I was meditating on how within the earth lie phenomena that shames our sense of humanity, remnants of lives that embody the missing: the archive of mediated experience, and how to animate it.

A circle of fresh dark earth laid out around one table. The more I walk, against time and the world of man, the more the smell of disturbed ground permeates the room. A hill atop a table from which small twigs, roots, and ceramic shards are carefully picked out with forensic gloves and patiently cleaned of earth to be laid out in neat rows of remembrance and display. A child's underpants, soiled by earth, and a press photograph of a forensic pathologist sifting through human remains in a body bag, appear. A photograph of a young boy, traumatised staring from his blockhouse window over and onto Beslan school number one, the site where his schoolmates and teachers are held hostage, where later 344 will be killed.
Financial newspapers burned, reduced to ashes and mixed with broken fruits smeared on face and hands. Who gave the orders? Will you walk with me? The more I walk the more the earth reveals its secrets, the more I meditate. Gloves appear from the earth, are picked up and held, the hands of the missing they are carried to the wall.
Light is changing, daylight replaced with evening dusk then darkness. Two small torches in the earth highlight the photographs.
How can I show that I just can't touch this anymore, that even a mediated experience of suffering is overwhelming? Incapacitating. That some things just don't belong in the ground? Pop. A breath. Wooden skewers are pierced through forensic gloves. It is physically impossible to touch the images and remnants now. In a while they are removed and nailed to the wall, shocked hands, their points protecting and preventing contact.
Sitting on a chair, throwing spoons at the photograph of the child in trauma, he moves, throwing spoons at the gloves, they move, throwing spoons at the underpants, they move, throwing spoons at the press image of the burned gutted shell of school number one, now filled with bottles of water, mounds of flowers and grieving family, it moves. 1,000 spoons: a long repetitive action that assumes banality, as futile a gesture as any wishful compassionate glance at the distancing screen of the media image. 1,000 spoons clatter against brick, against photograph, against gloves, against floor, against spoon. Everything reflected.

AND THERE...

Another table, covered with earth that assumes the shape of a shallow grave. Running gloved hands carefully through the earth silver spoons appear. Souls? Vessels? Mouths? Earth slides to the floor, in this stillness a crash, gloves become stained, spoons begin to shine through their dark cloak. In Toronto, overhead electric light, not so strong but impossible to tell day from night. This is the second day I inhabit this hallucination. I find a nail in the earth. The same boy, the same event. I have problems letting go. They weren't allowed water. The sound of gasping breath, grasping breath, rasping breathing, panic in their throats, fear occupies their small voices. What is this hunger? This pathological ingestion of violence and suffering? Incapacitated, again and again. A multiplicity of site.

 

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