Minimalism, Memory and the Reflection of Absence

Abstract

Within days, even hours after the collapse of the New York World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, people felt an urgent need to create a presence of some kind to mark its disappearance. This rush to remember is all the more striking since the metamorphosis of a historical place into a site of memory has always taken time: decades, even generations. This was, however, not the case with the site soon to be called Ground Zero. As Richard Stamelman explains, using terms derived from the French historian Pierre Nora, a milieu de mémoire (the moment of the event itself in the historical here and now) was rapidly transformed into a lieu de mémoire (a memory site) in order to turn the ‘nothing’ of Ground Zero into ‘something’ (2003, p. 15). Many ad hoc proposals for memorials were made at the time, but to date we are still waiting for an official memorial to become a lasting place of remembrance for the victims’ relatives and friends, and for the city, the nation and the world.