VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

During COVID lockdown, many found themselves transfixed by drone footage of a hazmat-suited crew at work in a burial trench in Long Island Sound. The disturbing images soon went viral, spurring all manner of fretfulness, panic and conspiratorial thinking. To some, Hart Island’s very existence was a profound shock. Others found it strangely…familiar, like something recollected from a dream. Indeed, this little-known potter’s field (the nation’s largest, home to ~1 million of NYC’s “friendless” / “indigent” dead) has been a place not only of abject burial but abject memory, for more than 150 years. Of particular concern to those seeking to address its rapid deterioration, and status as a site of “negative heritage,” has been the loss of its archives, and myriad forms of intangible heritage. Briefly recounting some of this history, the paper analyzes the recent work of Hart Island Project (HIP) activists, including a digital mapping/archiving initiative known as the Traveling Cloud Museum (TCM). Informed by decades of research/ advocacy for those traumatized by state abuse and mismanagement, the TCM seeks nothing less than to reconstitute the island’s burial landscape––through geographical, photographic, and statistical data––and with it, various forms of intangible heritage and community memory. Assessing these ambitious efforts to reshape the public imagination––effectively, to transform negative heritage into positive––the paper ends with a discussion of its impacts, and likely fate in this new political moment, especially in light of the surprising recent decision to open the “island of the dead” to the public.