Thesis Research 2015: “Museums of the Present Day: Contemporary Abandoned Spaces”

By Natalie Wright

“Museums of the Present Day: Contemporary Abandoned Spaces,” deals with the material qualities of contemporary abandoned spaces and their objects. More specifically, I analyzed spaces and objects that were abandoned from the twentieth century onwards. After following the recent explosion of interest in contemporary abandoned spaces, I wondered why they have captured the imagination of so many. One key question guided my analysis: “What is it about the material qualities of contemporary abandoned spaces that elicit such emotive responses from visitors?” This question eventually evolved into, “How and why do abandoned spaces and their objects communicate memory and emotion?” In order to answer these questions, I traveled to different types of abandoned spaces across the Eastern United States (industrial buildings at the Winterthur Museum and Garden, the abandoned sections of Ellis Island, a silent movie theatre, a community center, Eastern State Penitentiary and its abandoned collections, and an abandoned bank) and interviewed other visitors to these sites. It was in these conversations that interviewees used museums as a comparison to better explain their experiences in abandoned spaces. This comparison was a way to illuminate the specific materiality of contemporary abandoned spaces and the uniquely affective responses it demands. As I will explain, my core questions and methodology led to me to explore the materiality of memory, emotion, absence, ghosts, marginalized histories, souvenirs, and alternative museums. While the shear popularity of these sites points toward why they might be important for material culture scholars to examine, I hope to have proven their value as a research topic by exploring how they connect to, and further, so many material culture topics and theories.

In the past fifteen years, a veritable surge of articles appeared online showcasing abandoned spaces and their objects. You have probably seen one or two – perhaps the Paris time capsule apartment that was recently found, or articles showcasing abandoned buildings in Detroit. Indeed, the Guardian’s 3rd most popular article since 2010 is “Detroit in Ruins.” These articles are part of a larger trend of “ruin lust,” which includes “urbex,” the practice of visiting abandoned spaces to explore and photograph them.

The popularity of Google searches for the term ‘abandoned places’ between 2004-2015. Google Trends, “Explore: Abandoned Places,” accessed April 1, 2015, http://bit.ly/1GusIQx.

Ruin lust is not new (think: wealthy Victorian homeowners creating their own ruins for their properties), but contemporary abandoned spaces are. Unlike their older counterparts, such as Greco-Roman ruins, contemporary ruins are not finished the ruining process. Often abandoned with an immediacy such as shutting a door for the last time, abandoned spaces are filled with objects that create the effect of a time capsule. In these sites, time at once stays still and passes. Materials build up or erode, such as layers of dust or the decomposition of textiles, to create materializations of time – a process that could only happen with the stillness of the space. These materializations of time transform the site into a melancholic and nostalgic one – characteristics that are heightened by the fact that these spaces, and the stories they embody, have been forgotten.

Materials build up or erode, materializing time passing. Here, liquid that once filled these cups evaporated over time. Photo by Natalie Wright.

Remembering something takes work. Memories are forgotten unless they are consistently recalled, and even when an object materializes a memory, it needs to be preserved in order to also keep that memory alive. Societies and nations base collective identity on what to remember or forget, and tie these memories together into a narrative. These narratives are often aspirational – remembering the good and forgetting the bad. So, letting something deteriorate and ruin is a material representation of it being forgotten, and of it being excluded from the narrative of past people and events that societies wish to remember. It won’t come as a surprise to you that societies do not want to remember negative, or non-elite histories. In my small sample of abandoned spaces across the Eastern United States, a great deal of abandoned sites were mental health institutions, prisons, isolation hospitals, and the like – places where unwanted people were grouped and isolated away from society. But other places I visited were simply industrial – spaces where middle-lower class individuals worked and lived. These spaces, as well as the stories and people that they materialize, fall outside of societal remembrance practices.

Non-elite history: the interior of one of Winterthur’s abandoned buildings. This building, named the Creamery, had a variety of uses including laundry for the staff. The washing machines and dryer pictured here are exactly the same as those found in Ellis Island’s abandoned hospitals. Photo by Natalie Wright.

Negative history: dust covers the inside of Ellis Island’s morgue slats.  Photo by Natalie Wright.

Despite the fact that these spaces fall outside of remembrance practices, they still exist. They are involuntary memories. Societies do not put in the effort to remember them, yet they endure. In their unwanted endurance, these spaces and their objects get us thinking about memory, and the ways that objects hold memories in different ways.

Ruins retain certain types of material memory. Where persons are in constant contact with objects throughout everyday life, these objects take the body in. Clothes remember the shape and scent of their wearer, floors remember steps, and buttons and switches remember hands and fingers. A person’s physicality remains in objects long after the body is gone. Anyone who has gone through a loved one’s possessions after they have passed will understand this – especially as it relates to clothing. In ruins, these material memories, or witness marks, take two forms: routinized material memories and momentary material memories.

Routinized memories occur over time, where a long-term relationship between person and object creates wear. I found these sorts of memories in socks and shoes at Eastern State Penitentiary, and on buttons and levers at the silent movie theatre and abandoned bank. While these objects spoke to one person’s relationship with an object over time, wear on carpets indicated how many people used that one object. In each case, these wear marks gave clues as to who these missing persons were, what their gate was like, what their daily work routine was like, how they interacted with these objects, and how these objects interacted with them. These material memories give shape to a past person’s physicality, directing your attention toward the missing body that created them.

Routinized memories: wear marks can be seen around the heel and toe of this sock found in the abandoned collections at Eastern State Penitentiary. Photo by Natalie Wright. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.

Momentary memories, on the other hand, remember a singular ephemeral engagement with an object. Ruins foster momentary memories in particular because of the amount of dust and debris that covers every surface. Though dust is itself an indication of time passing, it has the ability to memorialize an instantaneous moment such as a foot or fingerprint. Because of their ephemeral nature, these delicate momentary memories seem to exist despite all odds, and thus emphasize the preservation of involuntary memories in ruins. Momentary memories are a testament to the stillness of the space and how it has been seemingly untouched for long periods of time. Thus, coming across momentary memories bolsters the visitor’s notion that they are the first to step foot in this space, and that they have discovered it.

Momentary memory: a footstep found in the debris at an abandoned bank in Philadelphia. Photo by Natalie Wright.

But in these spaces there are not just missing past persons, there are also missing objects. Just as persons and objects effect each other (enact agency on one another), so too do objects with other objects. Both person-object and object-object relationships result in wear marks that remember the ways in which the one effected the other. So, in the same way that wear marks give shape to missing persons, wear marks can also give shape to missing objects. This was exemplified at the silent movie theatre in which water stains ran down a once functional fountain, at the bank in which wear marks on walls and doors indicated where signs once were, and at Eastern State Penitentiary where hardware on doors left very clear outlines.

Missing objects: water stains formed down this fountain over time at the Lansdowne Theatre.

Because the ruin directs the visitor’s attention to what is missing (persons and objects), the materiality of abandonment effectively emphasizes the material culture of absence. Here, the objects that are absent are more potent than the objects that are present. In ruins, the incomplete nature of the landscape demands that the visitor’s imagination fills the gaps. Visitors thus imagine past persons, past objects, and past sensoryscapes – such as the sound of the water that once flowed out of the fountain at the silent movie theatre.

Ruins also populate the visitor’s imagined landscape by communicating past persons’ emotions. Contemporary ruins materialize emotion just as much as memory. As contemporary material culture scholars have debated, the materiality of emotion is notoriously tricky – there is no clear formula to find out someone’s past emotions through their objects despite the fact that emotions are so key to intimately understanding someone. The worry here is that present day researchers will project their own understanding of emotions onto the objects and persons. This projection, however, provides a lens to find out how people today understand the materiality of emotion. For instance, my interviewees found private objects in abandoned spaces to be indicative of an owner’s or user’s emotions. This was exemplified by a bottle of Tiger Balm lotion I found in Eastern State Penitentiary’s abandoned collection, in which a former inmate kept personal belongings such as notes and a watch face. The closed nature of the object renders it private, simultaneously bolstering the Western view that emotions are internal and going against the view that internal, private emotions are immaterial/cannot be material. Interviewees also indicated that spaces can communicate emotions. The most frequently cited room as conveying emotion was the bedroom – a closed off space that is commonly regarded as private. A second type of emotional objects and spaces were social in nature. Objects that materialized friendships and relationships, such as some humorous graffiti I found in Winterthur’s creamery, reveal how emotions produce, and are produced by, social relationships. More broadly, interviewees found objects that indicated how a person engaged in meaning-making strategies, that is, how individuals made their lives meaningful within the boundaries of life’s possibilities, to convey emotion. One example of this was a ball made of rags that I found in Eastern State’s abandoned collection, and a past inmate’s annotated bible. Perhaps the meaning making strategies found in Eastern State Penitentiary were even more powerful because the strategies that prisoners used were within very strict boundaries.

Emotional objects: a small bottle of Tiger Balm contains the personal effects left behind by one of Eastern State Penitentiary’s prisoners. These effects included a bank note with writing on it, a piece of paper with writing on it, a watch face, and a small metal star of David. Photo by Natalie Wright. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.

Emotional objects: a ball made of rags found in Eastern State Penitentiary’s abandoned collections. Photo by Natalie Wright. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.

Finally, ruins facilitate emotional relationships to ruined objects, and by extension, the past persons visitors imagine to be associated with them. Ruins do so by allowing visitors to engage with the objects via the most emotional sense: touch, and also by allowing visitors to engage these objects and imagined past persons alone. Often there is no one else in abandoned spaces other than members of the group that you have entered with, and even then, individuals break off to see spaces by themselves. Visitors are free to pick up, handle, and contemplate objects alone. The connection between visitor and imagined past person is thus intimate and direct. The result is that all of my interviewees describe feeling close to the persons they imagine, and moved by this sense of contact they experience.

Exploring the Lansdowne Theatre by myself. Without any other bodies to absorb the sounds I made, every movement echoed through the space. Photo by Natalie Wright. 

What’s more, this intimate and direct relationship can be continued through another aspect of the visitor’s material engagement with ruins: the collection of souvenirs. The material environment in these spaces is nothing like our everyday sensoryscape. Visitors immediately recognize this when they enter a site in unconventional ways, such as climbing down an air shaft. Upon arrival, visitors often experience an extremely dark building with no artificial light for assistance. It is usually damp, and very quiet – any noise will echo and reverberate throughout the site. And if a visitor steps in the wrong place, they might fall through the floor. One might see extraordinary sights of trees growing through books on abandoned library floors, or entire walls coming down.

These different experiences heighten senses in similar ways to travel. Visiting a ruin can be conceived of as a temporary escape into the extraordinary, and this trip often results in visitors engaging in souvenir practices similar to those associated with travel. When taking an object from an abandoned space and displaying it in the home, visitors can continue the relationship they foster with the past persons they imagine at infinitum.

But this relationship is just that, between the visitor and the imagined past person. The visitor really has no idea who the individuals were who once inhabited these spaces and used these objects, but they still feel close to them. The imagination jumps in and fills the gaps, populating the material culture of absence to render the absent real. These imaginings can be so powerful that interviewees and other sources report how their experiences blur the line between imagination and reality. The potency of these imaginings results in respondents explaining their experiences with ‘ghostly language,’ in which these individuals describe hearing past person’s voices, smelling past smells, and feeling the gaze of past persons. Rather than dismissing these reports as superstitious, I believe they attest to the ways in which individuals understand how past persons are embedded in, and stay on in objects – a main tenant of material culture studies.

Exemplary of this is artist JR’s experiences around the abandoned sections of Ellis Island. As a way to give life to the presences he felt stayed on in the buildings and objects, JR found historical photographs of migrants and workers around the now abandoned sites, blew them up, and pasted the figures back in situ where they were photographed. But, when he did it, he cut the figures around broken glass and falling tiles to make it look as though the figures have always been there and have ruined with the building. In some cases, the more the building ruins, the more the figures are revealed.

Ghosts: A doctor and nurses slowly emerge as tiles continue to fall from the wall. Photo by Natalie Wright. 

Ghosts: A group of children have been pasted onto cracked and broken windows, creating the impression that they have aged with the building, and have remained in the space since its abandonment. Photo by Natalie Wright. 

As JR, and all of my interviewees explained, these spaces can be conceived of as alternative museums. In each of my interviews, respondents used museum language as a way to describe the unique experiences that contemporary ruins facilitate. These conversations revealed that both sites are similar in that visitors can walk through a space, pay close attention to objects, contemplate the meaning of these objects, and think about an object’s past user or users. But these individuals also positioned abandoned spaces outside the traditional museum model and heritage sphere. Interviewees described how museums ‘exercised ghosts,’ by not allowing visitors to be alone with, or touch the objects, by not presenting objects in their ‘original’ context, and by highlighting the present objects rather than the absent objects and people.

Museums also represent societal remembrance practices, while abandoned spaces fall outside of these practices. Being forgotten, contemporary ruins are in a unique position to criticize these practices, questioning what and who should be remembered and why. The turn to contemporary ruins therefore dovetails with the turn to post-colonial studies and alternative histories that aim to question canonical histories. Their critical voice is what makes them appealing. But what happens when these spaces and objects are brought into the museum and heritage sphere, and thus into societal remembrance practices?

In recent years there has also been a turn to ruins and the materiality of abandonment in the museum. Rather than silencing the ruin’s critical voice, museums capitalize on it and amplify it. Institutions such as Eastern State Penitentiary and the East Side Tenement Museum (both previously abandoned sites which have been partially transformed into stabilized ruins and partially restored) use the site’s critical framework to explore the experiences of historical and contemporary marginalized persons. Eastern State Penitentiary, for instance, displays a large graph illustrating the rise of US incarceration rates over time, while the Lower East Side Tenement Museum asks visitors to question contemporary immigration laws.

Representatives from both institutions explained that keeping some areas as stabilized ruins also harnesses the level of engagement that contemporary abandoned spaces invite. But using the ruin to spark visitors’ imaginations does not come without anxieties. The imaginings that ruins foster, allowing visitors to feel close to persons they do not know, stems from a bottom-up model where the visitor is in complete control of the ways in which objects are interpreted. An object’s meaning is thus highly dynamic. While the visitor feels engaged in the meaning making process, a visitor’s interpretations could become highly problematic if their understanding of an object comes from a place of misconception and/or prejudice. This is particularly dangerous when a person’s object interpretation relates to traditionally marginalized populations. Only rigorous research can come close to giving voice to a past person’s experiences.

The materiality of abandonment, and the ways in which visitors affectively react to this materiality, can be mined for new angles and approaches toward a large number of topics within material culture. By combining object analysis of abandoned sites and objects with interviews I conducted with others who have experienced such sites and objects, I have attempted to describe the exact nature of contemporary abandonment, how it transforms objects, and how it affects individuals. By applying these conclusions to material culture theory, I hope to have engaged and furthered theories relating to the materiality of souvenirs, memory, emotion, absence, and marginalized histories.

In completing this thesis, I hope to have created a source for individuals to turn to when examining contemporary material culture theory, and methodologies to access new ideas from the research of contemporary object-person interactions. Finally, I hope to have created a platform for individuals to discuss the power of the object to capture and ignite the imagination, and the ways in which objects can transform into a portal for individuals to feel deeply connected to others.

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Read the full thesis here.