Syria Project: finding one's shadow in ruins and rubble

The Syria Project: finding one’s shadow in ruins and rubble | 2014

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August 2014.

The speed of light in vacuum [c] is 299,792,458 m/s. The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials is less than [c]. The refractive index [n] of a material is the ratio between [c] and the speed [v] at which light travels in the material [n=c/v]. The refractive index of glass in visible light is around 1.5. Light in glass travels at 200,000 km/s. The refractive index of air in visible light is about 1.0003. Light travels in air at the speed very close to c. The light we see from the stars have left them years ago | the photons that cross the vacuum of space, travel for millions, billions and even trillions of years until they encounter our eyes | the dead stars we see so clearly in the sky of a city where there is no electric light.
How long does it take for a large-caliber projectile to traverse the air through artillery? How many shelling bombardments are needed to erase a city?
Life accumulated from thousands and thousands of years can now be contained in Victorian keepsake boxes | collecting dust for many thousands of years to come.
Cultural heirlooms | in ruins and rubble | all lit up.
The city resurrects momentarily from its death | when the first sun ray hits its debris. Lovers walk around, hand in hand | before realizing they can’t find their own shadows. Children ride bicycles up and down little hills they don’t remember being there | eyes wide open before nightfall | before all disappear behind distorted walls | and into dark bullet holes.
I dare you to tell me what Baudrillard and Foucault have to say now.
Dizziness grows as a discomfort. Ideas and concepts of home and Homs become blurry, interchangeable, darkened by fact and fiction. The notion and condition of having ‘no home – not two homes.’[1]
The building of a nation equates destruction. The ancient kingdom can only be re-constructed now through historical maps | data charts | reports | images; cities and lives reduced merely to dots, numbers, increasing day by day: IDP – the internally displaced persons | refugees | and refugee camps. This, too, has become abstraction | vaguely understood in one’s imagination. Confusion created not by the lack of knowledge but an avalanche of information.
History repeats itself. History that marked the beginning of televised conflicts | and media downpours of human catastrophes in exotic and distant devastated topographies. History I want to forget | even deny.

Tiffany Chung
[1] Fitzgerald, David & Waldinger, Roger. Transnationalism in Question, UCLA. AJS Vol. 109 No.5 (March 2004): 1177-95; p. 1188

[Installation consists of 31 hand-crafted mahogany wooden boxes, Reuters-licensed photographs, plexiglass, LED lights | dimensions of light boxes variable.]

◀︎ ▶︎ All Projects

Syria Project 2012-2014 | 56th Venice Biennale Iteration | 2015

Syria Project: from a Dignity Revolution to War | 2017