This is a small, open-media project on documenting and writing about a monument, a memorial or site of memory in Providence RI. The project has two components: the fieldwork and the written presentation.
The fieldwork part of your project should be documented in your logbook. Since every monument or site of memory demands its own methods of documentation and engagement, it is part of the assignment for you to decide what media, what techniques you are going to use to document the site/monument. This should include drawing and sketching on site, photography, and verbal descriptions of the place and its relationship to its immediate environment or the urban space around it. You are encouraged to do library or archival research about the monument and carry out informal interviews with residents and locals to record particular memories, stories, imaginations attached to those places or monuments.
Your case study can range from small commemorative plaques on street corners, odd industrial ruins lying around in town, major historic monuments, tombs, statues or some imaginary place about which there are public rumors and urban legends. The written component of the project should be around 1000 words (3-4 pages- double spaced- total 5-6 pages with imagery and bibliography). The style of the writing can be academic, like a research paper, or creative. In any case, the recommendation is to integrate creatively the visual materials that you collect into your verbal presentation of the monument.
Suggested case studies:
- First Baptist Church
- Slater Mill
- Armenian monument in North Main Cemetery
- The Tunnel that runs underneath Brown
- Abandoned railroad lift bridge on the Seakonk River (Fox Point-Crook Point)
- Armenian monument on Douglas Avenue
- Rocky Point Amusement Park, Warwick RI.
- Rhode Island's Brownfields
- www.thesteelyard.org/ Steelyard
- The unfinished Masonic Temple
Suggested Readings, sample projects and resources:
- Nora, Pierre; 1989. “Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire,” Representations 26: 7-24.
- Classical Providence: landscapes, monuments, rediscovery
- An Arcade Project by Elise Nuding.
- Archaeology of Rhode Island Hall by Elise Nuding
- Museum of Westminster Street: Stories from a street in Providence, Rhode Island
- Speaking of Wickenden: Voices from the Fox Point Oral History Archive
- Art in Ruins
Due: Tuesday October 4, 2011, 5 pm.
Assignment1.docx