Artist Project: The Tightrope Walker's Monuments
Between earth and sky, some images stand out as anonymous monuments to a surreptitious and silent presence—that of other images, moving, mobile, stratified within memory, seemingly unconnected; precise yet fragmentary images, often gleaned from media sources where they register in a stealthy way by deconstructing and even denying the subject from which they are born. These are fast, apparently mundane images that filter into the web of information and disinformation to cancel or break through it. In this confluence, an alternate conscience sometimes takes shape beyond words and reasons of State, with the secret strength of silence. If I happen to barely open the layers of this sedimentation, I can see details a thousand times more chiselled than any photographic document.
Thus, the sole of this man fallen flat on the ground beneath the rubble in Djenin. Impossible thereof not to be obsessed by the wretchedness of a person who dies fighting barefoot. Impossible also not to recall this friend of mine who said he always slept half lying down and with his clothes on: "I don't want death to catch me without shoes."
Impossible yet again to forget the profound gaze of a Baghdad child whom they have tried since to erase by presenting him surrounded with people and half-smiling.
And then this: a writer recalled the moment when a great tightrope walker went from one tower to the other, 400 metres above the ground. One shivers just thinking about it—imagining how it is to move forward on an inconsistent and fragile line, looking for a possible recess in the sky; experiencing vertigo, intoxicating despite everything, the perennial frailty that clings to our pathetic power.
Time after time, there is something else to be seen, so many other images continuously adding themselves to the steady stream, upsetting and eradicating official justification... To walk while carrying them inside oneself, between earth and sky, looking for a break, a bend in reality that will change its course.
Winter 2003
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