Mierle Laderman Ukeles:

The rooms are in Snug Harbor on Staten Island, in the Newhouse Galleries, part of a show called "Fresh Kills: Artists Respond to the Closure of the Staten Island Landfill." The exhibition opened on October 14, 2001, nearly seven months after Fresh Kills had been officially closed by the City of New York, and a month after suicide terrorists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly 5,000 people and destroying the towers. Ukeles' work with the landfill had inspired the original idea for the show four years earlier, and it then developed under curator and director of visual arts Olivia Georgia to include the work of 19 artists, some of it commissioned.

Needless to say, the attack of September 11 had an enormous impact on everyone involved. Part of the landfill was reopened on September 13 to receive wreckage from the World Trade Center, inevitably altering the associations and meaning of the works in the show. "Fresh Kills," in the words of a press release from the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, "has been amplified as a symbolic vessel encapsulating who we are, what comprised our past, how we live in the present, and what may constitute the future."

Ukeles refigured her own piece in three parts, asking "is all this footage, shot before September 11, irrelevant?" The first part, to last for the traditional mourning period of 30 days, eliminated all sound and shut down the interviews, out of respect and the need to create a space to listen to each other. The second, which I saw, brought back interviews on two monitors, hoping to "think forward" again. And the third, starting in January, will bring back interviews on the other two monitors. It will also be seen then at the Staten Island Mall, which is adjacent to Fresh Kills.

Actually, this is only the beginning of Ukeles' work as the New York City Percent for Art Artist of the Fresh Kills, and its overall title at this early point is Reconnaissance. For the next ten years or so she will be working with ecologists, engineers, park planners, social historians, and others to create something new out of this strange amalgam of water, marsh, woodland, waste, and factory that covers 2,200 acres and has been filling the nostrils and possibly sickening Staten Island residents since 1948. It is the largest dump in the world, but also one of the most interesting places in the world, a juncture of northern and southern vegetation, as NYC Parks Department ecologist Mark Matsil points out, a screen that reveals our public awareness and the space in which we live, in my recollection of the thoughts of Dean Patricia Phillips of SUNY New Paltz. Most consider it a blight and a burden, something that defines where they live more than anything else, and now beyond that a place of indelible trauma. It becomes almost a psychoanalytic project to alleviate the pain.