Back then I was like so many others, young and pretty stupid, with no words, or maybe just the wrong ones, for what had happened in the USA. Ten years later I wanted to get closer to that old feeling again, not to the world, not to history, but to what had stayed inside me.
Black Birthday was my way of looking back from a distance, as someone who grew up with those collapsing towers, with faces I never knew but could never forget, replayed a hundred times from every possible angle.
The black blocks in the sculpture are stacked gifts, echoing the blown apart Twin Towers. It looks almost childlike, almost like a game, but it isn’t.
Each of these packages carries weight. No gift of life, but a memory of tears, pain and death that nobody ever asked for. Together they form two bodies leaning towards each other, as if trying to hold one another up, or stop each other from falling.
In front sits a small figure on a bench. One of my brave little Pinokels. The arm raised across his face, as if to hide, or just to breathe for a moment. Of course he cries like hell. I shaped him the way you sit when there are no words left.
Next to him lies a flower,
the leftover gesture of hope and ritual. The things people do. But how are fuckn flowers supposed to comfort that?
The white, patinated Statuario marble carries everything like a stage, cold, still, clean.
Black.
I wanted the work not to scream, but to stay silent.
Black is silent.
It endures what we can barely endure ourselves. I still remember the moments in my studio: the restlessness, the emptiness, the feeling that ten years were no distance at all. Back then I didn’t care much. I even blamed the Americans for their own tragedy.
Stupid young boy.
No hero, no victim, just a person looking, not understanding why the hell things like this keep happening.
Today Black Birthday stands in Berlin, in the permanent collection of the Galerie Charlotte Infantellina. I think it’s in the right place, in a city that carries its own scars and has learned to live with them.
It should have been obvious that violence gives birth only to itself, but people always need to destroy what’s closest before they finally believe it. Me too.
Berlin 2011
