Arrival
Exhibition Proposal for the National Museum of Immigration. Ellis Island, New York. 2015
When visiting New York this spring, I made several journeys along New York’s waterways. Stopping by Ellis Island, I also happened to visit the National Museum of Immigration and was very impressed by a strange atmosphere that’s still alive in this building. It was the big and empty Registration Hall in particular that made the strongest impression on me, and immediately inspired me to design an installation in this space.
My personal background includes relatives who emigrated before and during WWII; also, I currently live on the Canary Islands, a region that not only saw many people leaving for America during the 1950s due to famine, but has recently also taken in immigrants from Africa. All this, plus the current acute situation surrounding refugees in Europe, led me to choose the arrival in a foreign country as my focus for this installation, with a particular interest in the space that’s in-between, the ‘no man’s land’ where everything is possible, its absolute ambiguity and contrariness.
The project with the name Arrival is an artistic investigation of the moment of arrival. It proposes a spatial installation that evokes the presence of the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954 on their way to a new life in the United States. All had to file through one room, the Registration Room, to obtain a permit to live in the country. Here their identity, health and economic status were examined to determine their future destiny.
Today the space is empty, deprived of any former objects like the gratings that separated the immigrants into waiting lines.
Arrival wants to make the place’s history visible by introducing 100 rugs of different sizes into the hall’s central space, which contain at the same time patterns of the immigrants’ original countries, as well as the outline of the historic gratings. The installation physically visualizes the historic traces and, at the same time, attenuates and reconciles the hostility of the huge, bare and echoing space by introducing the domestic element par excellence: the rug.
By combining the outline of the gratings as the symbol of fear and uncertainty with the object of the rug as the symbol of shelter and prosperity – representing a traditional trade object and a high standard of living – the installation shows the twofold character of this arrival space, with the aim of reconciling past and present.In the contemporary context, the installation is a critical interpretation of the spaces we provide for people who are in an extraordinary situation, fleeing and transiting, on their way to searching for a new and better place to live.
Project: Constanze Sixt.