Who is forgotten by design?

Whispers of Incongruences

“[T]he museum's classical facade assumes the mantle of rational order, harkening back to the Greek ideal of architecture as a civilizing force… museumgoers partake of a predetermined narrative, performing a ritual of witnessing, observing, and paying homage to a history that has been carefully curated and ordered for them.”

– Richard Barnes, reflecting after photographing the bodies underneath the Legion of Honor, Still Rooms & Excavations, 1997

We are what we perceive, how we pay attention, and who we remember. In his essay Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe argues real power is to decide where the cemetery is built, who gets sent to it, and when. (2) This is evident in the stories of many peoples and places. San Francisco is infamously “a city for the living” (3,4) where to this day it is illegal to be buried within city limits is just one example of larger patterns. The bodies were meant to be forgotten, and along with them the story of San Francisco’s cemetery removal and construction of Legion of Honor, a memorial for WWI veterans, on top of the working class cemetery despite the outrage of people at the time. This is an example of a pattern that happens repeatedly throughout the Western world, removing people from their lineages is core to colonization and capitalism.

Many people from all walks of life have not let the darker parts of history be erased. In her book, San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History Beth Winegarner chronicles how San Francisco's rich and powerful “saw dollar signs where others saw sacred ground.” (3) Between 1994-1997 when the Legion of Honor was renovated, Richard Barnes captured haunting photos of the bodies still under the Legion.1 Chinese communities in San Francisco were central to the struggle for city landmark recognition and have honored their dead at Kong Chow monument during the festival of Chung Yeung. (3,5) Country Micks, creator of Here Lies a Story, made a detailed archive and was one of many who fought for the designation of City Cemetery as a city landmark in 2022 because “City Cemetery isn't a former cemetery, it's a current one.” (6)

We create the world within our skulls, and, even if the ledger we’ve been handed to view the world adds up by its own logic, our bodies keep the score. The nation turns its lonely eyes to Mrs. Robinson (7) ‌, to the cruel optimism of the good life (8), and to the museum to curate a story explaining what does not add up . The whispers of incongruence destroy many of us, as we can not sever our humanity to ignore inherent contractions. People can spend their whole life drowning these whispers out in order to go to work the next day, yet still be haunted by the echoes of the questions we dare not ask lest the whole narrative unravel. When you spend your whole life blaming yourself, the system gets off on a technicality.

The Legion of Honor, like most institutions, art-washed its own history (9), framed its story in identity politics while ignoring the literal & figurative skeletons in their closet and underneath their floors. At the ongoing “Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor” (10) exhibit there is no mention of the bones still buried underneath, and the only shovel included was a gold ceremonial one. 79 years before the Legion of Honor first opened its doors, Karl Marx (11) said that society's values are those of the ruling class. When viewing the events included in the 100th anniversary exhibit, fellow artist Megan Broughton (12) noted it is clear much of San Francisco is dictated by the same few wealthy families.

Between those coffins with pipes through them are the bones of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, whose descendants continue to resist and steward this land to this day. Is it really so surprising that a society built on top of a genocide would build museums on top their own dead? Has anything really changed besides which line of propaganda justifies that our wholeness could be achieved by the destruction of another? How do you answer Richard Barnes' question, “[w]hose past is worthy of collection and preservation and whose is expendable, and why?” (1)

The way out of the long night at the end of history (13) is to remember who came before us, see the patterns, and tell the stories the institution would dare not include in the exhibit. Institutions are defined most clearly by the stories they leave out – who is forgotten by design.

Barnes, Richard. Still Rooms & Excavations, 1997. www.richardbarnes.net/stillrooms-excavations.
Mbembé, J.-A. and Libby Meintjes. "Necropolitics." Public Culture, vol. 15 no. 1, 2003, p. 11-40. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. Also see “How Death Changes Your Perspective” by Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube, https://youtu.be/rLfzO7Sbdc4?si=RexTbWAtH30oIB-X
Winegarner, Beth. San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History. Arcadia Publishing, 28 Aug. 2023.
Hartlaub, Peter. “There Are Thousands of Dead Bodies under Modern San Francisco.” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 Oct. 2023, www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/buried-bodies-city-cemeteries-18409649.php
Zigoris, Julie. “Chinese Leaders Remember Ancestors at New Historic Landmark.” The San Francisco Standard, 5 Oct. 2022, sfstandard.com/2022/10/05/chinese-community-leaders-remember-ancestors-with-new-historic-landmark-in-lincoln-park/
Micks, Country. “Lost Cemeteries of San Francisco | Here Lies a Story.” Hereliesastory.com, 2020, hereliesastory.com/lost-cemeteries-of-san-francisco/
Simon & Garfunkel. Mrs. Robinson. 1967.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.
I first heard “art-washed” in a speech by an Artist Against Apartheid Organizer, Paris, France, 2024.
“Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor.” FAMSF, 2024, www.famsf.org/exhibitions/legion-100
Marx, Karl, et al. The German Ideology, Parts I & III. Mansfield, Ct, Martino Publishing, 2011. Originally published in 1845.
https://meganbroughton.com/
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. John Hunt Publishing, 25 Nov. 2022. Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, famously declared the end of history after the fall of the Soviet Union in his book The End of History and the Last Man.