Displaying. The Unspeakable. Workshop. MAY 14, 2012 New York, NY. center for international Research in the Humanities & Social sciences

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Unité Mixte Internationale 3199 4 Washington Square North New

1 Displaying Workshop MAY 14, 2012 New York, NY center for international Research in the Humanities & Social sciences Unité Mixte Internationale Washington Square North New York, NY (2d floor) The Unspeakable Thanks to the generous support of

2 Displaying the Unspeakable an international Workshop Center for international Research in the Humanities & Social Sciences Unité Mixte Internationale 3199 (CNRS-NYU) Monday May 14, Washington Square North, N e w Yo r k, N Y d floor, conference room: 9 : 0 0 a m - This conference will look at how museums deal with the representation of traumatic, tragic and terrifying events. How do museums attempt to represent the unspeakable elements of the past, who are they speaking for and just as importantly, who are they speaking to? Can we observe national or global cultures in curating such issues, in the representation of violence, in the description of inhuman behavior or political crimes? What is the particular role of objects in understanding the event, what do they convey, what is there documentary and emotional power in relation to the role of their authenticity? Introduction 9:00 am / Edward Berenson, Professor in Contemporary History, NYU & Christophe J. Goddard, CNRS Researcher and Associate Professor in Ancient History, co- Directors of the CNRS NYU Center of International Research in the Humanities & Social Sciences. 9:15 am / Opening Remarks, Dominique Poulot, Professor in Heritage Studies and Art History, University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris, CNRS NYU Research Fellow. Panel 1 / Curating 9/11 Chair : Vera Zolberg, The New School for Social Research 9:30 am / First Thoughts on Opening the National 9/11 Memorial - Clifford Chanin 10:00 am / An Institutional Memory of 9/11 - Marilyn Kushner Panel 2 / Curating Dictatorships in Latin America Chair : Brigitte Sion, CNRS-NYU 10:30 am / Curating the Years of Dictatorship in Chile ( ) : The Villa Grimaldi and the Memory and Human Rights museums - Paulina Faba Zuleta 11:30 am / Discussion & Luncheon Panel 3 / Globalizing Memory & Curatorship Chair : Finbarr Barry Flood, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU 12:00 pm / Curating Tragedy, Exhibiting Atrocity: The Memorial Museum in Contemporary Society- Amy Sodaro 12:30 pm / Holocaust Fatigue at the Jewish Museum in Berlin - Herman Lebovics Panel 4 / Victims Narratives and Curatorship Chair : Jorge Otero-Pailos, Columbia University 1:00 pm / We Are Here: Curating Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations - Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby 1:30 pm / The Valorization of Victims and its Implications - Harriet F. Senie 2:00 pm / Discussion & Concluding Remarks - Dominique Poulot, Edward Berenson. 11:00 am / Exhibiting Mass Violence: Argentinean Memory Places and State Terrorism - Virginia Vecchioli

3 Speakers Harriet F. Senie is director of museum studies and professor of art history at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Previously she was associate director of The Art Museum, Princeton University and director of the Amelie Wallace Gallery at SUNY, Old Westbury. She is the author of The `Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (2002) and Contemporary Public Sculpture (1992), and co-editor of Critical Issues in Public Art (1992; 1998) as well as numerous articles and essays on public art. Her current book project is Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11. She is co-founder of Public Art Dialogue (PAD), a cross-disciplinary organization that is an affiliate of the College Art Association. She is also co-editor of Public Art Dialogue, the journal published twice a year by Routledge starting in Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby s professional interests centre on questions of immigration, cultural diversity, (self)-representation and the transmission of cultural heritage. For the past three years, Eve-Lyne has coordinated the Life Stories of Montréalers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations Community-University Research Alliance (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia University, Canada). She is the curator of the exhibit, "We are here", which is showing at the Centre d'histoire de Montréal until April 2013, and which showcases much of the work that has come out of the project. Edward Berenson is Professor of History and director of the Institute of French Studies at NYU. He also co-directs NYU's collaborative research center with the CNRS. He is the author, most recently, of The Statue of Liberty. A Transatlantic Story (2012) and Heroes of Empire (2011). He is co-editor of The French Republic. Ideas, Values, Debates (2011) and Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2010). Dominique Poulot is professor at Sorbonne, Paris 1 since He studied the history of France with Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Nora and his Ph D dealt with the emergence of heritage and museums in early modern and revolutionary France (Musée, Nation, Patrimoine, Gallimard, 1997). He has been a Getty Scholar ( ), and was Visiting Professor in the Universities of Laval, Geneva, and Columbia (2011). He edited Quatremère de Quincy's Letters to Miranda and Canova ("Texts and Documents Series", Getty Research Institute, june 2012) and he is working about the history of European National Museums ( at the Brooklyn Museum ( ). She has also served as Curator of Collections at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, and Research Associate at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kushner has mounted more than thirty exhibitions focusing on such subjects as photographers Camilo Jose Vergara, Edward Burtynsky, Victor Prevost and Platon, images from 9/11, early twentieth-century advertising and prints, Walton Ford watercolors, Ground Zero images, and the career of Morgan Russell. She has published and lectured extensively on works on paper and has served on juries and guest curated exhibitions nation-wide. Kushner is also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in Paulina Faba, graduated in Social Anthropology at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico D.F (2001), obtained a Master s degree in Anthropology at the University of Chile (2004). She finished a DEA (Master) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a PhD in Art History at Sorbonne University, Paris I (2012). Her research topics concentrate in the forms of reproduction of memory, patrimonialization and re-appropriation of past in Mexico and Chile. She s the author of Imágenes de una memoria. Exégesis y representación del pasado entre los wixaritari (huicholes) del Noroeste de México, published this year by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Paulina Faba is Assistant Professor at U. Arcis and PUC in Santiago. Herman Lebovics is State University of New York Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University, and Fellow, Royal Historical Society. He is the author of many books, among them Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Duke University Press), 2004 ; Mona Lisa s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Cornell University Press, July 1999.) ; --True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, (Cornell University Press, 1992) trans. as La Vraie France (Paris: Editions Belin, 1995). Amy Sodaro holds a PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Paterson University. Her research focuses on memory and memorialization of genocide, trauma and atrocity and in particular on memorial museums. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave MacMillan 2010). Marilyn Kushner is Curator and Head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections at the New-York Historical Society. Previously she was Department Chair, Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and Curator of Prints and Drawings

4 Abstracts First Thoughts on Opening the National 9/11 Memorial - Clifford Chanin After years of planning, the 9/11 Memorial opened to the public on September 12, A look at how the best-laid plans matched up against the experience of interacting with the 2.3 million people who have since visited. An Institutional Memory of 9/11 - Marilyn Kushner On September 12, 2001, the New-York Historical Society became one of the first institutions to begin collecting the history of September 11. As one of the largest repositories of 9/11 materials in New York, we are now faced with the issue of how one accesses these materials to remember, memorialize, and honor that day. As the years pass the curator is presented with new issues regarding how the attacks must be portrayed, how the objects must be represented, how the event is defined, or how the public is informed. These matters will serve as the point of departure for a broader discussion of accepting responsibility to mark September 11 within an institutional setting. became integrated into a Federal Net of Memory Sites and depend on the National Human Rights Secretary. In this paper, I ll analyze two contrasting experiences: the Memorial Park and the Monument in Honor of Victims of State Terrorism, situated in the north border of Buenos Aires s city (2007) and the historical site named Former Clandestine Camp of Detention and Extermination, informally called the Officer Club, located within the Mechanic Army s Superior School (ESMA), today in power of civil authorities (2007). Whereas the last one preserves detention conditions during dictatorship to visitors, the first one was created anew in the borders of Rio de la Plata s rivers, where disappeared where thrown alive from military planes. By exploring these two cases, I ll discuss dilemmas related to the way of representing the horror of mass violence and centered on the architectural design of these places, the names exhibition (who and how should be enlisted), the selection of sculptures, the historical sketch developed by the guides, etc. In doing so, I ll highlight the social logic that underlines this conflicts about representing the past. Curating the years of dictatorship in Chile ( ) : The Villa Grimaldi and the Memory and Human Rights museums - Paulina Faba Zuleta As a reflection of recent social and political changes, different strategies of narrating history are perceived in the analysis of two museums dedicated to the memory of the tragic events that occurred in Chile during Augusto Pinochet s military government ( ). The first one, Villa Grimaldi, is a Santiago mansion where hundreds of detainees were tortured and killed. This place was transformed into a museum in 1997, after seven years of civil government. The second one, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, it s the result of a huge project spearheaded by the president Michelle Bachelet and inaugurated in 2010, the last year of her administration. Although recent TV shows, films, and literary works are supposed to help the country deal with the horrors committed during Pinochet s regime, the Villa Grimaldi and the Memory Museum are situated in marginal districts of Santiago and seem to address specific national and international audiences. Exhibiting mass violence: Argentinean Memory Places and State Terrorism - Virginia Vecchioli During the last decades, memory and memorial places about state terrorism in Argentina have exponentially increased. Symposiums, projects, laws, monuments, archives, visiting tours, exhibitions, urban marks, historical sites, widespread along the whole country involving artists, functionaries, scholars, transnational experts, secondary students, architects, activists and relatives of disappeared in a continuously increasing high dense framework of commemorating activities related to the period know as the last dictatorship ( ). Since 2007, most memorial places Curating Tragedy, Exhibiting Atrocity: The Memorial Museum in Contemporary Society- Amy Sodaro As nations and groups around the world negotiate complex memories of violence and genocide, a new form of commemoration has exploded in popularity: the memorial museum, which combines commemorative and museological functions to display the tragic past in the attempt to come to terms with and educate about the past in order to prevent violence in the future. These carefully curated museums attempt to answer an international, normative demand that groups face their tragic pasts by fulfilling three primary functions: memorial museums serve as spaces of truth-telling and preservation of the past, places of mourning and remembrance, and sites of moral education for the future. Looking at several exemplary memorial museums I will examine how they combine innovative curatorial practices with more traditional museology to play this unique role in the societies that create them. Holocaust Fatigue at the Jewish Museum in Berlin - Herman Lebovics The Jewish Museum in Berlin was initially proposed by non-jews as a place of remembrance for a lost German-Jewish culture in Berlin and Germany. The largest part of the Jewish population living in Berlin and Germany did not embrace the project as their own. They were new arrivals from Eastern Europe; this museum was not about their culture. Daniel Libeskind s striking structure was full of reminders and references to the Holocaust. And the original museological narrative carried out this tragic theme. But would the possible public, assumedly mostly Germans, come to such a dark and guilt-inducing place? Late in the planning process, new people were brought it to recast the museum s story. This was a team from New Zeeland that had just created the New Zealand national museum which emphasized the good relations

5 between Maoris and new settlers. The new museology changed the story line to one that told of historically good relations between German Jews and their hosts, except for a few troubled moments. Attendance has been good. We Are Here: Curating Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations - Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby From 2007 to 2012, the Montreal Life Stories project carried out around 500 interviews of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations. The interviewees were invited to talk about themselves in their own way, in front of the camera. With We Are Here, the public is invited to discover remarkable life paths through excerpts of interviews and personal objects. The exhibition illustrates all of the diversity of the experiences and demonstrates how important it is to avoid clichés and preconceptions. As is the case of the project that gave birth to it, We Are Here focuses on individual stories as a whole, before, during, after, and today. How did the people interviewed rebuild their lives in Montreal? How do they share their memories with their children and their families? What can be said about their children, born and raised here? This presentation will focus on the process of creating the exhibition: What are the main messages and themes that structure the narrative? How were interview excerpts and objects selected? What role did the interviewees and team members play in the process? The Valorization of Victims and its Implications - Harriet F. Senie The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its education center, the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum all focus on the victims as a strategy of diversion rather than the event that killed them, which is evoked in ways that prompt reenactment rather than reflection. Organizer: Dominique Poulot, Professor in Heritage Studies and Art History, University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris, CNRS NYU Research Fellow. For further information, please contact Dominique Poulot (Dominique. Poulot@univ-paris1.fr) or visit our website: The workshop is free and open to the public but please RSVP to Valerie Dubois (valerie.dubois@nyu.edu) / by May 11, Venue: 4 Washington Square North, New York, NY d floor / Conference room. Metro W4 (A, B, C, D, E, F, M), Christopher Street (1), 8st-NYU (N,R), Astor Place (6). Photo credit: Dominique Poulot. Car wreck after a blast in Baghdad, Imperial War Museum in London, UK.

Kuma International Centre for Visual Arts from Post-Conflict Societies Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Founder and director: Claudia Zini

Kuma International Centre for Visual Arts from Post-Conflict Societies Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Founder and director: Claudia Zini MAIN IDEA Kuma International is an international research centre