Freedom Rocks
2004 - present
Video still, Freedom Rocks, from interview with Barbara Lorenzen, 2009.

Freedom Rocks is a collaborative project currently being carried out with Blake Fitzpatrick. Named after the words on a bag of Wall fragments sold in Toronto in the early 1990s, this project is an extension of our work on the Berlin Wall from 2003-2004, which was shown at the Goethe Institute in Toronto in 2004 and is viewable elsewhere on this website. Click here to see it.

Freedeom Rocks takes as its premise that the Berlin Wall wasn't destroyed in 1989 but disassembled and dispersed throughout the world in various-sized pieces for a variety of reasons. In this sense, the history of the Berlin Wall didn't end on November 9, 1989 but continues to this day as it has become one of the world's largest mobile ruins. We are particularly interested in the meaning of the fragments of the Wall as they move in both time and space from Berlin to North America, where we live (Toronto). We are working with both the large two-ton trophy slabs found at sites like the American Presidential Libraries and with the smallest personally-collected slivers of Wall. In working with these extremes we have discovered interesting questions regarding the relationship of memory to history.

Please check back for further information on this extensive project as it will soon have its own website.

We are hoping that by the end of August/early September 2011, the new website will be up and running. It will feature still photographic and video work from our visits to many North American sites of the Wall including New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Montreal and (believe it or not) Truro, Nova Scotia. As well, the new website will offer many of our interviews with individuals who own small pieces. There will also be an important, interactive aspect to the new site that will invite those who own small pieces of the Wall to share their images and stories of how their pieces were acquired, thus contributing to a virtual "re-assembly" of the Wall as global archive.

 

 

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