SAVE MANHATTAN

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2008 - 2009, 00:08:37

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Architecture, Allegory, Memory, Society

Summary :
Mounir Fatmi’s series of installations have been crowned by a film also named Save Manhattan (2008-2009) and produced with means as archaic as for the precedent works. The New York landscape runs over the screen as if it was seen through a Chinese lamp or old optical devices. The viewer is impatient to see the twin towers and wonders if the collapse will happen. Airplanes and gas balloons fly around the buildings, but the expected crash is always differed, as both the airplanes and transparent buildings seem to be inconsistent, empty, immaterial. The Manhattan skyline progressively dissolves itself in distorted liquefied reflections and becomes the memory and the ghost of something that was but that is not anymore. mounir fatmi’s poetic editing embodies the unpredictable impermanent and insecure present Edouard Glissant had defined as the “Tout-Monde”. Gregory Buchakjian

"Excerpt from War and other (Impossible) Possibilities Thoughts on Arab History and Contemporary Art"

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