“Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching.The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body,that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some distance, out beyond the towers.”
― Don DeLillo, Falling Man
~~~~~~
i always remember to forget, or at least try to ~ every year… but then the images arrive on facebook and instagram, the feeds go wild with those views ~ old and new ~ that make my stomach churn, way back when and still to this day… each year on the anniversary of 9/11 i find out some little new story, a re-reading of that moment that happened 15 years ago.
every year, trying to ignore , yet be part of something that i witnessed from afar, when i was maybe, supposed to be there. then.
we make our choices every day ~ and those choices are pathways to where we are now, how we live, who we love, and why. my choice way back in 1993 to take an internship as a Hilla Rebay fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in NYC meant that I wouldn’t become the investment banker i thought i would when I began an economics degree at Holy Cross. And after working at the Cantor Art Gallery and using that little strategy to talk to the recruiter for Cantor Fitzgerald, I decided to forego the money and the lifestyle and turn my head instead to art and education… that was back in 1993, and in 2001 many of my fellow students at Holy Cross (and close to 700 others) were at the offices at Cantor when the attacks happened. it’s the choices we make that determine the life we find ourselves in. years and years later i will meet in my atelier at a salon dinner the writer who wrote about that moment. we will be stirring the risotto at my stove and his book will come up, and tears will happen, because i chose path A, not B.
In 2001 / the same year, and same month we also put on my very first fashion show. We had been planning for months ~ the clothes ready, my friends cast, the music composed, the invites out.
2 weeks after that day of 9/11 ~ we chose to go forward, onward and into the night and we showed my very first collection inspired by the Sirens (that turned themselves into Li Galli/below). It was a show that resonates more and more each year ~ about the shedding of skins, and the remaking of our selves that we do each day, that becomes a month, that turns into a year, and suddenly decade(s) gone by ~ as we move forward, and become again who we are meant to be…
…below, fragmented stilled moments of that evening, which can be seen in succession as well ~ part 1 / part 2 / part 3.
what is so poignant and beautiful, is this little totality that we are all brought back to each year ~ the images, the music, the clothes, the experience… as we change and move onward, the AFTER forever etched in our minds.
~~~~~
shedding skins / september 2001
“…you who go about exploring, and who see signs. tell me towards which of these favored futures the winds are driving us…
…it is all useless if we are tending inexorably toward conflagration
it is all useless if the last landing place can only be the infernal city
and it is there that in ever narrowing circles,
the current is drawing us…
the infernal of the living is not something that will be.
if there is one, it is what is already here,
the inferno that we live every day,
that we form by being together…
“there are two ways to escape suffering it the first is easy for many accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it…the second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension
seek and learn to recognize who and what in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno
then make them endure, and give them space…“
…tell me toward which of these futures, the favored winds are driving us.
the inferno of the living is not something that will be,
if there is one, it is something that is already here…
the inferno where we live every day, that we form by living together…
…it is not the voice that commands the story ~ it is the ear…
…though the images remain, the precise words have fallen away…this is grava.
…once lost or dismantled, eyes closed,
the beauty of the whole, was, even in memory lost forever,
the colorful blocks simply that, with the value of ash…
the inferno of the living is not something that will be, if there is one it is what is already here,
the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together…t
here are two ways to to escape suffering it the first is easy for many accept the inferno
and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it…
the second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension ~
seek and learn to recognize who and what in the midst of the inferno,
are not inferno then make them endure, and give them space.. .
i speak and speak but the listener retains only the words he is expecting ~
it is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear…
…you who go about exploring and who see signs, tell me towards which of these futures the favored winds are driving us…”
~ italo calvino
“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”
― Don DeLillo, Falling Man
