They stand one foot apart, filling the grass median. Visible from campus and the surrounding streets, each of the dowel rods stuck in the ground represents a soldier who has died in Iraq.

Numbers Without Number, an installation art piece by the Syracuse University graduate program in museum studies about the casualties of the Iraq war, was installed Sunday in the grass between the Schine Student Center and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It will be on display for one week.

There will be a ceremony today at noon, during which Hendricks Chapel chaplains and chaplains from other religious sectors on campus will offer their thoughts on the piece.

‘We invited all the chaplains to participate in any way they thought might be appropriate,’ said Daniel Chermak, a graduate student working on the project who helped organize the event. ‘We wanted to try and be inclusive in this because it does involve sectarian conflicts. There are religious overtones to the war.’

Chermak said he hopes today’s event will bring more Syracuse students to the installation.

‘They will be able to hear from someone besides us about what we’re doing,’ he said.

Wooden dowels were placed in the grass between Newhouse and Schine, spaced a foot apart, each signifying an unspecified amount of casualties of the conflict.

‘It’s a memorial to all casualties in the conflict in Iraq,’ said Nora Mattern, a graduate student in the museum curatorship program. ‘It commemorates all individuals regardless of nationality or religious affiliation. It’s a nonpartisan memorial.’

The reason for not specifying the amount of people each dowel represents is because there is a wide discrepancy with regard to how many people have died in Iraq, Mattern said.

Edward Aiken, a museum studies professor at SU who is overseeing the project, chose the subject because his studies have dealt with issues of borders, identity and memory. He said he was curious about how those issues might apply to Iraq. He also said he felt it was an important topic with the upcoming election, as war can shape the election’s outcome.

Aiken said those working on the project were careful not to reveal their own political beliefs.

Numbers Without Number coincides and is in conjunction with the Visible Memories Conference that will be on campus Oct. 2 to Oct. 4. The conference looks at how memories are displayed in visual culture.

The graduate program in museum studies does a project of this scale every year, such as last year’s On The Move exhibit at the Everson Museum. This year’s project is unique, Aiken said, because they have not done an outdoor installation of this sort before.

Student said they chose the specific site because it would allow for maximum exposure and because of its proximity to the Pan-Am Memorial.

‘We feel it’s an essential point,’ Mattern explained. ‘Students, faculty, staff and visitors really use these pathways to get from campus to off-campus. People who are driving by and people who are on Marshall Street will be able to see the exhibit. South of this site is a place of remembrance for the victims of the Pan-Am flight, so we wanted to extend this idea of a memorial.’

rhkheel@syr.edu

Published on September 28, 2008 at 12:00 pm