ALI CHERRI
ARTIST

Things that move (us)

Earthquakes, tremors, vibrations, vacillations, wiggles, wobbles and other movements that, when registered on the screen of the seismograph or in the body’s memory, make of us their witnesses.

We can perceive the difference between natural disasters—an earthquake or a tsunami, something unpredictable, to which we have no choice but to submit—and those made by man—an act of terrorism, the failure of a security system in a nuclear power plant or a financial crash. All of these events have their place on the spectrum of risk, but disaster itself, in all its forms, is always the same.

If disaster, in its very etymology, refers to the idea of being born under a “bad star” (dis-astro), proclaiming a doomed, sealed fate, catastrophe is also that which turns back on itself (kata-strophê). It is not only a reversal, but something that comes back, that repeats itself endlessly, stubbornly, irrevocably.

Far from apocalyptic representations, what I wish to make visible, poetic, is the chaos of a world in decline, its movements, its tremors and vacillations, its falls. The words of Walter Benjamin in his text on The Destructive Character resonate throughout this attempt: “What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”
Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Edmund F.N. Jephcott (Translator), 1986