B ETWEEN 1892 and 1954 twenty-two million their own country, their families and their roles in their own homes. Their past was washed away as they travelled to this new land. Underneath the surface of hope and new beginnings lay the fear of separation, rejection and deportation. The island was both an open door for the fortunate and a locked door for the deported. For detainees it was a place of uncertainty immigrants landed on Ellis Island in search for a new life. Leaving the old world behind; they abandoned and separation It was a place filled with deception for the ones whose hopes and promises were denied fulfillment by the American government — that guardian of individual freedom and dignity. Untruths about health conditions, supposed relatives waiting in America — a host of dishonesties were used to get into the land of rebirth. American government immigrant officers were filled with suspicion, often receiving the immigrants with hostility. Ellis Island, this threshold over which one enters the land of new possibilities by discarding of one’s former self, has itself become discarded. The buildings on Islands Two and Three are in decay, dereliction — no life except for pigeons and untended bushes. Sunlight streams through the broken windows. The space speaks powerfully of the trauma that the immigrants brought with them when they gave up their old lives, and of the misfortune of those who either died on the island or were detained and separated from their families.
In 1990 Island One was renovated as a museum. The original main immigration building was restored and is now an information centre depicting the immigration process in the actual layout and in old photos. Original furniture and pans used to feed the immigrants are on display. The depiction of the island’s past has been carefully set up to inform the public of the nation’s rich immigrant heritage. Ironically, the part that is shut off, the forbidden part with the words, NO TRESPASSING on the gates, tells the most accurate story. It is this other part of the island that does not need reconstruction. Another reality exists here, hidden away from the groups of visitors so preoccupied with the information offered in the replicated space of the restored building. Islands Two and Three contain a strong presence of the people that once were but are no longer here. Walking into the deserted rooms brings chills to one’s spine. The door left ajar, the single chair in the empty room are traces of people who have abandoned the space. Emptied out filing cabinets were once filled with personal documents of the immigrant’s life. Like Christian Boltanski’s les Habits de François C . where piles of clothes in the concentration camps brings us the absent man (Boltanksi, Milan: Charta, 1997), on Ellis Island the furniture, the half opened windows, the toilet are a direct link to prior users. It seems that these inanimate objects once had a sense of existence, lived through their own lives and have exhausted themselves. Like the buildings, they have no more life to give.
ellis island — the abandoned Francis Mikurya
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ON SITE review 5
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