Performing trauma: Commemorating 9/11 in downtown Manhattan (2018) (original) (raw)

There are two memorials at the site of the World Trade Center: the above ground Memorial Park and the below ground Memorial Museum. They embody very different conceptions of how an event such as 9/11 should be remembered. The Memorial Park was an attempt to integrate the recognition of loss into the ongoing life of the city. It fails to do this, largely because it succumbs to the temptation to let the site itself— " Ground Zero " —do the work of memory. The two pools (" voids ") are located on the footprints of the two towers. They dominate the site, inheriting the clumsy monumentality of the destroyed buildings. The underground Memorial Museum combines relics, remnants, images, and newsreels, to involve its visitors in the emotional immediacy of the events of 9/11. It presents 9/11 as a traumatic memory, one to be re-experienced but not understood, placing it outside history in a kind of perpetual present. It reinforces what Marita Sturken identified as a national sense of innocence, and it militates against the development of an historical understanding of the causes and consequences of 9/11. In the final section of this article, I reflect on ways in Ground Zero might have been designed to create a site where residents, citizens, and visitors might have come together to mourn, reflect on, and seek to understand the events of 9/11. The voids There are two memorials for 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center (" Ground Zero "). The first, the Memorial proper, is a park of around 8 acres, consisting of paved space, rows of trees (swamp oaks) and grass, and concrete benches. Within this space are two large square pits (" pools " and " voids "), each of which has water cascading down its walls, disappearing into a smaller square hole in the center. Surrounding each pool is a low wall, with the names of those who were killed on 9/11 and of those who died in the car bombing of 1993 displayed along a slanted top surface. A strangely off-kilter two-story building close to the two pools provides the entrance to the underground Memorial Museum, the second memorial (of which more shortly).