< / MADRID 11-03-04 MEMORIAL

download video 28momemorial ø6m paper, performance

MADRID 11-03-04
memorial ø6m paper, performance

I was requested by the Polychronopoulos foundation to produce a memorial for the Madrid 11/03/2004 attacks.
Each time a human being is beaten, humanity is hurt.

Just like for Chaos Magazine i confronted articles from different countries hoping i could make myself an opinion on the tragic event. So was it Al quaeda / ETA independentists ? The more i was looking for facts the more i observed the poverty of our information seeing that everything is generated by Reuters and the AFP in France, extremely tightly controlled medias sources. My researches on the groups led me to know that the biggest groups of french medias are held by military funds : no truth can be published in the country of human rights which is a major manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction ...

The installation is a large collage made of press cuts from all over the world (Spain, Saoudi Arabia, Japan, France, Greece, Germany ...) all published the day after the attacks. The papers are organised in a mandala shape :

Symbolic description from the center to the hedge :
0 - white = dead people, rational truth
1 - the list of hurt people, factual
2 - photos, capturing a infinitely short moment of an event in a choosen frame
3 - press articles, poetry, commentaries, documentaries, dissolved information, interpretations
4 -small titles, the keep the attention of the client
5 - les grands titres to grab the attention of the client, selling a product to make money.

"MADRID 11-03-04" was a 2 phases work:
1 building a memorial work : building a monument for the collective memory
2 performance : erasing the memorial polishing the ink with sand paper until it gets white (forgotten?) to the public.

Their is no justice fafter terrorism. Revenge does not bring any peace. Why building memorials ? Can we forget ? Must we forgive ? Must we live forever with a hatefull and hurt soul ? I want to forget pain, i refuse to forgive what happened. Should i ?

FOCUS = I give up looking for objectivity or truth. I just want to purify and live on.

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