Written by Emily Colucci

August 2022

Never forget. That’s a phrase frequently repeated about the attacks on September 11, 2001. But how can the act of remembrance—of not forgetting—be preserved materially? Artist Alexandria Deters’s embroideries and her corresponding video in Gonzalez: ‘Yes dear I’m here’ (A Primary Document, 9/11) document her attempts to bear witness to an unimaginable tragedy over twenty years later. The embroideries on view are part of an ongoing project in which she will embroider the entire 83-page audio transcript of the FAA and NORAD Response to 9/11, published by the Rutgers Law Review in 2011. Taken from logs, tape recordings, transcripts, and radar data, this audio monograph is the primary objective document of that morning, allowing viewers and listeners to read or hear the voices of 9/11 free from politicization or traumatic imagery. Through her painstaking embroidery process, visible in the time-lapse video in which she works at sites such as the 9/11 Memorial Plaza, Deters honors the flight attendants, air traffic control workers, and other working people responding to the attacks by preserving their words and their astonishing yet everyday acts of heroism.