Maquette & studies for a monument - Project 4 · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Nov 11, 2007

ISCO presentation for project 4

Postmortem
My intentions were to reinterpret the meanings associated to events via numbers, dates and days such as 9/11, black friday, Rebellion of 1857(Sepoy Mutiny) and how a mundane number is turned into a monumental figure that denotes events and memories of historical significance. These numbers come to represent an epic remembrance and play an important part in evoking collective memory. They become powerful signifiers. But they can be(have been) misused and re-appropriated to evoke very different responses. Such signifiers can instill fear, evoke extreme reactions and in a powerful manner paralyze our reasoning. Our capacity to accommodate and understand distant cultures, people and histories are given up all at once through a single occurrence/utterance of such numbers and signifiers.

Death by Numbers is a monument dedicated to such events and numbers. This monument attempts to remove and re-invent their canonical meanings.

I choose 9/11 because it is the most recent and overused signifier of an event. It has been used time and again to serve political agendas and to plague our minds with fear and hatred. One of the important critiques of this proposal were to do with using 9/11 as a base number system for counting afore mentioned activities around Astor Place. While the act of counting mundane events and activities provided a poetic framework, the framing of it within the two columns of 1-9 and 1-11 seemed to disorient the message and intention. To me this number system provided a set of constraints to work with and further amplified the redundancy and emptiness in the 9/11 semiotic. This number system evokes my intentions when compared to a matrix of numbers which act as a generic canvas for counting. Though I should agree that a far more rigorous framework/system for counting is a possibility, but at the moment I have not been able to resolve it.