Vibrations of History

 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

 

Gillian was frustrated. She had assembled a collection of historic and contemporary maps so she could layer the last hundred years of building and demolition into a single, time-collapsed site drawing. Unfortunately, these pasts and presents were not cooperating; the boundaries of buildings and streets were refusing to align into a clean site plan. She had scaled and measured, chosen consistent set points, overlaid and matched, and yet multiple lines that should have been describing the same edges would not snap into place. The outline of every street, building, and corner of her waterfront site slipped just off register, like a disorderly stack of papers.

During her year at the WAAC as a study-away student, Gillian had discovered the joys of Sanborn maps as she researched the waterfront site of her studio project, A Museum of Histories for the City of Alexandria. The plural in the project title—histories, not history—was a deliberate provocation by the Studio Clio faculty to nudge the students to question singular master narratives. With all the chaos of the preceding year, questioning everything seemed obligatory. With apologies to Marx, even if all that was solid hadn't entirely melted into air, all that seemed solid had at least been shaken off its foundations. The City of Alexandria, like many American cities, had already been cleaning the rosy tint from its glasses and was currently deep into the difficult process of seeing itself differently. Maybe a different kind of museum could help; maybe students could imagine such a thing.

Despite their disobedience, the collection of maps showed that the waterfront site had churned with construction and destruction as buildings and piers rose and fell, burned or demolished, and the shoreline crept eastward, built on the backs and ballast of old ships. Gillian wanted her museum to tell the full stories of the site and she hoped the Sanborn set would be a method to divine which parts of the site were accustomed to bearing buildings and which had spent their centuries unburdened. It was a productive strategy, if you were willing to tolerate such an an astigmatic drawing.

“It’s just a mess of a drawing,” she said in our zoom crit, laughing at the futility of the effort and the unpresentable result of her time-consuming research. But it wasn’t a mess. It was an epiphany, illuminating that the very pluralities we had hoped students would program into their buildings were actually latent, and still vibrating, in situ. This beautiful mess of a drawing invited creative misreadings and more questions than answers: What am I seeing? Are these lines of topography? Multiple layers of enclosure? Evidence of the multiverse? And what are we supposed to do with all the stuff histories leave for us if we can’t bring them into focus?

A beautiful mess of a drawing, by Gillian Wilhelm

 

We named our studio "Studio Clio" for the Muse of history. As daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Clio was blessed/cursed with a father who possessed more strength than judgement and a mother who never forgot anything. According to some, she was also the Muse of the stringed musical instrument, the lyre, because she is associated with celebrating achievements. Great moments of history have often been memorialized in song. That said, our modern minds don’t usually mix history with the arts of dance, music, and poetry, because we have come to think of history—singular master narrative-- as serious business. History is thick books and slow documentaries; it’s the recitation that this great man followed that great man followed another great man in umpteen-forty-nine; that this place invaded that place and burned it to the ground, so a new place takes the old place's place.

Histories—plural narratives-- are more like the lyre itself than it might seem at first. As with all stringed instruments, there are many different ways to play the same chord, and even a single string voices more frequencies than its name suggests.  Clio, Muse of Histories, knows it's the vibrations that make the music.