Memory, Objects and Location

Visiting the three exhibitions, I began to think about the idea of stories and memories being as important for their content as what is left out.

In the Tenement Museum, the elephant in the room was that the apartments were facsimiles of the actual experience, supported by historical artifacts, some oral history and research, but not totally true to their lives. When I was there on a field trip with the Cabinets of Wonder class last semester, we had the other guide leading our tour which led to an actress embodying one of the former residents. I found that experience way more enjoyable because it felt more real to see a person “living” in the space to simply be told what it was like. At the Brooklyn Historical Society, I found myself drawn more to the artifacts hidden in the binders than the actual voices because of what was left out. I was definitely more negative in my feelings about the City Reliquary. It seemed like a museum of kitsch and I felt removed from it compared to the other two that resonated more.

Thinking of my midterm response, I immediately gravitated towards using my thesis project because it’s all about using personal stories and photographs to paint a picture of a Brooklyn that is lost physically and psychologically now. As spring break went on, I was reading Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger and thinking about the story heard at BHS of the man who went to visit the family of his fellow soldier who died in Vietnam. I also remembered in high school where my drama class made short plays out of the epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master. I then turned my thoughts to doing a project on something more personal for me that I have been thinking about and working on as my thesis has kicked into gear.

When I originally thought of my thesis, I was considering using the idea to explore my own family history/memories. My father’s side of the family is gigantic, spread from here in New York throughout the country. Gatherings are large, loud, and confusing affairs because everyone tells stories about things that happened years ago that are fuzzy to them even. But there are some stories and people who are barely mentioned except in hushed tones and one of those has always resonated with me when the bare details. In my father’s childhood, my grandfather’s young newly divorced sister had moved from Mississippi with her children to start a new life here in Brooklyn. From what I’ve heard, she was enjoying a newly single life in an infinitely bigger place than Buford, MS and took to going out to party and drink with new friends. One night, she went missing and then turned up assaulted and murdered in an abandoned lot. Her attacker was never found and her kids were picked up by their father to go back to Mississippi and eventually moved to Las Vegas where they still live. From what I know, it was a majorly traumatizing event in the family and the cousins who moved away also became a shadowy presence in my father’s life since they rarely if ever came to NYC again.

In my midterm (and final), I want to explore through a fictional work a version of this story told through 1st person narratives. My characters are the sister, daughter, nephew, and granddaughter of the woman plus the case detective and a reporter who is the catalyst for bringing the story back to the surface. I’m considering turning it into a video piece for the final, but right now I’m just focused on writing it all out.