The concept for the installation came about in the Fall of 2020, when the number of US deaths due to Covid-19 reached the tragic count of 200,000 lives lost. At the time, we felt that there should be a local temporary memorial to this historic milestone. Then in 2021, when the toll doubled by the beginning of the year and with no real end in sight, we decided to use the opportunity given to us by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, to produce the temporary memorial that was missing from the conversation.

We cannot think of a better cultural institution to present this work than MoCA in North Miami. Not only is MoCA well known in the art community as being great supporters of local artists, but as an incubator for the development of ideas. We knew during our site visit that we found the right place to make our concept a reality. MoCA’s stately palms in the main courtyard presented the perfect canvas to scale up our concept and address it directly to the community that we are a part of.

One of our inspirations were the ideas present in Eastern philosophies where two or more individuals connected by a red thread are destined to share an important story, regardless of time and place. We see these interconnecting lines as the individual threads that weave the fabric of our society, no matter how tangled, stretched, or frayed. As humans, we all are experiencing the same circumstances and similar hardships, hopefully bringing us closer together, with more understanding of one another, no matter our differences.

We installed tens of thousands of feet of red webbing between the palms in the MoCA court yard. Each palm was connected to its neighboring palm and that palm to the next, until they were all intertwined and woven together. Each palm was standing in for a member of the human community, a lost loved one, a departed soul.

With the title of the work being “The Visible Invisible,” we loved for the community and those visiting to see the physical connections we created among the palms as the invisible connection we have with one another. Even though it may not be obvious at first, one’s actions directly and indirectly affect others. We ought to keep the shared fabric of our stories strong and the hidden bond we all have to one another unbreakable.

Now in April 2022, one year since the initial install of the temporary memorial, the death toll of the pandemic has surpassed 1,000,000 in the US and 6,000,000 globally, still with no end in sight.

Team:
Designers: AMLgMATD
Photographer: Zachary Balber