The laminated tribute pages at the base of the flagpole on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade were starting to get damp and brown at the edges. Water had seeped into the candle holders along with absorbed ash. Military vehicles lumbered uselessly around the newly dropped boulders protecting Wall Street. Empty storefronts that had filled up with gas masks and dust masks and gloves went back to their previous state, unseeing eyes looking out at dazed workers trying lamely to go about their business. Along Atlantic Avenue, the Middle Eastern communities who had lived there for generations wept silently for the fathers, brothers, uncles, sons who had been torn from their families; detained, imprisoned, or vanished.
This was September 2022. The briefest hopes of a global change, a solidarity, an end to arbitrary violence that followed the destruction a year earlier, had been dashed, not even a month later, when the Bush government declared a global war instead.
The whole thing makes me sick to think about even now. That’s why I am not going to write about September 11 today, September 11. I was running late for work that day and my train was one that was meant to go under the river, under the financial district, and up through the whole island of Manhattan.
My friends and acquaintances with studios on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center as part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council studio program were calling, frantically in search of each other. Nobody had heard from Michael Richards, an artist in the program who had stayed overnight to work. You can see a retrospective of his work now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It opened just this Friday and is curated by Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin.
But I am not writing about 2001. I am writing about the miracle of 2002 when the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council opened up applications, not even a year after all their offices were destroyed, for a studio residency in DUMBO, Brooklyn. I still do not know how they did it. The most incredible humans, especially Moukhtar Kocache, the Lebanese-born Program Director at LMCC at the time, his boundless energy despite—or because of—the cataclysm. Moukhtar and his whole team at LMCC, they did not give up. Making space for art.
The studio I was granted was an enormous empty unfinished industrial loft on a high floor of a former warehouse. Fat concrete columns stabilized ceiling to floor to roof to basement. There were elevators. But also stairs. All these things felt needed. The wall of windows resembled those in the art films you see from the 60s, like Michael Snow’s Wavelength, but each pane double height. And a wall of the large panels.
The windows looked out over the Brooklyn Bridge directly at Lower Manhattan, where the emptiness of the towers forced their way into the field of vision, fields of memory, like a gap in teeth that you know didn’t just fall out on their own.
I walked into the space and before I could even register where I was exactly, I knew what I had to make. It was automatic. And it had to happen right away.
The windows were dirty. I called my friend Tamar. She had been my college roommate and we reconnected when, by chance, we both moved to Brooklyn a decade later. It was her hands, her long fingers, her elegant arms I needed now.
She came to meet me in the studio a few days later. I set up the Bolex and had the rag and Windex waiting.
Wash the windows, I told her, can you wash this pane? Good, now wipe a little differently, now can you wipe them but in the other direction? Maybe a little slower? How about this pane? And so she did.
It didn’t take very long to shoot. The lab took two weeks to process the thin strand of 16mm film. And when I got it back I cut it up using my heavy steel Rivas splicer.
My fingers, once adept at lining up the tape sprocket holes over the pins and matching them up with the film sprocket holes and pressing down the tape and tearing the extra tape off with a quick lift against the razor blade, worked with urgency but no accuracy. I opened and closed the splices so many times and when they were finished I went and double spliced the back so the loop wouldn’t break.
Two spools on the projector to make a path for the short loop. The projector beam shone small in between the panes, the only slice of wall in the wall of windows.
The clattering projector sound echoing in the concrete empty space of the studio. The view of the bridge and lower Manhattan beyond.
The hand washing the windows, those same windows, again and again, looping and gathering dirt and dust and scratches more at each pass through the projector, collecting what was invisible in the space and adding it to the image. At the same time the film losing its image as pieces of the emulsion flaked off with each rough run through the old projector’s gears.
Over and over. That futile image of trying to clean, trying to erase, trying to make clear.
The film is called “Washing.”
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And as always, you can see my film BUNKER, currently online, streaming on Amazon or via Projectr.tv.