ABSTRACT
In examining Renée Green’s documentation of the effects of historical trauma on the re-creation of urban environments and the design languages of memorials, close study is made of two film installations: Climates and Paradoxes and Selected Life Indexes (2005) and Walking in NYL (2016). Green works simultaneously in multiple modalities, as “combination artist,” where her work consists of overlapping layers, conceptually and aesthetically. She creates installation environments where the written word (poetry, letters, academic research, prose) can come together in and around her films. Green creates sites that facilitate contact with the complex histories of place. Green’s embodied and filmic writing enables her to “write” into a disappearance; she invents archives that allow traces to be incomplete, and therefore incapable of preservation—they can only be evoked or remembered but never reproduced. Green’s art is not meant to guarantee a redemptive, definitive map of these complex sites, but offer scaffolding that might open conversations that may, in turn, initiate social change.
