The study of reconstruction at Ground Zero has already shown that the reality of remains, debris, and other ruins had to be excluded in order to produce the site of catastrophe as a place where \u00adconstruction is \u00adpossible in conformity with the American myth of the new \u00adbeginnings.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - See \u201cGround Zero<\/em>, Where Do We Go From Here?,\u201d eds. Bertrand Gervais and Christina Horvarth, \u00c9crire la ville<\/em>, Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al, Centre Figura de recherche sur le texte et l\u2019imaginaire (Figura collection), no. 14, 2005, 183-196; \u201cGround Zero\u2014Quand l\u2019architecture, comme la guerre, devient pr\u00e9ventive,\u201d Le Devoir<\/em>, September 11, 2003, A7.<\/span> What remains at issue now is the treatment of those scraps and \u00adremnants: whether material vestiges that still bear witness to 9\/11 at the World Trade Centre site (such as the sunken imprint revealed by the collapse of the towers, and the bathtub<\/em> or the slurry wall<\/em>, the \u00adfoundations that contain the Hudson River), or those remains that we choose to discard or to rediscover, to preserve (in a museological sense) or to bury, and their vertiginous proliferation in the forms, languages, and technologies of a contemporary culture exposed to danger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The speed with which debris was evacuated and the site was cleaned cannot be justified solely on the base of a search for survivors and human remains. This swift action was intended to rebuild a certain kind of \u00adenclosure through the process of domesticating remains. The \u00adrhetoric of the resilient city therefore seeks to contain the event, to enclose it within the limits of an interpretation.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - This is the case not only at Ground Zero, but also in that imprecise trauma zone where the shock wave echoes in the form of personal and social distress as well as in other kinds of borders (or remains) such as the Homeland Security Department<\/em>, the Security Fence<\/em>, and the Secure Border Initiative<\/em>.<\/span> To consider Ground Zero and its relation to waste is only another way of ascertaining that the \u201cLaw of the house\u201d (according to the etymology of the word economy<\/em>) is also the power of disposal, be it of people, narratives, or things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hence the photographic counterpoint of this article: images from another site, the Mbeubeuss garbage dump in the Dakar suburbs, one of the largest landfills of the African continent. A comparison between refuse found on site at Mbeubeuss or Ground Zero would be enough to convince of \u201cour\u201d fabulous power of exclusion and domination if their wasn\u2019t also the ways in which we identify and process (or don\u2019t process) \u201cour\u201d wastes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[T]rash is a dynamic category… created by sorting,\u201d writes Susan Strasser: \u201cNon trash belongs in the house; trash goes outside.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - \u201cAmerican cities and towns no longer operate swill yards or piggeries at the city limits, but they do maintain landfills and incinerators [in addition to toxic waste dumps] in places that are out of the way of all but the poorest citizens,\u201d Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash<\/em> (New York: Owl Books, 2000), 355 p.<\/span> As the \u00adparadigm of all architecture, the house reflects the city as well as the diverse and collective forms of enclosure, inside of which our cultural \u00adpractices exercise the functions of integration and differentiation that ensure the cohesion of familial and social groups. The house is also a \u00adsystem of domination and control. One of its central functions \u00adpertains to the transmission of a culture and its conciliatory mechanisms still based on sacrifice, be it in terms of art or gift, in various exchange forms, through the market or war, or the processing of our wastes. \u201cWe\u201d still believe, therefore, in our power to choose and, most often, \u201cwe\u201d choose to \u00adcontinue to move our trash<\/em> towards the margins of \u201cour\u201d property, \u201c\u00adoutside of our house,\u201d as far as the borders of \u201cour\u201d culture. This economy of \u00adwastes<\/em> is also an ethics that spatially inscribes cultural forms of sacrifice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The debris of the World Trade Centre were gathered and driven \u201cout of the city\u201d to Staten Island\u2019s Fresh Kills garbage dump, two New Jersey scrap metal yards, and a couple of metal recycling sites.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - There is a definite irony in the fact that the site upon which the WTC was built was itself an old dumping ground dating back to colonial days. Unfortunately, lack of space does not allow a comment here on the trajectory of these metal scraps. <\/span> Created in 1947 to solve, albeit temporarily, the problem of the ever-increasing garbage produced by New York City, the 3,000 acres of Fresh Kills Landfill became the municipality\u2019s exclusive dumping grounds and the largest dumpsite in the world.It was finally closed after fifty-three years of operation and after twenty-five years of effort, on the part of the riverside community, to stop the transfer of refuse to the island. Closed on March 22, 2001, the site was reopened on September 13, 2001. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The evacuation of remains \u201cout of\u201d Ground Zero negatively \u00adreinstitutes a certain kind of enclosure around the site whose centre is being emptied out. Throughout this cleanup, the pile becomes the pit<\/em>. Ground Zero becomes the object of a distancing as well as of a symbolic and sacrificial re-appropriation. The site takes on sacred and mythical \u00addimensions as a result of restrictions and prohibitions, which favour a conquering domestication of both the space and the event\u2019s meaning: \u00adrestrictions to access and circulation, in addition to prohibitions against seeing, \u00adphotographing, and displaying ruins, remains, and bodies. These \u00adinterdictions promptly impact the spontaneous memorials and other \u00adgestures that inscribe themselves and are disseminated within the space of the city, in the media, and on the web in response to the event, \u00adleading to a process producing \u201cnew\u201d remains that will be checked neither by \u00adprohibitions, the cleaning of the site, nor the removal of artefacts and informal memorials. On the contrary, under the aegis of memory and \u00adresilience, Ground Zero elicits an incessant proliferation of images, objects, sounds, and stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYour house is burning down, you run back in, what do you save?\u201d (New York Times<\/em>). This question, raised by Bartholomew Voorsanger, one of the architects participating in the conservation team commissioned on-site by municipal and state authorities, does not merely raise the issue of the processing of remains in the immediacy of the collapse of the Twin Towers. What do you save? This is the same as asking: What sacrifice will save \u201cus\u201d? Faced with 1.8 million tons of debris, how does one make a choice? At the Fresh Kills dump, the pile of debris will be meticulously sorted by hand. There is a \u201cmission\u201d at stake, and it pertains to rescue efforts, legal medicine, and police investigation; it demands the \u00adfinding of human remains, personal objects, and clues for future inquests; and it comprises its own \u201cexperts,\u201d authorities, and truths. This sorting involves specific selection criteria, since the recovery of relics points to their restitution as well as to a quest for meaning. Through the \u00adcreation of lists (objects, victims, survivors, those compensated, etc.), of \u00adinventories that tend to be self-contained, the narrative establishes itself. Most of the sorted remains will not have been \u201crecovered\u201d at Fresh Kills or at Ground Zero; they will have been \u201csaved.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first choices are improvised and spontaneous, and the \u00adselection criteria pertain to the World Trade Center and the collapse of the Twin Towers.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - There was an immediate \u201cconsensus\u201d regarding the need to preserve certain \u00admaterial remains. This was the case with many \u201cstructural remnants\u201d of the towers as well as with fragments of artworks. They soon left Ground Zero to be \u00adtransported to Warehouse 17 at the JFK international airport, a site of storage, reserve (in a museological sense), and sanctuary. The countless commentaries diffused in the media insist on the usefulness of this \u201ccollection\u201d in its ability to communicate the catastrophic proportions of the attack, the chaos and raw emotion associated with it, and the magnitude or power of the event itself. <\/span> Museum institutions are soon called upon and the quest for meaning is hastened, under the shelter of a certain historical and cultural perspective. At this stage, curatorial choices begin to be differenciated and criteria become specialized.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - One of the further developments of this study will focus one the analysis of these collections, the creation and specialization of 9\/11-related collections by museum institutions, including the countless exhibitions that have marked the process.<\/span> The narrative has a strong tendency to align itself with the dominant \u00addiscourse of faith and progress. Of even greater influence, however, is the power of attraction of the cultural forms of faith and progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, the narratives of resilience will be effectively relayed through the museum\u2019s authority and expertise, through photography and institutional or informal archival practices (archived are artefacts, images, websites, sounds, and oral histories), through different 9\/11 \u201cexhibitions of relics,\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - For instance, as both a quest for social legitimacy and cohesion as well as a \u00adfundraising initiative for the construction of the \u201caltar,\u201d the memorial Reflecting Absence<\/em>, the exhibition 9\/11 Tribute Tour<\/em> was shown in several cities prior to its \u00adeventual integration on the Ground Zero site. <\/span> as well as through the aesthetization of remains\u2014another form of their domestication\u2014in numerous artistic forms (photography, \u00adliterature, cinema, cartoons, websites, and web art). <\/p>\n\n\n\n At Ground Zero, reconstruction rests on this socially and \u00adeconomically productive from of denial, which also forms the basis of the rhetoric of the resilient city (Vale and Campanella)8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - \u201cUrban resilience is an interpretative framework proposed by local and national leaders and shaped and accepted by citizens in the wake of disaster. However \u00adequitable or unjust, efficient or untenable, that framework serves as the foundation upon which the society builds anew.\u201d Laurence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 340, 353. We have only to think of G. W. Bush\u2019s speech associating homeland security with the national economy and inciting the citizens of the United States to consume as a humanitarian gesture, or of mayor Giuliani\u2019s invitations to go out, spend money, and consume\u2014in short, \u201cto act as if all were well.\u201d <\/span> and contributes widely to the \u00addomestication of 9\/11\u2019s remains. It is fundamentally a matter of denying the failure of the culture of sacrifice. Ultimately, it is a denial that aims to safeguard this same culture. The war on terror seeks to counter aggression in the same manner as the rhetoric of the resilient city seeks to retaliate against its symbolic defeat, i.e., by means of the same values and culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To the power of buying and consumption corresponds an \u00adanalogous power of discarding and disposal. September 11, 2001, and our cultural response to this event offer a formidable demonstration of this double power. The \u00addestruction of the World Trade Center seems challenged through a \u00adparadoxical potlatch that proceeds by valorizing its remains\u2014an \u00adescalation of conspicuous consumption linked to the imperatives of treatment, \u00adpreservation, and the \u00addissemination of remains, and, \u00adsimultaneously, a refusal to \u00adacknowledge loss. However, to whom is this symbolic retort addressed, if not to the same culture that \u201csuffers from the blow\u201d? It is a culture that tries desperately to protect itself from \u00addanger in a manner similar to its shielding itself from what it has excluded. Thus, rather than preserving the memory of an event, the domesticated remains of September 11, 2001, serve to produce the salvational memory of a culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Vivian Ralickas<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/64_DO02_Lachappelle_Decharge-de-Mbeubeuss-2-scaled.jpg\")
Dakar, S\u00e9n\u00e9gal, 2007.
Photo: Louise Lachapelle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n