Reconstruction
Reconstruction
The reconstruction process started with the development of instructions to do it. Using the code system, the images of isolated pieces and the 3D models of each layer, maps were developed and the printed versions of these maps can be used to locate, to identify and to position each piece.
Or an animated version can be project in real size over the wood board and guide the performance to position every piece in its original place.
However, it will be never the original rubble.
Even if it was possible to position every grain of dust of this rubble as it was before, the new context, the new players, the new movements, will make it different. And every time that it was reconstructed it would be another version.
But can one said that the first one, the one constructed on 15th November 2016 is the original one? Or was it already a version of the newspaper cover? Aren’t these maps and animation many versions of the rubble?
30 maps to reposition each of the 1442 pieces
“What are the many versions if not diverse perspectives of a movable event?”
Oliver Laric
Can one said that authenticity is decided by the viewer?
Is the Palmyra ruins after the destruction by ISIS just another version of the ruins that have been changing since its construction?
Should we physically rebuild Palmyra? Or its many versions are already a reconstruction process?
There are meaningful and valuable ways to give an afterlife to destroyed landscapes through the representation of its destruction. These representations “demonstrate that in many cases, destruction is less an end-point […] than the beginning of a process of meaning-making”.7
Therefore, the absence of a monument does not mean it will be lost or forgotten but rather than its existence could be defined, for instance, through a “specific mode of image production”.8
Once the monument’s “potential for destruction” begins to function as “the most meaningful aspect of the monument’s existence as an object”, then its destruction becomes its realization.9
7. Keith Bresnahan and J. M. Mancini, 'Introduction' in Architecture and Armed Confict ed. JoAnne Mancini and Keith Bresnahan (Taylor and Francis, 2014)
8. Thomas Stubblefeld, 'Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul', Aggregate, http://we-aggregate.org/piece/iconoclasm-beyond-negation-globalization-and-image-production-in-mosul
9. Keith Bresnahan and J. M. Mancini
