2 - Memorial Projects: Memory Work as Archive Work

Summary

IN AN ARTICLE from 2013, Bill Niven argues that recent Holocaust memorials make notable use of “archival … elements.” Drawing on the work of Paul Williams, which shows the shift towards commemoration in museums and the prominence of so-called “memorial museums,” Niven argues that a similar movement can be observed in memorials, which increasingly include elements associated with museums and with archives. Crucially, these “combimemorials,” as Niven calls them, “begin to dissolve the traditional boundaries between memorials on the one hand, and archives and exhibitions on the other.” As well as aligning themselves with such changing trends in museums, combimemorials also place an emphasis on public engagement, and thus mark an important difference from the “second generation” of so-called countermonuments that preceded them. Whereas countermonuments centered on the artist's engagement with the difficulty of representing the “gaps, rifts, and malleability” of collective memory, combimemorials turn on the collective that constitutes this memory, “encouraging people to engage actively in researching, remembering, and memorializing.” Moreover, combimemorials— unlike countermonuments, whose initial and characteristic provocative potential has, perhaps inevitably, diminished—facilitate the continuation of the work of memory, both in its performance and documentation: “Exhibiting and archiving this concrete memory work … the memorial becomes potentially ever-expanding testimony not just to the remembered, but also to a process of accretive memory work.” Thus, the combimemorial's archival aspects relate not only to the historical events being commemorated but also to a recording of the process of commemoration and memorialization itself. We might say that the combimemorial comes to function as an archive of Aufarbeitung.

Niven maps the transition from countermonuments to combimemorials onto a shift from second- to third-generation engagement, but acknowledges that generational overlap means that such clear distinctions are not always found in practice and that some countermonuments already show features more typical of combimemorials. He cites the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as an important example: Peter Eisenman's field of stele exists alongside the underground information center, which adds dimensions of the archive, museum, and exhibition to the memorial. Here, documentary evidence is used to give historical meaning to the abstract sculpture, and demonstrates the important relationship at stake in memorialization between memory and history. According to Niven, countermonuments and combimemorials negotiate this relationship differently.