Legacies of Detention, Isolation, and Quarantine: Ambivalence, Covid-19, and the Uses of Memory

The severe geographical constraints of low-lying, water-suffused Amsterdam forced city leaders to improvise when a new burst of growth proved necessary, but as Wan shows, new space on the new margins of the city was found each time, and a new geography of marginalization contained the threat of contamination by those with infectious diseases. What Chase-Levenson calls "lazaretto ambiguity" operated at multiple levels: the stations served as outposts of their nations but cooperated daily with the authorities of other nations;similarly, they were built on the principle of strict isolation of healthy and "suspect" but allowed outsiders in to communi- cate with relatives or business partners undergoing quarantine. The Sites of Conscience framework has provided useful guidelines for allowing the past to speak directly to present-day issues of social relevance. [...]the messy process may be a feature, not a bug, if it allows survivors to feel seen and heard, and if it helps produce interpretation of the site's history that is dynamic, engaged, and directly connected to institutionalization in the present and in the future. In "Artistic Inversions of Isolation and Confinement: Public Art, Architecture, and the Liberation of Space on Roosevelt Island," Deborah Vess recounts the surprising ways that this carceral island, later also the home of the neoGothic Renwick-designed Smallpox Hospital, failed to achieve its institutions' aims, despite a beautiful geographical setting and ambitious architecture, then eventually found an equally ambitious rebirth beginning in the 1970s.