A Spectacle of Privacy

“We cyclically mourn the disappearance/demolition of our cities as if it’s something new. We strive to maintain our cities. We fight for them. We revolt. We draw borders. We break them. Our entire lives become shadows of fights that are both legendary and futile: our intentions are noble, and our struggles, mundane. 

We strive to save our cities, assuming they once were shelters for our wilting dreams. We want to freeze their geographies in time, assuming smiles in picture frames will follow. We are selfish. We want to maintain our privacies by sustaining the world outside. We want to fuck in private, in a public discourse that allows us to fuck in private. 

The outside shells what is inside, instead of the inside constructing the outside. We strive to maintain our cities. We shout, shoot and die for them. We die for the outside so others can quietly fuck inside. As we cyclically mourn the disappearance/demolition of our cities, have we missed the possibility of the exercise of our most private moments becoming the bricks and mortar of the appearance/construction of our cities to come? Who shuts whom up? What censors what? This is a story of the city mourning the disappearance/demolition of its people and the compass of their fights.”

Roy Dib in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)