Through photographs, sculptures, and video, The Tell investigates the material legacies of September 11th as a means of deciphering the traces left by the event on contemporary political discourse. The project is articulated by site and material, even as it disputes the truth-claims of those forms through its own juxtapositions and fictions. In these works, the former Fresh Kills landfill, a burial site for the wreckage of September 11th, offers the site of disposal as a site of inquiry. Approached as an archaeological tell, the landscape becomes an archive. The production of a mythic history occurs in tandem with the production of its forms. Reflecting on cultural treasures, Walter Benjamin writes that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Through their material considerations, these pieces critique the mechanisms by which myth imbricates and constrains political identities.
William Wiebe
A Time of Abundance, 2018
