A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

SANDRA PEREIRA
Brent Glass is Director of the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History
in Washington, DC. He is also a member
of the Flight 93 Memorial Advisory
Commission whose goal was to construct
a memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania,
at the site where the aircraft hijacked by
terrorists on 9/11 plummeted to earth.
8
9/11
A decade later
september 11 th
in America’s collective memory
From the Holocaust to 9/11: why do we need memorials to remember tragedies?
And is there such a thing as too much remembrance?
By KATHLeen Gomes
PhOTOGRAPhy By sAndrA pereirA AND vAnessA rodriGues
Like the memorial to the World Trade
Center victims in New York, the Flight 93
Memorial was inaugurated on Sept. 11 th ,
2011, ten years after the disaster.
Memorials combine the way we wish to
be remembered in the future with people’s
need to be consoled in the present. They
“tell more about ourselves and our own
times than they do about the events that
we are supposedly commemorating,” affirmed
Glass in this interview conducted in
Washington.
[Parallel] Whether it’s the Columbine massacre
or 9/11, the building of memorials seems to be
a growing industry in the United States. Why?
The elements of the memorial are positioned to distinguish between those that symbolize the victims inside the pentagon building and those that represent the
victims on the plane. Those in which you can read the victim’s name and simultaneously see the pentagon building memorialize those who died in the pentagon.
Those facing in the opposite direction, where the sky acts as a backdrop to the name, pay tribute to the people who perished aboard AA Flight 77.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011