In fact, place is believed to be so intimately tied into memory that humans can even still be attached to sites that no longer exist. This phenomenon, known as ‘place attachment’, was proposed by environmental psychologists Setha Low and Irvin Altman. Low and Altman argue that places can help individuals and communities develop strong ties to places because they are “repositories… within which interpersonal, community, and cultural relationships occur, and it is to those social relationships, not just the place qua place, to which people are attached.”19 Cemeteries represent a final relationship between a person and their loved ones and funerals can be a site of community building. During the 19th century cholera epidemics, funerals and memorial services would likely have grouped several people together who were all set to be buried on the same day; families would have leaned on each other and formed a community of mourners to help and support each other. Cimetière Saint-Antoine would have become a place where members of the community could come together and rely on its members to help each other through their loss just as everyone taking part in the intervention (including onlookers) assembled to restore some visual association of its past in the present. But public mourning and memorials are not necessarily confined to cemeteries. In fact, an increasing number of spontaneous memorials are being erected at the sites of perceived tragedies, almost as soon as they occur. Recent examples would be the memorial to Cory Monteith outside the Vancouver hotel where he was found dead and the Sandy Hook memorial where people laid wreaths, toys, candles, and other commemorative material on the school lawn and throughout the surrounding neighbourhood. These ‘temporary memorials,’ as they have been termed by American cultural historian Erika Doss, are ephemeral by nature, though they have the potential to become permanent, and are an immediate, public way of dealing with grief and mourning.20 The second component of my intervention draws from and is in dialogue with the notion of temporary memorials. I provided each participant with the name, death number and any other information that I could find about an
Irish Catholic person who had succumbed to cholera on August 8th 1831 or 1832, the same calendar date as that of the intervention.21 Contributors were asked to design a headstone using cheap materials (a binder, two pieces of paper, and markers) in order to commemorate the person on their card . My aim was to call attention to the history of the space by occupying small portions of Dorchester Square and disrupting the visual coherence of the space temporarily, same as with the memorial service. This technique is known as cultural hijack and it has taken root in the arts community in England in order to call attention to various aspects of the country’s history. The goal of a cultural hijacking is the “empower[ment of] people to act and think differently about the world around them,”22 which can also be the purpose of temporary memorials. The commemorative tombstone intervention was planned with much of the same spirit, in order to call attention to the history of social disparity in Montreal and the struggles of immigrants upon arriving to Montreal in the 19th century. In each binder, I placed one page of information about the history of the cemetery and its importance as a burial site for Irish Catholic victims, as well as the purpose and nature of the public interventions. Participants had complete creative control over the look of their headstone and once they had finished their design, they were instructed to place their headstone anywhere that they chose within Dorchester Square. An aspect that I had not anticipated was that one of the participants actually drew from Dorchester Square as it exists currently by plucking a few flowers from a flower pot and placing it in the rings of her binder, linking the space’s present to the past that she was asked to represent. This cultural hijacking of the original intervention “mediate[d] between the living and the dead,”23 in order to “preserve a material presence in the face of an embodied absence.”24 Otherwise stated, the participant used flowers as a physical representation of death in lieu of the bodies, or representations of bodies such as original grave markers. Just as people die, so to do the cut flowers that are often laid on or in front of headstones. They, too, are eventually hidden away from public 20