a bird of stone
 

A Bird of Stone

“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh (1971) quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”

~ Milan Kundera (The book of Laughter & Forgetting)

Walking about 15 km way from the US embassy Dhaka, with stones at both feet and singing bowl at hand, came out of the connection between ephemerality of human beings on earth and its incessant power struggle since the inception. To Reetu peace is a utopia, but memory can create a range of dystopia. She thinks memory has the potential to awake the sleeping question of who we are? And what are we doing here? May be Memory has the strength of a fairy tale to get close to the answers of these questions.

This project enquires these questions by a created collective memory. Reetu tried to create memories, rechecking the memory after two years to find out if a personal dedication for the greatest global catastrophe could possibly create a personal memory. Or whether it was just something that faded away under the rubble of one and then another and then another.

US Embassy to Drik Picture Library, Dhanmondi, 22 August, 2014
Duration: 6 hour
Photo: Munem Wasif