The Use of Concrete Versus Ceramic as Backgrounds in Speaking to Memory
The exhibit, Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School, undoubtedly leads to various interpretations that I would not have reached, had it been presented at a location other than the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), following a different set of framing layout or arrangements.
The different kinds of background material that the testimonies, images and governmental mandates and apologies are glued onto can be studied using paratextual analysis. As soon as we enter the exhibition space, we are forced to notice the three oversized hanging pictures on our right, each of which containing governmental and church comments regarding their desired reach of residential schools. These three pictures near the entrance, along with three other pictures with wordings, in the same size, at the rear of the exhibition, are all hanged onto cement walls. While the three pictures at the front outlines the reaches and proposed outcomes of residential schools, justified by major Canadian institutions at the time, wordings on the three large posters at the back, also voiced by Canada’s administrative officials (like the RCMP), nonetheless admit to and acknowledge the true, devastating results of residential schools (i.e., the loss of Aboriginal customs and disrupted familial patterns). Now, in contrast, the materials related to victim testimonies – including photos, comments (both anonymous and named) and explanatory notes – are all glued or hanged onto light-weight, removable, white ceramic boards. Interestingly, these testimonies could have been mounted in the same way as the large hanging pictures – onto the cement walls of the showroom. But instead of choosing to use the default cement walls, which would also have been much easier, presenters chose to mount an extra layer of plastic board, on top of the original cement wall, in order to use it as the background for the photographic and textual testimonies.
This way of framing invites various interpretations. Cement is solid, everlasting and dangerous (upon impact). In this case, it is suitable for the display of “benevolent,” institutional mandates and objectives of residential schools on cement, for their outcomes have proven to be equally disastrous for those subjected to and “impacted” by these mandates. Likewise, the effects of the legacy of residential schools, like cement, are everlasting and impossible to efface. The history and failures of these mandates, the framing style further suggests, should be kept in the memories of Canadians for as long as it takes for concrete to fully deteriorate – forever (or to be more precise, approximately one million years for an average-sized granite rock). Unlike cement, the plastic boards used as backgrounds for victim testimonies can be easily altered. The agonies that had resulted from the horrors of residential schools, like the white boards, are still altering and manifesting themselves among Indigenous families; producing cycles of violent tendencies, depression and substance abuse that will continue to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Regardless of the different meanings they imply, concrete and plastic boards both illuminate the disastrous outcomes of residential schools. Concrete insinuates a sense of externality regarding the catastrophic outcomes of residential schools. And plastic boards, able to change and adapt, complement the implications of concrete, as they show the ongoing process of testimony collection, and in that, the intense, everlasting generational reach of trauma and depression created by residential schools.