A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial By: Yohanna M. Roa

A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial

^{06/01/2023
By: Yohanna M. Roa
Brooklyn Museum, New York}

The Brooklyn Museum is currently exhibiting Rafael Lozano Hammer’s A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial. The piece, initially commissioned
by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de México, is a participatory tribute that allows relatives of COVID-19 victims, from New York City and anywhere in the world, to come together to mourn their loss and share their experiences. The work is located at the intersection between art, technology, and architecture, while claiming to be an anti-monument that does not intend to immortalize any historical narrative nor an idea of nation, race, or social class. It rather aims to offer an immaterial participatory encounter for us to exercise the right to remember by weaving a collective fabric. The artist assumes a political stance against the writing processes of history, exchanging the concept of monument for that of document by creating a collective archive to exercise our right to memories.

Family members or friends interested in commemorating the life of a COVID-19 victim can submit a photograph through an online platform and physically attend or watch the live broadcast of the process of creating an ephemeral portrait with a modified robotic plotter that uses the grains of an hourglass set on a black background. At the conclusion of each drawing, the support tilts automatically, the sand descends, and is collected and stored for the next portrait. At first glance, the room is reminiscent of a family mausoleum; the two lateral walls of the exhibition room are covered with digital prints of the sand-made ephemeral portraits. The robotic plotter can be seen in the background and, on the wall located at the entrance, three simultaneous videos record the process. Due to the pandemic, funeral rites were altered; mourning and farewell as mediation spaces were suspended in much of the world. In some cases, they were replaced by a virtual image transmitted by a nurse with an electronic device to allow family members to say their final goodbye. Lozano intervenes this scenario by creating a place that wanders between the virtual and the face-to-face to recreate a communal space where, on the one hand, it is possible to share a farewell experience and, on the other, pay tribute to those who have gone. He recovers a
place of mediation by merging the physical, digital, and temporal spheres.
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By exchanging the concept of monument for that of document, the latter operates as a trace, a fragment of ruin, an unstable, incomplete transmitter; a blurred image that cites bodies and invokes presences in order to produce a common mediating space in the face of death. What emerges is a method that seeks to reverse the processes of writing history, since traditionally the objective has been to preserve images for posterity and produce a single narrative; instead, ephemeral images focus on preserving a collective and voluntary archive. In itself, the archive creates meaning; we formulate the images in order to write the story in a certain way. For this reason, it is essential that the sand images be shown together with the names of those portrayed and the dedications written by their loved ones. This method allows the multiplicity of personal stories, names, situations, races, locations, relationships to death, and goodbyes to emerge. In this way, Lozano assumes a political and ethical stance against the work of the historian as a certifier of those events that deserve to pass to posterity, and allows the exercise of the collective right to memory, assuming the creation of the archive as a multiplicity of stories. He is aware that the document is the product of human activity, consigned and kept under decisions made in advance.
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With this work, Rafael Lozano Hammer points to a social arena that became visible with COVID-19, where the ways we use to manage our pain and relationship with
death, either through legal and administrative processes or farewell rituals, are determined by conditions of class, race, gender, and nationality. However, the artist goes beyond this judgement to generate a collective device for articulating memory, which can continue to expand. In this way, he reverses the exercise of power through the conventional writing methods of the past, by operating the document and the archive as beacons that dimly illuminate memory zones, allowing us to establish dissimilar narratives that fracture the limits of what has traditionally been constituted as our identity.

YOHANNA M. ROA
Art historian and curator

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