MUSEUM
The museum uses victims’ voices, faces and names to humanise the experience
The events of 9/11 are a symbol of a larger and much more significant unfolding story. A museum which purely historicises would be out of place here
REMEMBRANCE AND EVOLUTION A salient point is that the 9/11 Memorial Museum has managed to refl ect too the resil- ience of the city, the strength of the spirit that survived in the people who were affected the most. It seems vital to the museum that in places it has this energy within it, and that it is closely related to the words of the people who did not die that day. There are listening alcoves in the history exhibit where visitors can hear recordings made by people who escaped the Twin Towers or the Pentagon and rescuers. “There is something enormously powerful in hearing their experiences spoken in their own words, not fi ltered through the museum’s curatorial voice,” says Greenwald. In the memorial exhibit too, fi rst-person
recordings by relatives and friends of victims strike a similar chord. “What you fi nd is that the stories they tell are the same stories that all families tell; stories that celebrate lives and remember people for the best of who they were,” she says. “The stories are not about how they died but about how they lived.” It’s debatable whether the commemorative
nature of parts of the museum corresponds to the typical defi nitions of what a museum
86
CLADGLOBAL.COM
is and should be. Hennes refers to an arti- cle in The New Yorker published in July last year, that questioned the case for the museum, saying “nothing is really taught ... [the designers] are in constant peril from the enormous American readiness to be mortally offended by some small misstep of word or tone. They can be felt navigating the require- ments of interested parties at every turn.” Perhaps it’s because this is an event that belongs to everybody – as Greenwald said, everyone has his own 9/11 story – so wasn’t it right to build a museum that could be some- thing to everybody? The museum and design teams believe the museum is organic; it will evolve and grow as the years pass, as fresh audiences come, as the event moves out of memory and more into history. “To say a memorial museum is a contradic-
tion in terms is missing the fundamental point about the potential of a memorial museum, which is that it’s there to help society wrap a story around a traumatic event so it can come to terms with it. It’s a way of turning it into history,” Hennes says. “It’s about maintaining an alive awareness of the meaning of 9/11 and the fact that it isn’t over. The events of 9/11 are a symbol of a larger and much more
signifi cant unfolding story. A museum which purely historicises would be out of place here. “Visitors can put their own experience of
this event into a more fully understood and fully realised context. The museum should enable people to be more engaged in the complex world that’s come out of this event and I think that’s a radically different mission for a museum.” Without its human voices, faces and names, the museum would be a dissonant experience. And, it’s hard to imagine that a cold, hard, faceless version would be well received by a public who arrive from all over the world, people who have been there, as Hennes points out, in some way, before. The repercussions of 9/11 reach beyond Manhattan, after all. For Greenwald, the humanity is central.
“These were people just like you and me, who got up in the morning and went to work or boarded an aeroplane, and got caught in the vortex of a global event,” she says. “Over 90 nations were represented in the people killed. They were from two and a half to 85 years old, from every sector of the economy, every faith tradition, every ethnicity imagi- nable. They were us.” ●
CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 2
PHOTO: DAVJDAVIES ON FLICKR
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132