Exegi monumentum aere perennius. Horace III.30.1
My small town in Vermont looked different last week as two groups of public artists installed a temporary mural project.
The first, ArtLords, is an Afghan-led movement dedicated to making art for social change and peace building. Since 2014, ArtLords have created murals on blast walls in Kabul as a way, in their own words, “to convert the negative psychological impact of violence on the people of Kabul into a positive visual experience.”
But since the 2021 evacuation of Kabul, the 50-some ArtLords have been scattered and in hiding. Five have found refuge here in the Brattleboro area.
These five worked with Tape Art, a Providence-based group that creates temporary murals with low-adhesive tape. Together, they created 17 temporary murals on walls in downtown Brattleboro. These temporary murals honored those the ArtLords had created in Kabul, murals subsequently destroyed by the Taliban.
I didn’t even know what a blast wall was: a barrier erected to protect vulnerable buildings from explosions. My first challenge, then, has been to imagine living in a place where such things are normal. And then to imagine what it means that, immediately on taking power, the Taliban would choose to whitewash these works of art.
What I find so moving in these recreated murals is the act of remembering and caring both for the work originally created in Afghanistan and for the Afghan people themselves. Consider I See You, a mural with an anti-corruption message placed on a wall of the spy agency in Afghanistan.
The Brattleboro version honors the work of the mural by showing the artists (figures made with green and blue tape) in the process of creating it.
Or I See You, We Will Not Forget, which incorporates bloodied shoes belonging to a child killed in a bombing.
The Brattleboro version again incorporates figures, this time two women who carry the burden of grief for the dead child.
A map of Afghanistan covered in a bandage:
The recreated image of this bandaged map of Afghanistan adds figures who look as though they are carrying the wounded country out of a battlefield.
The murals are gone now, as they were created to remain for only a week.
I have built a monument more lasting than bronze, Horace writes about his poetry, and his grand statement is often seen as a programmatic statement about art: it’s meant to endure.
But not all art does last, of course. Some is lost to time and some is intentionally eradicated. The Taliban has erased not just subversive murals, but priceless monuments. I remember the shock my history students and I felt as we watched video of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, monumental statues that had stood in their limestone niches for more than 1500 years.
But some works of art, such as these murals, choose to be ephemeral. And that very fragility, the awareness that we can’t always hold on to what is beautiful, or to what we love, can make them that much more powerful.
In Honoring Honar (honar means “art” in Dari) these artists have reminded us to pay attention to what is around us. Works of art may be as mortal as we are.
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