Memory in the City of Tomorrow

editorial Jorinde Seijdel rather subject to socio-cultural, historical, political and techno- (NO)MEMORY logical forces, which continually redefine their conditions and The subtitle of the new Open limits and continually reconfigure reads, ‘cahier on art and the memory. The current culture seems public domain’. A cahier on art equally dominated by safe-keeping and the public domain is not and remembering as by discarding necessarily or exclusively about and forgetting. Cultural heritage art in public space. The physical is a topic of interest, as is the interpretation often associated search for workable memorials and with ‘art in public space’ is contemporary monuments. Technology often too limited. In the new Open guarantees unlimited storage space public space is seen as a compo- for information and data. But at nent of the larger arena of public the same time the media and opinion-making and public life, an consumer culture contribute to arena that can take multiple a ‘memorylessness’ and transience forms. Within this Open sees art that make it seem as though not as an isolated phenomenon, but everything were beginning all as a participant bearing joint over again. responsibility, as well as in The present pluriform and post- relation to other signification ideological public domain is not disciplines and developments. This shored up by one single binding does not imply that Open is an collective memory, but by count- interdisciplinary cahier, but it less material and immaterial memo- does imply that it includes room ries. These short and long-term for themes, visions and viewpoints memories oppose or overlap one that sometimes criss-cross these another. The current organization various areas. Something like this and experience of the public seems urgent in a time when all domain is defined in part by the notions of publicness are being tension that exists between indi- reappraised. vidual and collective, between old From this perspective Open 7 and new, between autochthonous and explores the current status of allochthonous memories. Within the memory within art and the public public domain, memory (its con- domain. Public and collective tent, control or place) has an forms of remembrance are definite- impact on the way in which we view ly not static or neutral, but each other, ourselves, our past 4 Open 2004/Nr. 7/(No)Memory and our future. He who controls viewed artist and archivist Tjebbe the memories and archives of a van Tijen about his project society controls time and space. Unbombing the World 1911–2011, It is precisely for this reason which aims to document air that keeping them accessible and bombardments all over the world. sharing them is something that This Open includes a separate concerns everyone. supplement, designed by Lonnie van How can active use be made of Brummelen, with a text on identity the information and the memories and local memory, entitled ‘Wij’ stored in the current ‘memory (‘We’), by artist Arnoud Holleman, places’? What is the role of art written for the Proeftuin Twente. in this? Is such a thing as In addition Open 7 includes collective remembrance still shorter texts taken directly from possible? How can the cultural actual practice or linked to (art) heritage be made accessible projects, and the books section without turning city and country has been expanded. There is a into one big open-air museum? And story by the photographer and what are the implications of new writer Hans Aarsman, and the media and digital storage techno- column on art as public space was logies for the social and histori- written by philosopher Henk cal process of safe-keeping and Oosterling. Nico Bick photographed remembering? several archives for Open, inclu- In Open 7 Rudi Laermans analyses ding the Amsterdam Municipal the current ‘heritage regime’, Archives and the National Archives while Frank van Vree examines in The Hague. This issue also the political significance of the includes a letter by Barbara contemporary monument. Cor Wagenaar Visser, written under the aegis argues for the use of time as an of Sternet, the network of twelve instrument in the Belvedere poli- distribution buildings of the cy, in which the cultural history former PTT designated as ‘recent serves as a source of inspiration urban heritage’. Artists Joke in the spatial planning of the Robaard and Nico Dockx produced Netherlands. The German media contributions for Open based on theorist Wolfgang Ernst demon- their own preoccupations with the strates how the archive, in a archive. digital culture, literally becomes metaphor. Jorinde Seijdel subjects Bill Gates’s image archive to closer inspection, while Sven Lütticken writes on the ‘conspira- cy of publicness’ at work in the mass media. Geert Lovink inter- Editorial 5 Rudi Laermans forces the division between past and Paradoxes of present. According to Patrimonialization Laermans they are two sides of the same Using several histori- coin.The often cal lines, the Belgian expressed criticism of sociologist Rudi Disneyfication merely Laermans analyses diverts attention. the present ‘heritage regime’. Actualism, which so dominates the modern era, is characterized by an emphasis on forgetting.The present focus on heritage seems to contradict this.Yet stressing the autonomous value of the past in fact rein- 6 Open 2004/Nr. 7/(No)Memory A lot changes in a man’s life. increase the tourist appeal of a city. In the essay The gentleman regularly went to look at quoted above, Groys goes one step further. the landscape marred by motorways, because Rather than the urban patrimony awaiting the he knew how it had looked in the past. tourist gaze, it is the reverse that takes place, A curious habit. according to Groys:‘it is only tourism that cre- (Armando, De haperende schepping / ates these monuments, it is only because of ‘The Faltering Creation’, 2003) tourism that a city is monumentalized, it is only in passing through the city that the ever-flow- In Cologne the famed Dom is merely a good ing, constantly changing everyday urban stone’s throw from the train station. In environment is turned into a monumental something like five minutes you walk from image of eternity’.This stimulating premise by the station to the majestic church building the Groys is rather arbitrary. It ignores, after all, Cologne tourism office likes to pride itself on. the whole heritage or patrimony machine, the Those five minutes on foot bridge a huge gap in dynamic network of legal regulations, govern- time, as Boris Groys rightly notes in ‘Die Stadt ment subsidies and divergent interests, that auf Durchreise’ (‘Travelling Through the City’), each time selects specific artefacts from the one of the essays in Logik der Sammlung (‘The past, transforms them into workable political Logic of Collecting’).While the architecture of and administrative dossiers, with official the Cologne train station cannot really be protection and preservation as the final result. termed contemporary, it is nevertheless vaguely Without these the tourist gaze would simply recognizable as ‘of our time’. Moreover, we have a lot less to look at.This gaze, in quite a would not be surprised if the station building few cases of patrimony policy, serves as an were to be partially demolished or if an entirely implicit premise and indirectly contributes to new station were to be built somewhere else. it. But in any case heritage production and The Dom, on the other hand, seems timeless, heritage tourism are two different things, even indeed eternal, and alludes to an era other than if one undeniably implies the other. our own.‘The monumental in the city is thus The usual patrimony or heritage practice for us the other, the inaccessible, the displaced has very direct effects on how time and history in time – and therefore the invariable in space’, presently manifest themselves within the urban writes Groys.‘The Dom of Cologne can be environment. For the time being, along with destroyed, like a utopian city, but it cannot the officially commemorated city area, a usually be altered.’ far larger section of the city emerged, without a The difference between, in Groys’s imagery, ‘stone memory’, often even without a past as the monumental and the changeable city is not such. Particularly in new-build districts, as in factually given but rather actively produced. post-war suburbia, there are few if any archi- Over the last decades the gap between old and tectural signs that refer to the past. Nor does new urbanity, the historic city centre and the one find many symbols from the present rest of the public space has increased, by the intended for the long run, with a view to creat- generalization of what is officially known as ing something like a spatial memory.The public patrimony or heritage policy.We know that a space is all provisional; it exudes no supratem- portion of the built environment is quite often porality or monumentality – and when it designated as historical patrimony in order to exceptionally does so, the constructions seem Paradoxes of Patrimonialization 7 contrived and rhetorical. In short, designating a on a living community of remembrance. It is small portion of the urban space as patrimony one thing to preserve and restore; it is another underscores the manifest lack of memory of the to remember – in the sense of ‘think of’– the greater part of the built environment of the past through relics.The inventoried and classi- twentieth century, especially that of the post- fied, often legally protected monumental city war era. Is the visit to the ‘monumental city’ is of course never completely without memory. supposed to compensate for, if not legitimize, It has at minimum a memory of use, which living and working in the ‘changeable city’? probably has a collective character to a signifi- There is another paradox: the monumental cant degree.

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