)
The Hiroshima Projection: Survivors' hands were projected onto the base of the A-Bomb dome as their oral narratives are played.
(7:58 min)
|
Today, such a public space is barricaded and monopolized by the powerful presence of historical, symbolic structures and events. They represent what Walter Benjamin called the history of the victors, those chosen to remember and be remembered at the expense of the forgotten vanquished. |
These monopolies of the public space exclusively perpetuate the official collective memory or other forms of hegemony, such as the daily invasion of political and commercial propaganda. To borrow Habermas's term, the public voice is replaced by publicity, by the legitimizing process of those who have more power and access to speaking in that space at the expense of the others. Clearly this corrodes the possibility of instituting alternative public spheres that will really make state, corporate, or other cross-national entities accountable to the public interests. |
This also poses problems for my work. First, the memorial barricades the public space, preventing the contest of agonistic testimonies. Second, those most invisible and unheard who should be first to offer the truth of their testimony are often, initially, not capable of speaking as they are locked into post-traumatic silence and even amnesia. Third, memorials themselves, submerged in the process of gentrification, subjected to the defensive redesign of their surrounding parks against so-called violence, and in other ways isolated in a kind of beautification project from the real life of the city, suffer a semi-traumatic state. |
So the question is: How could the testimonial "saying" of today's forgotten vanquished animate and educate the "said" of the victorious past? |
Witness of survivors
Testimony, or truth-telling, has both a private dimension--which is confessional and spiritual--and a public aspect, which is political and judicial. My projections onto monuments which magnify the testimony are an attempt to take on this greater scale, appropriating and amplifying the role of those monuments as response-able speakers. I'm referring here to both the ability to respond and the responsibility to do so. |
Such a project must comprise two kinds of art: the art of monumental projection in public space, and the dramatic art of testifying, which in part overlaps with post-traumatic therapy. |
Healing the survivors, the monuments, and the public
Survivors--through the long and complex process of remembering--produce the script and scenario for such a memorial animation. Those who speak through such victorious, lofty but speechless monuments, thus become both patients and doctors. Through their own healing, they are attempting to heal the monument and bring it back to life. |
In fact, the monuments are not in very healthy condition. They suffer in a state that is similar in many ways to post-traumatic stress, mostly because they are isolated from the events and life of people who very often live on their steps. They look, they hear, but they cannot speak. They have no iconic equipment to articulate, in any motion or voice, their response to present-day catastrophes and troubles. Their warning function, their mission, is somehow paralyzed. They are, in fact, dumb and numb. They suffer through this traumatic speechlessness, and any possibility to be of any use to the living would be a great relief for them. |
Fearless speech and memorial therapy
The truth of these testimonies--these speech acts--depends on the character of the speaker "saying" and that of the spectator "listening." The emotional charge of the saying and the investment of the listening are equally central components of the speech act as truth tests. Georges Bataille has described the sacred place as one fit for the unleashing of passions. And as Chantal Mouffe points out, for agonistic pluralism the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passion from this sphere of the public in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize passion towards democratic designs. |
As Michel Foucault puts it in his work, Fearless Speech, which more appropriately should be translated "Fearless Speaking," parrhesia--speaking freely--is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses her personal relationship to truth and risks her reputation, security, and even life because she recognizes truth-telling as a duty to help others, as well as herself. Truth-telling that implicates a memorial, that makes the façade face and speak the truth, is surely the most adventurous form of parrhesia, recovered from traumatic oblivion. |
Here we attain the full sense of memorial therapy. Therapy through the monument and of the monument. This double therapy contributes to the reanimating of democracy and those who inhabit it. Democracy is thus cared for and not taken for granted by always--devenir--becoming, and always--avenir--what is to come. |
BUNKER HILL Charlestown, Massachusetts |
![[Image]](3808_503.jpg)
The Bunker Hill Projection: The Testimony of a Mother from the Charlestown After Murder Program.
(1:49 min)
View Transcript
|
Charlestown, in Boston, is a place where an enormous number of murders take place in comparison to any other part of the city. This happens mostly because of the Code of Silence. This self-imposed code rules the community of Charlestown; no one ever speaks to the police or reports to the justice system who killed whom, how, or when. So in this tight community where people love each other so much, they pay an incredible price for their community ties. The price of life. |
If only monuments could speak
Here, a group of mothers whose children were murdered in crossfires or executions formed a self-healing group called the Charlestown After Murder Program, in order to speak about the truth, to be truth-tellers. |
They said to me, if only monuments could speak. And so I suggested, "Why don't you speak through this monument?" If only this monument could speak. "Why don't you become a monument--at least for several evenings?" The monument should speak because the monument saw what was happening, who was murdered where and by whom. The monument could then imagine itself saying: "This happened just behind me," or "on the left side," or "in front, where you are, down there. You small people, among whom there may be one of those who killed my son or someone who didn't say anything." |
At the base of the Bunker Hill Monument, there is already someone standing there, dressed in civilian clothes--a statue of the commander of the battle, the first revolutionary battle in Charlestown, to secure the rights for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice for all. The First Amendment in the United States Constitution, the only constitution in the world that has communicative rights as the first. (In the French Constitution, it's the seventh.) So in defense of this constitution, the battle continues. All those mothers against others; the Bunker Hill battle continues. |
CULTURAL CENTER Tijuana, Mexico |
Factory workers
Tijuana is a very densely populated city near the United States-Mexico border. Along this border, there are some 500 factories called maquiladora built by transnational corporations. Foreign materials and parts are shipped to these factories to be assembled by cheap Mexican labor. |
Young women drawn from all over the country constitute 90 percent of this labor. They are, in fact, mostly teenage girls, as young as 13 years old. They come from various parts of Mexico, usually very poor areas like Chapas, from very feudal patriarchal set-ups in which they had no chance to be anybody else than what they were supposed to be as described by the whole cultural system. Abused and suffering enormous wounds, they would come to Tijuana in order to liberate themselves as a new proletariat. From the feudal assembly line, they ended up in the post-modern assembly line. They left one hell, they say, and ended up in a new hell. |
The Cultural Center: Silent monument of progress
In this city of Tijuana, there is a significant symbolic structure, the Cultural Center (El Centro Cultural), which is the pride of the city and a kind of gift presented to the city by the central government to promote modernity and progress. Inside this spherical monument, there is an IMAX theater, an ongoing projection of some sort of uplifting image of great achievements and love between the United States and Mexico. There are also restaurants and a museum, and quite important, educational facilities. |
However, maquiladora workers are absent from this place. They form the core of the economy of the city yet when their problems and their culture should be there, they're not. |
Factor X
![[Image]](3808_504.jpg)
The Tijuana Projection: The Testimony of a Woman from a Factor X Group on the dome of the Cultural Center.
(4:21 min)
View Transcript
|
There is a group of women who went through years of working in these maquiladora factories who formed an organization--not unlike the Charlestown After Murder program--called Factor X. They formed to learn political and human rights so they could spread the knowledge about those rights among young factory workers. They also talk about their husbands, who committed all sorts of crimes, including incest and rape. |
They invite others to participate to somehow recognize that human rights are not just for public spaces; they are in the domestic environment and also in the workplace. |
So I suggested to a Factor X group, "Would you be interested in speaking through this structure?" |
|
| |
onuments and memorials, in their speechlessness and stillness, look strangely human while traumatized humans, in their emotionlessness and silence, appear strangely monumental. The blank facades and blind eyes of our public buildings and memorials are speechless witnesses to the present-day injustices faced by speechless survivors living in their shadows. Both require reanimation. 