Providence is a city studded with monuments. Plaques, statues, and historic landmarks litter the landscape filling out everyday experience with places intended to force us to remember. Most of these monuments are solid, composed of marble and steel, but what about those less tangible, more personal monuments that are part of a living landscape? These changing monuments are breathing things. Due to their fluid nature they don’t ever lessen in meaning with time, but instead outlast monuments of stone because they are able to bend to the will of the collective memory. Never static, these lieu de memoire belong to a part of a larger social memory which only uses a material site as a means of communication instead of an end result. Thus, these memorials exist long after they appear destroyed.
I never noticed my monument until it was “destroyed”. All last year I was acclimatized to seeing the poetry on the back of the bathroom stalls in the women’s facility beyond the Gate. I enjoyed seeing it there, written in thick black sharpie, but it never occurred to me that it was a transient feature. This year I returned and the sharpie was gone. A void was left where beautiful words once stood. Yet, I still remembered them, and to my surprise, so did others. People around me talked about the poetry for the first time. What was once a part of the unspoken social collective suddenly became a shared social memory.
So, although this site might appear meaningless and silly, it still became a memorial for all the students who had ever graced its stalls. This site still shares the qualities of functionality, materiality, and symbolism with all the other lieu de memoire around the world.
