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Exhibit Explores 9/11 Living Memorials

The multimedia show is an outcropping of the ongoing Living Memorials Project, mandated by Congress in 2002 as a response to the previous year’s September 11 attacks.

Meaghan O'Neill -- Interior Design, 9/12/2006 12:00:00 AM

In 2002, at the request of Congress, the USDA Forest Service initiated its Living Memorials Project, a response to the September 11 attacks of the previous year. Hundreds of individuals and groups across the country created memorials that range from single tree-plantings to the creation of new parks to the restoration of existing forests. The project was developed both to provide funding to a number of community memorial projects and to help understand changes in the use of trees and the landscape in response to this unprecedented incident.

Today, nearly 700 community-based memorials exist, and next month, from October 7 to 27, the New School and the Forest Service will highlight these efforts in a multimedia exhibition called “Land-markings: 12 Journeys Through 9/11 Living Memorials,” which tells the story of hundreds of sites via photos, video, and other archival information. Curated by Parsons and the New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center in partnership with the Forest Service, the exhibition compresses four years of research into 12 digital “journeys,” which showcase living memorials nationwide, ranging from sunflowers planted in found spaces in New York to the site of the Flight 93 plane crash in Pennsylvania, to an elementary school garden in Florida.

“September 11 memorials reflect traditional, almost universal, mourning rituals and beliefs,” says Erika Svendsen of the USDA Forest Service, who extensively documented several of the memorial sites. “This exhibition is a step along a much longer path of understanding of not just how we memorialize events and individuals, but how we interact with our public landscapes.”

“The New School is committed to exploring the intersection of design and the pressing social and political issues of our day,” says Bob Kerrey, president of The New School, who also who served on the 9/11 Commission. “‘Living Memorials’ demonstrates how the design of our environment can play an important role in expressing and coming to terms with powerful emotions.”

The exhibition will be presented in the newly restored National Park Service Federal Hall National Memorial in downtown Manhattan, at 26 Wall Street, and will open to the public in conjunction with the re-opening of the space.