The
original model for Yet to be titled is
a found press photograph from 2009. The motif is a building site in Tripoli. That
is two years before the foreign intervention in the country. Electricity
shortages prevail and the South Korean company Daewoo is in the process of
building a power plant. We see the construction site; above a pickup truck
hangs a large framed mirror. The mirror consists of five smaller vertical
mirrors that reflect an orange steel structure from the building site. In the
original photograph the frame included a large propaganda poster depicting
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi celebrating the 40th anniversary of the
Libyan Revolution. That Gaddafi’s place is now taken by a mirror seems to
suggest the obvious: that the choice between a Western presence and “Gaddafism”
was ultimately a false, paraconsistent one: the Libyan dictator as a sort of
distorting mirror.
Another observation about the picture is that what is seen
in the mirror is not optically consistent. The reflective surface does not show
what is there in the foreground. What we see is in fact the surface to the left
of the mirror, the background, if you will. That surface has been repeated five
times by an act of digital duplication. Repetition in architecture has
typically manifested in duplication. We see it in the steel structure on the
building site with its loss of formal lineage. Digitally this gesture results
in the boundaries between foreground and background being impossible to hold onto.
The genealogy of duplication is a never-ending story comparable to the act of
cloning. The dilemma, then, is not the risk of losing the original, but rather
the predicament of immortality, that something can be reconstituted endlessly from
leftover fragments, and reconfigured in constantly new variants. ︎
