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Statement of plans for fellowship      Jaime Davidovich

In the year 2000, I applied to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's artist-in-residence program at the World Trade Center.  In my proposal I stated that "the World Trade Center is a highly symbolic location.  I want to use images from the WTC environment together with my personal vision to produce new video and installation work."

During the summer of 2000, I was awarded the residence.  Over the following six months I worked on the ninety-first floor, starting every morning at 6, and videotaped misty views of the slowly awakening city.  I came back later in the afternoon to record the sunset.  I wanted to capture, in real time, the pace of life from this "mile-high" perspective.

My experience videotaping the New York landscape before and after rush hour impacted my work significantly.  When I look at the videos now, it is not a "past time" but a real time converted into mist and dust.  Additionally, the events of 9/11 have dramatically altered the context and meaning of my project.  The landscapes I videotaped now exist only in our collective memory and are imbued with anger, sadness and a range of other complex emotions.

If I am awarded this grant I will develop an installation based on the footage from my World Trade Center residency.  The piece will consist of two large vertical stripes of white paint - evoking the shapes of the two towers - in the center of a black painted wall.  The views I videotaped from the World Trade Center will be projected on either side of the white stripes. (Projecting video on a black painted surface produces an effect similar to that of an old photograph from 1900.) The lef side will be the East River, and the right side of the Hudson River.  This reverse of the "real" viewing will further stress the dislocation produced by the 9/11 tragedy.  Each video projection will be in real time; one will be sunset and the other will be sunrise.

The working title of this new piece is "Rewind and Stop".

The installation with all the equipment and DVD's will be packed in a specially designed crate to be available for presentations in universities and museums all over the world.  This will conclude the work I started during the summer of the year 2000.