AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

The nearly 30,000 artifacts at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum serve to bear witness to the terrorist attacks and commemorate and honor the stories of the 2,983 victims of September 2001 and February 1993 and all those who are affected in their aftermath. The museum’s nascent collection was the result of immediate action taken by local cultural heritage workers in collaboration with law enforcement and recovery organizations along with donations from survivors, victims’ families and friends, and local and global communities. These objects are in service to the people they represent and provide individual voices to a universal tragic experience.  Consultation and relationship-building with 9/11-community members and donors is integral to the Museum’s mission, and community input is considered in exhibition development. In this memorial context, the ability of an object to telegraph parts of a narrative may take priority over its material “authentic” state. 

Conservators at the Museum put great thought into when, how, and whether to provide conservation intervention, recognizing that any treatment can alter interpretation of objects that hold great personal significance. In instances of Ground Zero-recovered artifacts, they may be all that remains of someone who died that day. Generally, interventive treatment is limited to changes identified as occurring after a particular moment such as the day of attacks or the moment of acquisition. Even then, the decision to not treat is given heavier weight than it may at traditional cultural institutions; damage is often integral to the significance of an artifact. However, there are circumstances in which these principles accede to storytelling that represents or honors the community. This presentation discusses instances when intervention resulted in a visibly changed artifact, where the after-treatment condition is not only of greater physical stability, but also of greater accessibility and emotional power. 

Case studies include artifacts that have images of victims or other deeply personal associations where restoration of imagery such as faces was conducted even if the damage was part of the object’s “authentic” historical narrative. Another example is the consideration of the toxic dust that coated everything in lower Manhattan following the collapse of the buildings. Leaving the encrusted dust in place, the way the object was recovered, might be the most “accurate” method of display, but issues of toxicity and available resources introduced discussion of when it is appropriate to remove or consolidate dust. Decisions to abate dust may allow for highlighting one narrative (the impact of crumpled steel or the emblazoned logo of a particular FDNY Ladder company) over another (the pervasiveness of toxic dust), resulting in some of the institution’s most impactful visitor experiences. Consolidation of dust, on the other hand, which alters the chemical composition central to its toxicity narrative, may allow for an object to safely travel and experienced by a broader audience. For trauma heritage collections, we must acknowledge that loss of an object’s traumatic context may be inevitable. This means that decision-making around preservation and treatment can diverge from traditional methodologies.