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NICOLE
ANTEBI
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STATEMENT
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“’The empire is being crushed by its own weight,’ Kublai thinks and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like lace, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities |
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To be in Jerusalem is to be surrounded by buildings, streets, and landscape overdetermined by opposing memories of historical events. These conflicts of claim swell over Jerusalem rendering it a mythological place. Watching dozens of people at the Western Wall tucking their minuscule messages into the ruin of the old synagogue precipitated a curiosity in me about why and how we anthropomorphicize monuments. This curiosity is the seed of my ongoing projects with religious and cultural monuments in the Middle East. The
monument begins as a cultural, religious or political emblem.
As the monument decays the infinite potential of its substance
is revealed. What remains in this process of disintegration
is an index of the former structure, the ruin. Unlike the
activity of decay, the ruin arrests this motion and replaces
the original
as a new monument. Like the Western Wall, the ruin reshapes
our understanding of the monument through reassignment of
signification. My work attempts to situate the monuments of
Jerusalem not as
permanent, mythological and religious structures, but as
the cultural exchange capital of violence and power they’ve
become. The monuments are presented primarily as form without
substance, malleable, yet resisting distortion or
alteration and maintaining their original, inherent shapes. |
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