Charleston has a memory. Its memory is long. It is genetic. It is alive in its people. Remembering is about the past, to be sure, but Charleston’s memory is also committed to the future.

Memory is in the land. And Charleston’s geography as a peninsula—neither island nor just land—plays a role in its memory because the land is always a part of the water.

The waterways that form and isolate the Charleston peninsula connect it, too, to the region through other waters—the Wadmalaw, Waccamaw, and Wando, the Pee Dee, Ashepoo, and Combahee, the Santee, Stono, and Edisto—and from the Ashley and Cooper, bring it to other lands near and far—Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, Africa, Europe, South America, Asia.  In its backwaters—the veins and arteries that are the creeks and marshes of this Lowcountry—cultural heritages are both contained and communicated.  

Charleston’s memory is bound up in places, places that are still in evidence. Even when an old structure is removed, making room for the new, the memory of what came before remains. Continuity is the greatest attribute of Charleston. It is a place where people embody the stories of their ancestors and to which they return “home,” even if work or school or marriage has taken them away for a time. While discontinuity of history seems commonplace everywhere in the world today, in Charleston the past has a continuous, visible presence.

Charleston is an environment permeated with memory, perpetuated by the institutions of family and church, and sustained by a communal way of life. Most cites depend on monuments to tell the stories of the past and build commemorative works in place of memory; but Charleston is a place of memory, and its living memory—in the people, in the land, and carried by the water—is its “monument” to the past.

This memory is bound to the origins of place and interwoven into a narrative that gives meaning to daily life and bestows a sense of spirituality. This narrative is a process-in-the-making as African-American activist-residents Rebecca Campbell and Catherine Braxton return after more than two decades in New York to trace their heritage back to the two small houses on East Bay and Calhoun Streets that are “home” to Spoleto art projects this year, and from there to their ancestors at Drayton Hall. A narrative of African-American ancestry was told when 2001 festival artist Lonnie Graham traced his roots to slaves buried at Drayton Hall (even though he wasn’t from there) and created a permanent memorial. Drayton Hall director George McDaniel spins compelling narratives when he links this plantation’s geography and people to Africa. Memory is embodied, too, in a futuristic work like Yinka Shonibare’s 2002 project Space Walk in which new colonists carry the vestiges of the past on their backs in the form of the Asian-European-African-American textile patterns they wear. As viewers, listeners, visitors, witnesses, we become entwined in this ongoing narrative of memory.  

Memory is tied to place. While classical orators used architectural elements as mnemonic devices to remember their speeches,  Charleston residents have their vast inventory of memory places—Drayton Hall, Middleton Place, the Aiken-Rhett House, the Morris Island Lighthouse, Sullivan’s Island, The Borough—that are a way of remembering   But memory is life, in a permanent process of remembering and forgetting. It is also embedded in things and places, gestures and images. It is at once personal and collective, private and public. It can be selective, as suits the moment, or spontaneous. Memory is messy.

History, as distinct from memory, is the way modern societies organize the past. History is a representation of the past and, by necessity, incomplete in capturing what memory holds so dear. Rather, history is an intellectual enterprise valuing scientific analysis and is colored by ideology; history is suspicious of memory. Moreover, history can eradicate memory, and this can and does happen anywhere—even in Charleston. Cleaning up memory through restoration can be a way of forgetting, erasing the stories and lives of others. So, at a site like Drayton Hall, which is presented “as is,” memory is preserved. Not restored to a single time or composed of various period rooms, Drayton Hall is a place where the 18th to the 20th centuries interpenetrate, giving a sense of the vitality of all the generations of people, white and black, who lived there. Artists, through the Spoleto Festival USA in 2001 and 2002, have extended this environment of memory through the creation of 21st-century works of art.

Yet history and memory have an interdependent relationship. The historic marker placed in 1999 at Sullivan’s Island, begins “We commemorate this site.” It marks a place of memory where there is no longer a living environment. Reading on it tells a narrative that evokes the origins of the people of the region and the nation and speaks of the continuity of memory through culture outside the mainstream story: “This memorial rekindles the memory of a dismal time in American history, but it also serves as reminder of a people who—despite injustice and intolerance, past and present, have retained the unique values, strengths and potential that flow from our West African culture which came to this nation through the Middle Passage.”  For groups and peoples whose past is threatened, the creation of such a powerful place of memory becomes an act of resistance.   

Memory is the fuel of art. It can give art purpose. Toni Morrison wrote, speaking of the work of writers, but in a way equally applicable to visual artists:
…no matter how “fictional” the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”   

The past two decades have brought about new ways of making art that parallel the revisionism and rethinking of historiography and museology. When the Spoleto Festival presented “Places with a Past” in 1991, it participated in this moment of change and, in turn, this exhibition contributed to the emerging discourse. By “re-seeing” Charleston’s history through the critical practice of postmodern artists, this show focused on chapters left out. Yet, in spite of the intelligence and beauty of these artists’ perspectives, their works remained alternative places of the past: representations and not real environments.  
“Evoking History,” beginning in 2001, stems from a different practice in two important ways. First of all, it is a collaborative process that involves relationships among institutions and persons over time who are engaged in listening to and negotiating their ideas with one another. Secondly, it engages the “now”—the past as it lives on in the present—and seeks artistic forms that can embody living memory.  

This year’s exhibition—“The Memory of Water”—is comprised of six artists’ installations that span sites from the peninsula, up the Ashley River to Drayton Hall, and out to the Atlantic and the lighthouse on Morris Island. Its adjunct programs, collectively called “The Memory of Land,” are public acts of articulation that extend the resonance of these works, magnifying their meaning and that of the past in the present.  

The Borough project is one such public act of articulation. It is a project of Charleston citizens led by Rebecca Campbell and Catherine Braxton, with creative participation from curators Tumelo Mosaka and Sarah Carrington and artist Suzanne Lacy. In the passage of memory into history, such acts of personal history-making are vital.  Here they respond to the effects of displacement through urban development and gentrification that have erased Ansonborough Homes, and the homes that came before them by tapping into the collective memory. Because The Borough, and its epicenter of African American life, have been thrust from public memory, it is no longer a living environment. In its place, if only temporarily, is a performative installation in its name—The Borough— located at 35-1/2 Calhoun that serves as a place of memory and a locus for acts of personal historification. This project directs our attention, outwardly, to the adjacent open, blank space (now called “Ansonborough Fields”) which was a core part of old Borough neighborhood; and, inwardly, to the very structure at 35-1/2 Calhoun as a site of resistance, transforming it into a container, a collecting box, a memory-place. The Borough project will live on at another a place of memory, the Avery Institute for African-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, where the stories and objects revealed and catalogued during the project will find a new “home.”

As an activity center for “The Memory of Water” and the heart of “The Memory of Land” program, The Borough is connected spatially to three artists’ projects. Next door, at No. 35, J. Morgan Puett’s Cottage Industry intertwines family belongings from these residences into a larger social narrative of women’s labor, crossing social histories in the production of a multi-class garment series. Nari Ward’s Fortress on Ansonborough Fields honors the memories associated with this site and the places where life was once lived. Bringing the port palpably into the equation—a location that provided for the livelihood of many and shaped the culture of all who lived here—Marc Latamie’s Caravella links the foods and daily life rituals of former Borough residents to that of denizens at other ports of exchange and trade.

The process of creating the artists’ projects and producing a companion public work like The Borough is fluid and continuous, like the memory it seeks to address. It is a risk— not knowing when you start how it will look in the end, but having clear aims to guide the process. This process brings the Spoleto Festival staff into the making of art, requiring everyone to be a part of the act of creation and of meaning-making. Long before these works are presented to the public, others are brought into an organic, self-aware, collaborative process: from the offices of development, public relations, accounting…all sides of the institution’s operations; to the project-production staff working intimately with artists as co-makers; to institutions, organizations, and citizens from different local communities who are invested in the ideas expressed in this art.

This artmaking is a discursive process. So, it is located, too, in “Stakeholders Forums” that periodically bring people together to hear what each has at stake in history, in Charleston, in art, in culture, and—finding common ground—to work together toward complementary and coexistent ends. Reflection at each juncture has been essential and Charleston’s memory places have become the spaces in which stakeholders have gathered to consider more fully the projects presented. These potent sites of conversation are spaces of transition, where passage can be negotiated between worlds and between the past and the future.  This is the meeting space of the European place or piazza—in Charleston terms, piazza (pe-a-za), the side porches of a Charleston single house. Last year, it was the porch on the clubhouse at the I’On community in Mount Pleasant, but it was also aboard the 84-foot, three-mast ship Schooner Pride. This year we find a veranda on Marc Latamie’s neighborhood store installation Caravella; piazzas at J. Morgan Puett’s Cottage Industry at 35 Calhoun and The Borough at 35-1/2, the deck of a cruise ship and pontoon boat. While we don’t know where “Evoking History” will take us in 2003, we do know that long after this program ends, the dialogue will continue…living on in horizontal conversations that will stretch thorough time and converge like the waters through this place.