A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

‘ i don’t know if you can ever
remember too much, or whether
the past becomes too much of
a burden and prevents you from
moving forward. But i agree that
it tells more about ourselves and
our own times than it does about
the events that we’re supposedly
commemorating.
’
on site. There’s an inscription that’s on the
wall outside that vault where the human
remains are being kept. Some of the relatives
have said: “We don’t want anything
on that wall because we don’t want to
turn the vault into part of an exhibit or
part of a tour where people will take pictures
of the inscription.”
At the Flight 93 Memorial Commission
we have four meetings a year. And at each
meeting a handful of family members
come, and there are a lot of tears, and
there’s still a lot of emotion. The shock
has worn off, but it’s been like a prolonged
grieving process. I don’t think it
will ever end. But I think in September it
will reach a point where they will feel
their mission has been fulfilled. The 10 th
anniversary is going to be a sort of feeling
like: “Ok, we’ve done our share to remember
our family members.”
[P] When you talk to New Yorkers, you don’t get
a sense that the memorial is important for them,
personally. To them, the rebuilding of the World
Trade Center, the fact that towers have started to
come up again on the site is a more powerful
symbol than the actual memorial. The memorial
seems to be much more about appeasing the
victims’ families.
[BG] Yes, everyone is being very deferential
to the family members because the
event is so immediate. And I often ask
the questions at Flight 93 site, which has
a much smaller population to deal with:
“Who constitutes a family member? How
do you qualify or not as a family member?
Do you have to be a blood relative?
How distant – a second cousin, an aunt,
or an uncle?” So that’s another political
issue: Who speaks for these people? It’s
easy if it’s a son or daughter, a husband
or wife, but it gets a little more difficult
9/11
A decade later
when the relationship is
someone more remote.
Yeah, I think that’s the primary
audience.
In the case of New York,
you’ve got nearly 3,000
deaths that have occurred,
so you’re not going to get
a consensus. Even in
Shanksville we didn’t have
a total consensus about the
design of the memorial.
The crash occurred at a former
coal mine site, and
although the landscape had
been restored, it was still
sort of bowl-shaped. And
the bowl has a 10, 20%
incline, so the designer of the winning
design used that to recommend a semicircle
of trees. I think it’s 40 trees for
Brent Glass in Portugal
“A Guardian of Memory” is how Brent Glass can be described.
A firm believer that “the way in which we remember history
also reveals much about our own times,” during his first visit
to Portugal, Glass shared his vision of history and museum
expertise with curators and government officials in Lisbon,
Porto, Coimbra, Madeira and the Azores. As a public historian,
Glass’ deals with both remembrance and oblivion, and stresses
that planning, partnerships, outreach and feedback are
essential tools for today’s museums.
each victim, so 1600 trees altogether are
going to be placed in this semi-circle.
But he named his memorial “A Crescent
of Embrace.” And someone jumped on
that and said: “Ah-ha, this is a tribute to
Islam.” Because it was red maples, in the
fall, when the leaves turn, they would be
red. So from the air, if you were flying
over, it would look like a red crescent.
And there was some controversy about
that, and that led one of the family members
to say, “I won’t support this.” The
families had been very close together and
they took this very hard because they
wanted everybody to approve it.
[P] What was the outcome of that discussion?
[BG] The designer made it more of a
circle and extended both ends of the
crescent.
seven thousand ticket-holders were allowed to visit the Ground Zero memorial on sept. 11 th , 2011.
more than 400 thousand purchased tickets to see it in the upcoming months.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011 11
D.R.
VANESSA RODRIGUES