Performative Empathy

This article was originally written in December 2025.

In the heart of Battery Park City, surrounded by the glass and steel of global financial centers and luxury apartments, sits a quarter acre of Ireland. The Irish Hunger Memorial is strikingly different from the rest of the landscape by appearing as a massive concrete “wedge” that lifts a recreation of a potato field twenty feet into the air.

According to Roberta Smith, the New York Times art critic, the structure was designed to be a “realistic replication of an Irish hillside,” a “walk-in relic” that offers the city an introspective, reflective experience (Smith 1). It has two purposes: to commemorate the 1.5 million victims of the Great Irish Famine and to serve as a reminder of the world hunger that’s still happening today.

However, when standing on the memorial grounds on a Saturday afternoon and watching visitors take selfies with the Hudson River as a backdrop, a tension emerges. The behavior of the visitors — laughing and gossiping, discussing what to get for dinner — seems not to be compatible with the somber history of 1.5 million deaths. This disconnect raises a difficult question: does this memorial actually force us to confront the history of the Irish famine, or does its design, in fact, allow us to ignore it?

The design of the memorial encourages a transference of attention. Visitors are required to enter through a dark tunnel that leads to the base of the “wedge”. The entire tunnel is lined with glass-covered bands of texts that are true statistics of the Irish famine and hunger. Ideally, this should be the part that provokes confrontation.

However, during my visit, I have observed that visitors walk through this tunnel without slowing down at all as they rush towards the “natural” and “recreational” part of the memorial. The tunnel is dark and unwelcoming; the text, which Roberta Smith describes as “terse facts”, is ignored, for their miniature size and muted color scheme. Once on top of the structure, the behavior of visitors is indistinguishable from that of a playground, with people discussing lighthearted topics and exchanging smiles.

The tone concerning people’s behaviors is wildly different from the tone of the site. The aesthetically pleasing “ruin” rules over the reality of the tragedies.

Figure 1: The Irish Hunger Memorial. Source: Architectural Record.

Figure 2: Tunnels of the Irish Hunger Memorial. Source: Architectural Record.

To see how the memorial actually functions to create this disconnect, it is helpful to analyze the work of media scholar Marita Sturken. In her analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Sturken argues that a memorial can act as a “screen.” Let us look at the Vietnam memorial first: it has black granite walls, with names of those who died during the war etched into the surface, that reflects the faces of the viewers.

When visitors are “seeing their own images in the names, they are thus implicated in the listing of the dead.” (Sturken 120)

Figure 3: The Vietnamese Veterans Memorial. Source: National Park Service.

Sturken uses the “screen” metaphor to describe the black granite walls — they are reflective surfaces that allow visitors to project their own personal grief regarding the sacrificed people onto the site, but at the same time they act as an object that “hides something from view, that shelters or protects”. (Sturken 118) One does not see a raw scene from the war, nor a frame of politics, in this memorial.

For Sturken, the Vietnam Memorial aids the process of grief by screening out the divisive political narratives of the war, such as the “narrative of defeat”, which allows the veterans, who had been frequently ignored or even scapegoated by the public, a safe space to mourn their loss of loved ones. In this context, the screen functions to heal a marginalized group.

The Irish Hunger Memorial uses this “screen” mechanic; however, it uses it in a different and troubling way, with far less somber aesthetics.

One can see how the designers tried to evoke a connection to the Irish homeland through realizing a curated list of design elements, but, unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which screens out politics to protect the victims, the Irish Hunger Memorial screens out politics to protect the bystanders, as it is built two hundred years after the tragedy, a time when all of its victims have unfortunately passed away.

To understand what the Irish Hunger Memorial is trying to hide, we need to examine the history of the Irish Famine (or the Great Famine) first.

According to historian Peter Gray, framing the Great Famine purely as a tragedy of nature is historically insufficient. While the potato blight was the environmental trigger, Gray argues that the catastrophic loss of life was largely the result of “colonial” policies and “attempted social engineering” by the British state.

(Gray 170) The British government at the time was committed to the ideology of laissez-faire economics, which discouraged any sort of intervention in the market, even in the face of mass starvation. Colonial administrators like Charles Trevelyan, who managed relief efforts, viewed the famine in a morally justified religious way, which is nearly the polar opposite of humanitarian ideals.

Gray claims that Trevelyan “regularly and vehemently denounced the ‘defective part of the national character’ of Ireland as the root social cause of the famine”. (Gray 168) Trevelyan even went so far as to describe the blight as a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence,” sent by God to force a “social revolution” upon the Irish people. (Gray 169) Within this ridiculous perspective.

The starving Irish peasants were seen not as victims to be saved, but as a “surplus population” that needed to be eradicated to propel the development of a “freer” market. Inaction and neglect wiped out those 1.5 million people.

Figure 4: The plants seen at the Irish Hunger Memorial. Photograph by author.

Here, as the memorial focuses nearly entirely on the nature aspect of the tragedy, the stones, the potato furrows, and the grasses, the Irish Hunger Memorial screens out this political maliciousness through commendable aesthetics of an Irish village style.

It presents the visitors with a “realistic” recreation of the landscape, made significantly elevated from the ground, to reinforce the idea that the Famine was a natural disaster, a tragedy of the environment, rather than a governance failure that humans have inflicted upon each other. This design choice functions as a screen, but it does not hide trauma; it deceives you. It projects a pretty and performative image of empathy while hiding the brutal political choices that caused the suffering.

It allows the visitor to mourn the “natural” tragedy of the potato blight without ever having to think about the uncomfortable reality of the “genocidal intent” and colonial neglect that Peter Gray describes. In doing so, the memorial performs, in a caring way, for the “bystanders”, the modern visitors, and the wealthy neighbors, to remain comfortable.

The most triggering evidence to show that the memorial functions as a screen to shield visitors from reality, however, lies in its surroundings, its treatment for the living of the present time. The memorial claims to commemorate those who suffered and died from world hunger and the “poor and desperate”.

Yet, benches surrounding the site are all fitted with metal ridges, which are prime specimens of what researcher James Petty calls “hostile architecture.” Petty defines this architecture as being designed to “render [spaces] unusable in certain ways or by certain groups,” which, most commonly, refers to the homeless. (Petty 68) He argues those designs often hide behind a “socially palatable” look. (Petty 76)

Figure 5: Benches near the Irish Hunger Memorial. Photograph by author.

The presence of these benches at the Irish Hunger Memorial creates an irony that is heartbreaking to look at. Despite being dedicated to those who were starved, evicted, who had no shelter, no food, displaced, and punished by their own government that sees them as less than human, the memorial has a physical design to displace those who suffer in New York City with “revanchist” urban design.

(Petty 71) As Petty notes, these measures are what can be called “double distaste”, which contains a distaste for the visual appearance of poverty and the inhumane mechanisms to remove it being displayed. (Petty 77) The memorial, at this point, basically recreates the Trevelyan behaviors that it tried to mourn. It tries to remove the “surplus population” from sight to protect a “clean” view of the city.

In the end, the Irish Hunger Museum fails, in my opinion, to be a place of genuine commemoration and reflection but instead functions as a space of leisure. It is a screen that projects a comfortable image that seems empathetic, but it screens out the political violence of the past that’s still relevant today.

The memorial even actively filters out the reality of poverty that people still suffer from in modern time, which allows the city to believe that it has remembered the hungry while making sure that the hungry is not actually in front of its eyes. It is reasonable to conclude that the memorial is performative at best, if not evil, in its attempts to show empathy towards and to deter the same group of people at the same time.

References

Gray, Peter. “Was the Great Irish Famine a Colonial Famine?” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, pp. 159–172.

Petty, James. “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture’.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, pp. 67–81.

Smith, Roberta. “Critic’s Notebook; A Memorial Remembers The Hungry.” The New York Times, 16 July 2002.

Sturken, Marita. “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Representations, Summer 1991, pp. 118–142.