Maybe this is why I was so drawn to Xavier Cortada's recent installation at OMNIart. ''Absence of Place'', which ran during Art Basel, was not so much a tribute to a lost city as it was an artist's way of remembering a vanished self.
''Marcelino and I played kick ball in this baseball diamond,'' reads the caption beneath a photograph of new homes on SW Fourth Avenue and Fourth Street.
''Nuns taught me to read at this (Gesu Catholic) school,'' it says under a photo of a car-park on Northeast First Avenue and Second Street.
Beneath a shot of a construction site on Northeast 18th Street and Bayshore Drive: ``Mo and I pounded drinks at this (The 1800 Club) bar.''
In photo after photo -- 180 in total -- Cortada juxtaposed what used to be with what now stands in its place. It all added up to a powerful argument for the persistence (and necessity) of memory in a transitory place like Miami.
''History,'' Xavier points out, ``is composed of individual stories.''
