The capsules of time have something paradoxical: they are born almost always from the idea that the present is flowing too quickly to be remembered alone. For more than a century cities, schools and institutions have hidden common objects in the hope that, decades later, someone can use them to understand what was the life of another era. This is what is happening in New York, where residents are called to choose an object small enough to enter a time capsule and representative enough to talk about the city to those who will live it in fifty years. The project is part of the celebrations for America 250, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and provides that the capsule remains closed until 4 July 2076, when the country will celebrate its three hundredth anniversary. The idea is to leave the New Yorkers of the future a material piece of 2026, not an ordered reconstruction made by historians, but a collection of memories chosen by those who today live the city.
To promote the project is John C. Liu, Democratic State Senator representing a part of Queens. Liu invited New Yorkers to contribute with photographs, letters, works of art or other small relics capable of telling the present. Objects will have to have a small size, more or less of a deck of cards, and may be rejected if they do not meet the requirements of material or preservation. It is a practical limit, but it also says something about the sense of initiative: it is not about depositing monuments, but minute traces of everyday life.
The capsule will be assembled on Sunday, June 28 at 13 at Francis Lewis High School, Fresh Meadows, Queens, during a public festival organized for America 250. The event will be free and will include food, live music, games, family activities and historical re-enactments. The central moment will be the insertion of objects in the capsule: a ceremonial gesture, of course, but also a way to force people to decide what of the present deserves to be preserved. A photo of a block, a handwritten ticket or memory of a neighborhood store can say more than many official celebrations.
After the event, the capsule will be transferred to the Main Street branch of the Queens Public Library, in Flushing, where it will remain exposed to the public for the next fifty years. It will be opened on 4 July 2076. For those who look at it then, the objects collected will not only tell how New York was in 2026, but also what things its inhabitants thought it was worth saving: prices, habits, neighborhoods changing, small daily obsessions, and perhaps also some sign of a city that, as always, seemed at the point of becoming unrecognizable.
L’articolo A time capsule to tell the New York of today in fifty years proviene da IlNewyorkese.
