2003/12/12

Constructing memorials
Here's the reference to the essay by Susana Torre that I mentioned the other day:
Susana Torre, "Constructing Memorials," in Enwezor, Okwui et al. eds. Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, Documenta 11, Platform 2, Hatje Cantz 2002, pp. 343-360
The always intelligent Sara Fishko produced another of her serious, thought-provoking radio essays on this topic for the WNYC news program this morning. I couldn't find a link on the station's website -- perhaps it's too soon. You can find many other pieces by her, however, including one on memorials in music, focusing on mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade.

The Fishko Files

2003/12/10

A 9-11 memorial proposal: Susana Torre

Susana Torre was one of the 5,000+ entrants in the open competition to design a memorial for the World Trade Center site. What distinguishes her proposal most from those of the eight finalists is its provision for memory's "reinscription," by dynamic events that continually renew memory and encourage us to rethink the meaning of what happened here. In part, this dynamic is in the recurrent, seasonal changes that the design celebrates and emphasizes. In part, it is in the provision of spaces for us and future generations to invent and act out our own rituals. Torre is the author of a major article on memorials, which she was completing just as the planes struck the World Trade Center towers -- whose burning and collapse she and I witnessed from our rooftop. In the essay, she compares memorials to the dead of World War I; victims of the European "Holocaust" in Poland, Austria and Germany; the murdered millions of Cambodia; the American dead in Vietnam; the "disappeared" during the military terror regimes of Chile, Uruguay, and her native Argentina -- and she added then a brief paragraph on what we had just witnessed. Everywhere, she finds, memory remains alive only when it is renewed, through reinscription by rituals that make the past speak to the ever-changing present.

9/11 MEMORIAL: LOSS, REMEMBRANCE, RENEWAL by Susana Torre

2003/12/09

Cuban tragedy

À propos of recent reports and denials of a financial scandal in Cuba's Ministry of Tourism (one of the few places where anybody can get hold of large number of dollars there), a friend asked me a provocative question: what I thought of Cuba today. Here's the answer he provoked:
Briefly, what I think is that the tragedy of Cuba is that its people have not been permitted to assume [excuse me, I'm using this in the Spanish sense of asumir -- to "appropriate," or to "accept as theirs"] the enormous achievements of 1957 (beginning of the war) or 1959 (triumph of the revolution) to, say, 1970 (when the colossal failure of the "10-million ton sugar harvest" demonstrated the weakness of a command economy) and move on. Those achievements were, 1st, freeing the island from the heavy hand of US capital so that its people had some room to breathe and maneuver ("Cuba libre"); 2nd, hugely reducing disparities in wealth and life-chances (between black and white, rural and urban, rich and poor); 3rd, bringing the entire population to literacy and expanding educational opportunities to create a highly skilled, critically conscious population; 4th, infrastructural and industrial development projects that -- while mostly uncompleted and in some cases misdirected (importing a windowless Czech factory to make refrigerators, for example, or trying to convert the green zone around Havana into an immense coffee plantation) -- nevertheless pointed the way to greater economy autonomy and improved standards of living.

Having done these things, and having developed a literate population fully capable of rational debate, they should have been allowed to open political contests to groups outside the party, and let the enormous ingenuity of the people go into economic projects more constructive than building rafts to float to Miami, or "barbacoas" (improvised lofts) as a homemade solution to the housing crisis. Some very stubborn Cubans inside the party and a pack of crazed and persistent Cubans in Miami conspired (with lots of help from Washington) to keep tensions so high that party leaders are afraid to relax their grip or let Fidel retire.