Episode 56: Memorials (Collaboration with Hi-Phi Nation)
“By performing it, by making it into an event rather than a thing, your experience of the memorial is the is the act of remembering. ”
When tragedy strikes an individual, a nation, or an entire people, artists and architects are tasked with designing a public display that memorializes the event and its victims. But how do you do that? In this episode, we explore the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in DC, the 9/11 Memorial, and others, to look at how respecting and remembering loss collides with the demands of history and politics. Why do abstract, rather than representational, memorials resonate more profoundly in recent years? And no matter how well done they are, will they inevitably lose their impact after a single generation?
This episode of The Lonely Palette was produced in collaboration with Slate’s Hi-Phi Nation.
James E. Young is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and Founding Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst. He has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1983. His teaching and research areas include narrative theory, cultural memory studies, Holocaust studies, and visual culture.
K. Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Director of the Master in Design Studies program. Hays joined the Faculty of Design in 1988, teaching courses in architectural history and theory. Hays received the Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976. From MIT he received the Master of Architecture degree in Advanced Studies in 1979, and the Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art in 1990.
Karen Krolak is a free-range collaborator and mentor, and founder of The Dictionary of Negative Space, an interdisciplinary lament.
Images Referenced:
Music Used:
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Drone Pine,” “Taoudella,” “The Consulate,” “Our Fingers Cold,” “Slider”
Silver Maple, “After the Rain”
Megan Wofford, “Awake”
Yi Nantiro, “Blue Lantern”
Christian Nanzell, “Contraband”
Gunnar Johnsen, “Documents 4”
Fabien Tell, “Liason”
Arden Forest, “Monastral”
Niclas Gustavsson, “My Kind of Illusion 1,” “Reflection 4”
