| |
Finally he arrives. It is not so easy to enter through this door. This museum feels like a cemetery. He has a strange feeling in front of this huge white tree. White is the color of the shroud. This lonely tree, cut from her source and planted here in the middle of marbles and cold walls, is far away from her roots. Maybe it is not that huge, but everything looks bigger from his perspective, everything has a more powerful position than him, including this white tree. This tree arrived by a similar pathway to his. The high temperature that melted her helped her to have another shape, made her an artwork. For him, the final result is different. This hell on earth during the explosion that he survived was too much. It reshaped him to fit in a wheelchair and destroyed his soul so it couldn’t fit anywhere. We don’t really know who is more dead, her or him.
This artwork is made from cast aluminum and he is made from flesh and bones, but he is also cut from his roots. He is feeling uncomfortable in front of this artwork. It is hard to understand art after all, but something in this tree is bothering him. He is not prepared yet to rethink his memories, now in Montreal, six thousand miles away and eight years past, and he is not ready to face something that reminds him of himself. He doesn’t expect to be confronted with this just at the entrance; but he cannot move from there, he feels as a magnetic field is keeping him staring at those branches, they are looking to the sky with such a pride. He admires how a dead tree can be so proud of herself. After all she is looking to a new start, the artwork title is: Turn back time, let’s start this day again. After reading this small note on the wall, a thought hits his soul like gunfire: Bagdad, would it be possible to start 24 April 2003 again?
|