For our final project, my group has been working towards proposing a ritual or festival as a way of enabling the people of Minami Sanriku to map out their emotional landscape as they work to rebuild their physical infrastructure that has been destroyed. As my group members have already mentioned, our proposed ritual starts with a return from the hills back to the town in the lowlands. Starting with a sound signal, the people will retrieve balloons from the hillside and walk to the locations at which their memories are strongly tied. While the sun is up, they can mark sites of memories with a mixture of seeds and pigment, and as the sun goes down, their balloons will illuminate, and the locations of their memories will be marked with light. The whole process will be recorded from above, and a new map of the emotional landscape of Minami Sanriku can be produced. The people can leave their balloons with their strongest memories, and head out to the water with their fellow townsmen.

This ritual is the culmination of my group members’ individual ideas. We all wanted to find a way to map out and recreate the emotional landscape of the town, but had different approaches. Our ideas naturally flowed together into a unifying process. My contribution to the ritual is the implementation of light as one of the ways to map the infrastructure of memories. By viewing the lights at night, we can see the locations of the memories without the need for physical infrastructure.

Coming from a physics background, I have always been very fond of light and its beautiful characteristics. I have seen images of the Earth at night taken from space and have noted their complete lack of physical features—they only show peoples’ locations. Many maps of Minami Sanriku show the physical landscape before and after the tsunami. Using this method of mapping light would allow the people to see how their town has stayed the same, rather than how it has changed, just as the light from dead stars still shines brightly in the night sky.

I have been trying to find the appropriate method of illuminating our balloons, and through my group’s discussions, we have decided to place the lights inside the balloons so that they will glow as light beacons, incorporating light into the beauty of the gift, and not using it solely as a memory marker from above.

To remember the victims from New Jersey who died during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the state of New Jersey recently opened the memorial “Empty Sky” at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. The memorial site is directly across the Hudson River from “Ground Zero” in Manhatten. It consists of “two 30-foot-high rectangular towers that stretch 208 feet, 10 inches long— the exact width of the World Trade Center towers” with a walkway inbetween so that visitors can read the names of those who died in the attacks inscribed on the stainless steel towers. The walls are in a direct line to where the Twin Towers stood in Lower Manhatten. The construction of the memorial faced protests from groups who did not want the memorial to obstruct views of Manhatten and for New Jersey to waste taxpayer money during economically difficult times.

I find it interesting that this memorial does not sit in the location of what it is memorializing. Rather, it sits across the river in a location where the real location can be seen, and can thus incorporate the actual site in its design even though it sits in a different city—and state. I think it represents the memory of the event more than the place itself as seen through a particular community that was directly affected by the event.



An article from the Guardian this week describes how unions and anti-capitalist campaigners in South Africa are protesting the upcoming takeover of the Massmart supermarket chain by Walmart, currently the largest grocer in the United States. The protesters “fear job losses, the livelihoods of local producers and Walmart’s reputation for being anti-union and, allegedly, aggressive in its dealings with staff and competitors.” It will be interesting to see what happens when this case is heard by the tribunal at the end of October, although, as the article suggests, it seems unlikely that a deal long in the making will be stopped. This conflict is a case of a large American company trying to enter the market in Africa and potentially posing a threat to local producers and workers.