Save Manhatten 03 by Mounir Fatmi was presented at the Venice Biennial 2007. It is the third in a series. Save Manhatten 01 was a cityscape constructed of books, all of which were written on the events of 9/11, except two copies of the Koran. Stacked on a table in such a way that when bright light was shown on them, a shadow portrait of the city was projected on the far wall. The two books of the Koran created the shadow image of the Twin Towers.
Save Manhatten 02, created in 2005, consisted of VHS tapes stacked to mimic the pre-9/11 Manhatten skyline. This installation did not include light and shadow—the white and black domino of the tape boxes carried this motif in addition to standing for the oft-repeated images of the tragedy on TVs all across the world, video being the medium of witness and testimony.
The third installment of this series is subtitled Sound Architecture. The cityscape is created with speakers of various sizes which emit a wall of sounds—traffic sounds taped in the street and subway, as well as fictional sounds lifted from blockbuster movies, crashes, explosions, the sounds of catastrophe. This speaker-city is lit in such a way that both its shadow as well as the shadows of viewers are projected on the wall.
I like this series. The building blocks of each cityscape conveys a perspective through which we understand this image: Manhatten, the pre-9/11 city, now an emblem of a global antagonism. All that has been read about it, written about it, spoken and presented about it; all the mythical, fictional, factual things congesting into an unintelligible cacophony of information and image—but the image is a shadow, a phantom. The blood and guts are the people killed, the people oppressed, the people in uniforms and in hiding.
I like that this artist is from Tunesia, lives in Paris, gives us a perspective from outside, yet inside, for the image cast from 9/11 is long as it is complicated.
Pic courtesy of Universes in Universe, visual arts from Africa, Asia, the Americas in the international art context.
