Abstract
At the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the material culture of everyday life infuses the heart of a story in which ordinary people, on an otherwise unexceptional workday, were thrust into the vortex of a global event. Within the museum, objects serve as proxies for the thousands of individuals that confronted drastic choices. Personal possessions recovered in the wreckage and objects that speak to a victim’s life are especially poignant when their meaning is explained by loved ones.
This chapter explores the complex issues of curatorial practice, collection building, and memorialization of shared traumatic experience. It will also address some of the digital culture related to 9/11, and how the unification of the material and digital and use of technology in the museum space offer unique opportunities for storytelling, and memorialization of victims of mass violence. Although the National September 11 Memorial Museum chronicles an event of continuing global consequence, this chapter seeks to emphasize the importance of gathering evidence of the human impact of any disruptive contemporaneous event that is emotionally sensitive, politically charged, and historically unsettled.
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The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s growing repository of recovered property items emanate from the Pentagon and Flight 93 crash sites, in addition to the World Trade Center site/“Ground Zero.” The museum has acquired (and continues to actively collect) nonrecovered material as well, such as photographs, videotapes, voice messages, workplace memorabilia, incident-specific documents, and original writings including letters, emails, and diaries that help to illuminate personal experiences during and after September 11, 2001, and February 26, 1993. The museum also collects photographs, personal mementos, and other memorial materials to commemorate the lives of those who perished on 9/11 and in the February 26, 1993, attack on the World Trade Center. This collecting effort in particular supports the presentation of victims in the memorial exhibition, In Memoriam, which provides visitors with the opportunity to learn about and connect to the victims of these attacks.
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Author’s transcription.
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Details regarding the development of the 9/11 Memorial Museum and curatorial intent come from the experience of the author, Alexandra Drakakis.
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Drakakis, A. (2020). From the Material to the Digital: Reflections on Collecting and Exhibiting Grief at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. In: Zucker, E., Simon, D. (eds) Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39395-3_6
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