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The following is excerpted from Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination by Karen Engle:
The
winning memorial design for the World Trade Center site remembers the
significance of absence and failure to the events of September 11. Named Reflecting
Absence, the
plan takes advantage of the voids left by the towers’ collapses, transforming
them into deep reflecting pools. Visitors will descend into the memorial
through a passageway that leads them away from the city. Then, “at the bottom
of their descent, they find themselves behind a thin curtain of water, staring
out at an enormous pool. Surrounding this pool is a continuous ribbon of names.
The enormity of this space and the multitude of names that form this endless
ribbon underscore the vast scope of the destruction. Standing there at the
water’s edge, looking at a pool of water that is flowing away into an abyss, a
visitor to the site can sense that what is beyond this curtain of water and
ribbon of names is inaccessible” (Arad and Walker n.d.). The names designate a
limit – both of knowledge and of memory. All that we cannot understand of the event
itself, and all that remains to come in the form of the future, lies just
beyond our sightlines. The memorial encourages us to remember that we do not
see all these absences, and it provides a space where the drive to identify can
be relinquished in the face of absolute loss.
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