This website is designed to be experienced without a guide, as one faces a new city or place the first time one arrives to it. Nonetheless, we recognize that some people would prefer to have a little guidance, especially if they are using this website for educational purposes. This section is for them.
We believe that the past is inscribed in places by way of structures and paths. We also believe that these places cue memories for some and that these memories circulate in material and nonmaterial forms. This website attends to the indexicality reflected between histories inscribed in particular places and memories that have been - and still are - formed by people from many different parts of the world.
In the 'Home' section, you will find a map of what is called 'Historic Harlem', resembling the image of a cosmogram (you can learn more about cosmograms in the section What is a Cosmogram?).
In the map you will find highlighted 4 paths ('The A Train', '135th Street', 'Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard' and 'Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard') and three buildings ('The Renaissance Casino and Ballroom', 'The Lafayette Theater' and 'The Dark Tower'). Clicking in any of these will lead you to explore these 'sites of memory'. You can also access them in the upper menu, under the option 'More'.
In the map you will find highlighted 4 paths ('The A Train', '135th Street', 'Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard' and 'Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard') and three buildings ('The Renaissance Casino and Ballroom', 'The Lafayette Theater' and 'The Dark Tower'). Clicking in any of these will lead you to explore these 'sites of memory'. You can also access them in the upper menu, under the option 'More'.
After going to any of these sites you will find a series of narratives, historical sources, theoretical quotes, pictures, videos, songs and news reports. Each site is different and none of them has a 'traditional structure', but the media should help you to explore some of the history of the building/path and, more important, think about the memories associated with it.
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Finally, at the end of each site, you will find the section 'The roads of the Cosmogram'. Here is where the Cosmogram of Harlem is connected with other places in the world. Through this section we expect that the visitor can reflect in the potentially infinite encounters that can happen when people from other parts of the world - and all the memories they carry with them - arrive to Harlem and are faced with the memories inscribed in these different places. |
Each of these sections includes a new city, an image of it and its map. A brief text introduces the city and the relation of it with the place that is accompanying in the Cosmogram. Finally, each one of these sections invites the visitors to 'go' somewhere else and 'do' something (listen to a song, read a poem or a graphic novel, tour a virtual museum or even do some research about their own neighborhoods and cities). These invitations will allow the visitors to reflect further on the different dimensions of memory and how they are expressed in the material space of the cities and the experiences lived within them. |