Through the phone today came a torrent of distressing news about various family members and good friends’ health. Small disasters each one, likely survivable, but tremors or portents of future worlds nonetheless. I think it’s become a bit of a Jedi-mind trick to focus on the positive amidst the death and destruction of the last 15 months.
Is this photo real?
( Image: Cambridge University Library, “The eruption of Mont Pelée, Martinique, 1902. GBR/0115/RCS/Y307E/20, May 8, 1902 / May 8, 2021. )
A man, standing on top of the rubble of Sainte-Pierre, Martinique, after the active volcano Mount Pelée blew up on May 8, 1902 and covered the city so violently and so fast that about 30,000 people died in minutes. Before the eruption, masses of ants, spiders and centipedes came down from the mountain and swarmed the agricultural fields at its base. Pit vipers came down and invaded the town. People smelled sulphur in the air.
On May 2, the volcano produced loud explosions and earthquakes, which got people’s attention. But an important election was called for May 11 and the Governor did not want to order an evacuation. All of that became irrelevant in the unstoppable pyroclastic flow of gases, dust, and steam that reached temperatures of about 2000 degrees F. The man here looks like he’s been photoshopped into the disaster, airlifted in through a few keystrokes or trackpad swipes. Dropped in to look around. He is standing in what once was a street, now flattened through the camera lens into a jumble of jagged shapes and patterns. And at the vanishing point, still standing in the rear of the street reduced to chaos, is the remnants of a Church or City Hall. The empty shell of the church or the state left recognizable for those leftover to witness the displeasure of the gods… or at least that’s what people tell themselves when the cold hard reality of science is too much to bear.
Leah Modigliani
Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is an artist and scholar who rejects specialization in favor of transdisciplinary engagements with fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s projects arise from a network of concerns including the history of the avant-garde and its relationship to political critique, feminist art and writing, social dissent since 1968, the history of photography, performance and re-enactment as political strategy, and the pernicious effects of neoliberal capitalism. At the node of these networks is her central concern with how an individual’s freedom of expression is destroyed, curtailed, or displaced through socio-economic factors beyond their control.
@time_moves_in_myserious_ways is inspired broadly by conceptual artists’ work, and On Kawara’s date paintings and his I Got Up postcards more particularly. The IG account became a way to reflect on each day, and learn something new about the world, while under the influence of the strange sense of time that accompanies life under quarantine during a global pandemic. July 21, 2021 will mark a year of completing one post every day. Modigliani’s other work can be seen at www.leahmodiglianii.net.
For more work like the one above, please go here.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.