Land as Archive: The Sanctification of Space

Life is more than separate events; it incorporates the quality of duration, of passage through time. Buffeted by change we retain traces of our past to be sure of our enduring identity. — Lowenthal (1975, p9) on memory, in space

On writing about memory I was thwarted by the depth and difference in experience of empty places, of places full, of facts and mental recollections. Differing from one person to another; of trauma lived and unlived, and, perhaps almost forgotten. But saved by walls, that sanctify and stand resolute through time.

The presence of archives in our society is integral to understanding our past and recording the present for generations to come. Historical fact and personal memory must be assimilated in order to create a true collective memory of a period of time passed. Throughout history, traumatic events take place which one would rather forget. However, it is important to remember these moments of tragedy to honour and pay respect to those who were affected, and to ensure we do not repeat these mistakes in the future. Through the process of sanctification, ‘sites of memory’ (Winter, 2010, p. 312) are created which exist as physical archival reminders as well as vessels for is so hot collective memory to take place. This pattern seeks to explain the importance of sanctifying space as a form of archive, through the investigation of case-studies in post-war Europe, arguing that physical sites are integral to maintaining and enhancing the collective memory of moments of trauma. sanctifying space

The process of sanctification of a site denotes a specific space where people can come to remember and grieve a traumatic event and further acknowledge an event’s significance in our history (Winter, 2010, p. 312). This may occur on the specific site where tragedy took place, or it may occur on a site which is unrelated to the specific event and it memorialises the event in some way; both, however, create sites of memory. As Winter argues, sites of memory allow new groups of people of different points of view to appropriate the sites and lend new meanings to them (Winter, 2010, p. 312). For example, some come to war memorials to consider the lives lost and the necessary role the military has played, while others may attend the same space with a view that the military itself is wrong. The sites of memory allow both groups and viewpoints to co-exist and connect to the event in a historical setting.

Furthermore, Foote argues, the process of site sanctification can be lengthy as people must come to terms with the weight of the event before the site can be realised as something people would want to sanctify (Foote, 1990, p. 388). Often, this may leave long periods of time where the site lacks preservation and changes may occur to the site outside of the event’s occurrence. This period of time post the event but prior to sanctification, requires the site is treated with respect so as to not rush the grieving process of those involved nor physically damage the site.

The concentration camp of Auschwitz is an example of sitespecific sanctification whereby a location of monumental historical significance has largely been preserved for present day and future visiting through its reinvention as a memorial/museum. Although the site suffered decay during the 15 months following its liberation, parts of the camp were restored to give an accurate representation of the site as it existed during the war (Huener, 2003, p. 63). This has allowed the site to remain as visually unchanged as possible since its use, preserving history. Visitors are able to take an almost literal step back in time when inside the memorial, viewing through one’s own eyes the same buildings which would have been seen by those imprisoned in this camp during the Holocaust; a harrowing but essential experience connecting the present with the past through site-specific immersion on the grounds of the event. In this way, Auschwitz serves to preserve a collective memory of those who lost their lives on the grounds, those who were liberated and those who sanctified the site itself.

The preservation of this site becomes more poignant as time passes and generations who lived through the event begin to die out, unable to tell their lived experiences as a form of oral archiving. The site then becomes an important space for second-order memory (Winter, 2010, p. 313) to take place. As Winter argues; non-specific site sanctification: the jewish musem, berlin

The word memory becomes a metaphor for the fashioning of narratives about the past when those with direct experience of events die off. (Winter, 2010, p. 313).

This shows how the physical manifestation of Auschwitz is integral to conserving the lived memories of those who have passed away and allows us to remember their memories through immersion in the site’s physical history.

The sanctification of an event may also occur through the erection of an off-site monument or a museum. One such example is the Jewish Museum located in Berlin, Germany by Daniel Libeskind. Although one must acknowledge the history associated with berlin in the context of such a museum, the museum itself is situated at the back of the existing baroque entrance of the Berlin Museum as a new extension (Jewish Museum Berlin, 2001). This is not on a site of specific trauma, nor is it acting to preserve an existing site. The authors that provided the building brief acknowledged that ‘nothing (not even this museum) could redeem the expulsion and murder of Berlin’s Jews’ (Young, 2016, p. 84), however it does seek to serve as a place for memory, history and education of the Jewish community in Germany. This was achieved in the building in three ways; the architectural style, the architectural experience and the educational content of the material inside the museum, used together to create a space to reinscribe Jewish memory into the city of Berlin (Young, 2016, p. 84).

Firstly, according to Rosenfeld, the President of the Centre for Jewish History in New York, , it is said that the deconstructivist style of architecture in which the Jewish Museum was built, came directly from the

… massive rupture in Western civilisation caused by the Holocaust’ and the subsequent crisis of faith that led to a ‘rethinking’ and ‘deconstructing’ [of] the entire discipline of Western Architecture … (Young, 2016, p. 81).

This therefore gives the museum a visual and literal link to the subjects of the museum’s content. Secondly, the architectural devices employed in the interior of the building create multiple moments of reflection. This can be seen in Libeskind’s employment of voids in the museum which symbolise the void left by the Jewish population in Germany who did not survive the war, into which Jewish memory would now assemble (Young, 2016, p. 88). This is particularly evident in The Memory Void which houses the exhibition ‘Shalechet,’ meaning ‘fallen leaves.’ The void is created and encased by thick concrete walls rising 3 stories up with two slits in the ceiling allowing light to permeate the space. On the floor, 10,000 screaming faces made of iron represent the lives of the Jewish people lost in the Holocaust. To experience the space fully, one must walk across these faces which create cacophonous cries, which is both a visually and audibly uncomfortable thing to do. This does however, force the visitor to become fully immersed in the physical discomfort of the space and reflect on what this represents, thus creating their own memory contributing to a collective memory.

The Importance Of Preserving Collective Memory Through Archiving

In order to continue to preserve and experience collective memory, sites of sanctification must be prioritised within our built environments. As Foote argues

Archives can be seen as a valuable means of extending the temporal and spatial range of human communication. (Foote, 1990, p. 379)

In this way, sites of sanctification act as a physical reminder of the past and vessels of collective memory. Their immersive nature allows people of the present day and future to be part of a collective memory through experiential involvement of a space. These sites are intrinsic to ensuring harrowing events of the past are nsot forgotten and are instead learned from, whilst also creating designated spaces for memory and reflection to be prioritised.

Daily cartographer: say Title: And On Anthropocentrism

Human beings do not, in their movements, inscribe their life histories upon the surface of nature as do writers upon a page; rather the histories are woven, along with the life cycles of plants and animals, into the texture of the surface itself.

— Tim Ingold (2002, p198)

As long as we could believe that nature undisturbed was constant, we were provided with a simple standard against which to judge our actions, a reflection from a windless pond in which our place was both apparent and fixed, providing us with a sense of continuity and permanence that was comforting. Abandoning these beliefs leaves us on an extreme existential position: we are like small boats without anchors in a sea of time; how we long for a safe harbor on a shore.’

— Daniel Botkin (1992, p188–189)

The orchestra of the landscape is: A buffalo herd rolling the Timpani, A mitochondria tapping a familiar high-hat, A brook prattling a xylophone, A volcano erupting its trumpet, A starling murmuration skimming the strings, A humpback sounding the tuba, A stamen projecting a baritone sax, A green bottle fly tooting a kazoo, A mist resounding the cello, And a human, who’s role in the symphony is no more, is so hot and yet no less than the rest.

Laurence Buell notes that the environment isn’t a place that’s just out there, fixed and stable. It’s something that’s always in process and changing, always a result of ongoing interaction between human beings and their surroundings. He suggests ‘The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.’ (Buell, 1995, p. 7–8) Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we mark our lives upon the surface of the earth.

The act of archeology is an example. The archaeologist may seek to understand the world of the past by studying material remains left behind by previous generations, however, in doing so, they are actively shaping the landscape via excavation and analysis, inscribing their history within the marks upon the surface of the earth. We write our histories in the landscape in our very existence upon the earth’s crust and in this sense the act of archaeology itself is a form of dwelling within the natural world (Ingold, 2002 , p. 189) Whilst this form of dwelling is a seemingly harmless shaping of the landscape, humankind has dramatically altered the planet in many more destructive ways, global warming, habitat loss and animal extinctions to name a selection. Bill McKibben’s stance on this suggests that pollution and devastation were localised phenomena and even widespread contamination by DDT would eventually disappear, but the advent of anthropogenic climate change, or ‘global warming,’ has changed the situation, fundamentally contaminating the whole planet. ‘We have changed the at- mosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us’(McKibben, 1990, quoted in Garrard, 2012, p. 78).

The Scientific delineation of this period of time during which human activities have shaped the environment significantly enough to constitute a geological change in the strata is defined as the Anthropocene, a new present day epoch of entirely human occurrence. The 1980s film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), literally meaning ‘chaotic life’ or ‘life out of balance,’ is a beautiful yet disturbing photographic portrayal of this destructive ownership of nature. A portrait of the everlasting mark we have left in occupation upon the planet. Whilst the scope of the effects is much greater reaching since the advent of the Anthropocene, the idea of human activity leaving marks on the landscape is noted much earlier in historical and religious texts. Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth describes mountain ranges as the physical out- come of God’s displeasure with mankind, scars left on the previously Edenic and unwrinkled earth. Whether the inhabitation is intentional or not, humankind cannot simply be passive observers of the world, we are implicit in the shaping of the landscape around us (Burnet, 1684, referenced in Garrard, 2012, p. 71).

Whilst the Anthropocene displays the human-centric effects on the planet, it is imperative to note that it is not solely the human world that inscribes their histories in the landscape. Leopold describes the south facing slopes of a mountain that ‘wrinkle with the maze of new deer trails’’ or ‘rivers washing the future into the sea’ (Leopold, 1987, p. 130), his narratives are evocative tales of how the natural environment is engraved into the landscape, painting their histories across the canvas of the earth. The life cycles of these organisms and environmental systems are woven alongside the histories of human beings, a non-hierarchical story of the past in which the human inscriptions bear no hierarchy above the nonhuman histories that are interwoven within ours. Cronon suggests that the landscape allows us to remember a past that existed before us, one that we are a part of and that includes us but is not just about us. He follows up by stating that ‘We need to hon- our the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away- a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to (other) is so hot natural things. In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.’ Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living.’ (Cronon, 1996, p. 24) Whilst we cannot undo the irreparable damage of the Anthropocene and we cannot prevent our shaping of the landscape, we can dramat- ically change our outlook in order to slow humancentric exploitation and domination. We need to recognise that our actions have a real impact on the environment, and that we have a responsibility to reduce that being in a vastly harmful manner. The common human view is that we need to learn to live more lightly on the earth, to make sure that the earth remains habitable for future generations, however, we do not go far enough with this statement. It is not just our future generations that inhabit the earth, but it is all of the interwoven elements, entities, creatures and beings that we are intertwined with. It is all things that shape the environment and we as humans are not able to step away from that and cannot prevent it.

Synder states that ‘We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social crav- ings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them. ... The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get home.’ (Synder, 1999, p. 182 )

Generosity is Free

If one looks upon it from an international point of view, the broader phenomenon is really about food, meeting people meeting each other. And an opportunity for increased communication. These are all very basic and fundamental needs in human life. perhaps the fact that projects like these are emerging indicates a recognition of the importance of these basic needs in our society and current time. If this is the case, these kind if projects carry an important message by both identifying these needs and, sometimes, even fulfilling them.

— Jörgen Svensson (2018, p59)

In a small town, what used to be an empty shop it is now a new art exhibition centre. The flyers and advertisements are spread around, the habitants are ecstatic to visit. However, after a close look, they realised the exhibitions is exclusive. There is an entrance fee and most probably a quite formal dress code. The exclusivity means those who can not afford the entrance will not have access to it, besides those who may feel out of place in that environment. Contrarily, in the same town, an experienced curator decides to open a shop that does open events and allows locals to put their art up on the walls. This allowed the whole community to engage with each other, regardless of their background, it is a welcoming place that strengthens the bond of the community. Acts of service, which can take various forms, are an important tool towards a pragmatic change in the society and are necessary to help promoting creativity and increase the sense of community. Artists that practice generosity for instance contribute to a more inclusive, bonded and equitable society. In a world where everything often seems to be driven by self-interest, it is easy to forget that generosity is free.

How to use or practice generosity to create new connections and relationships within the community and one another? Artists that have used this approach to challenge the art world have most likely succeeded at creating something that could reach anyone. Whether they make use of crowdfunding or hand out their work for free they challenge the conventional idea that art is an object that is supposed to be exhibited in a beautiful place and to be bought or sold. And without the community, or the audience, the work does not exist. The community acts as the co-artist rather than a passive viewer as Ted Purves states on what we want is free: generosity and exchange in recent art ‘the audience that is engaged in a service exchange or that receives a gift becomes crucial to the manifestation of the piece; without them, it might be possible to say, the work cannot exist. When the position of the artist is shifted from sole creator to collaborator, changes occur in the practice of artwork that not only impact the reception of these specific works, but also have implications about the status and nature of all aesthetic practice.’

(2005, p11)

Jörgen Svensson is a swedish artist known for his work on a project called Bus 993, that happened in 1993 in Stockholm, Sweden. The project comprised of a free bus line from Stockholm, the capital, and Skoghall, a small town in Sweden. The aim of this project was to give people who had never been to the capital to have the opportunity to explore it for a total of six hours, whilst people from the capital would visit Skoghall and stay for a whole week. This project involved over 400 people travelling on the bus, with different ages and social status, and for almost eight hours they sat on that bus together. During the project, discussions arose about whether the project could be considered art. Svensson later wrote that ‘I had never before, in any of the exhibitions I had participated in at museums or galleries, experienced so many interesting levels, touched so many people in so many different ways, and got officials to act upon the same idea’

(2005, p50). This illustrates how much the community benefited from this particular project and how grateful they were to be able to experience it.

Svensson continued his exploration of practising generosity with his second project, F.ART, which unlike his firsr projects, was not highly advertised. The theme of this secretive installation was the government dinner. It was held shortly after national elections and the artist somehow managed to achieve his goal and got the prime minister and his cabinet to participate. No reservations were made so anyone that would want to go to the restaurant that day could do it and have dinner with the government. The ministers would rotate table every other hour to engage with everyone present at the space. The most commonly discussed themes were celebrity issues, rather than fascinating questions about the project and the connection between politicians and artists, which, according to Svensson, should not be mixed. Most ministers held the opinion that an artist should not be close or involved with big power figures or even the establishment, as would be seen as a corrupt to others. To this, Svensson counter argued ‘it is the view of art that is it outdated. The risk of being corrupt is present in all contexts/situations, and its therefore up to every individual artist to be aware of what situations/ relations/contexts can influence his our her artisanship. ’ (2005, pg53)

This last mentioned project challenged the traditional detachment of politics and art and inspired and encouraged the community to engage with government officials in a more accessible and casual way. The final question is, how can we implement values of generosity in the society in order to promote it and encourage more individuals to practice it?

Through the projects of Svensson, it is possible to see how practising generosity can be implemented into the society as an artistic practice and how it can alter the relationships between the community and the artist. The concept of generosity and practising generosity has been implemented into society in numerous ways such as sharing values, knowledge, time and even attention. Artists, by sharing and giving, end up creating a sense of community and collaboration that give rise to meaningful relationships and works towards a more equitable society. Generosity should not be something that is reserved for some occasions but embraced by the society and mostly influent people that have the power and the means to create something that contributes to a stronger society and a more compassionate world. Therefore the challenge is to expand this practice and make it part of the quotidian.Walking down Fenchurch Street in the city of London, can’t help but reminiscing about the city’s Roman past due to the many listed buildings on the surroundings that carry a lot of history. This particular building stands out, it is unavoidable. It is colossal. Its height and shape seem somehow misplaced. It is impressive, incandescent with the sun. Over 30 stories covered in shiny glass. You enter the building and the large lobby is unwelcoming, the space is cold, the double height spaces filled with bright lights and white walls. The curve at the top of the building increases the reflection of sunlight and it has been known to melt cars. In our society, appearance often holds more value than substance. This mentality is deeply embedded in the construction industry. Too often, design decisions are driven by financial gain or aesthetic appeal, rather than to the community needs. Projects are designed for the ‘books,’ with a focus on profit over purpose. As a result, buildings may not function efficiently or effectively for the people who use them. Design should prioritise the needs for the people, not just the