Again we are numb when thinking about the number of people ripped out of life by gun violence and mass shootings in the U.S.

In January of 2023 over three thousand people already lost their lives to murder, accidental killings and suicide (up to date daily statistics here.) As of the 26th, the NYT reported on 39 mass shootings for this month alone, with 69 people killed and more wounded.

Today we are not digging into the causes for gun violence – you know my opinions! but just in case here is a link again to an essay in the Washington Post on how the normalization of gun violence paves the way for authoritarianism. Instead I was wondering about how people who were not famous, not on anyone’s radar other than family and friends, just everyday people like ourselves, are remembered. Once the “here are the victims” profiles have disappeared from the media who jump on the wagon of public attention after each egregious new massacre, how is the departed’s memory honored? What will remain of the mostly anonymous ones?

I am surely not the first nor the last one to think along those lines. But some do it with stunning creativity, like Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo. She started a project in 2005, Minimum Monument, that concentrated on small, ordinary men and woman made from ice. The 20 cm tall figures are spread out in public places to melt away, the opposite of static memorials to the famous. As she explains on her website (all images in this section from her website) :

In a few-minute action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice; in the place of the monument scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Middlebury, Vermont (2018)

Here is a short video of the work process. The work has been shown in cities around the world.

The project, originally an attempt to elevate the memory of the defeated, the unknown, and to make us think of mortality rather than the immortality of fame, has evolved to embrace a larger issue as well. The climate movement has coopted the symbolism of these melting ordinary men and women, alerting us to the threats and dangers of global warming, the potential disappearance of human life.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Rome, Italy (2020.)

Here is the artist’s statement:

The issue of global warming and the threatens posed by climate change on the planet that shows us an interdependence between different humans and puts us all in the same condition and in the face of a planetary urgency. This urgency requires a paradigm shift in the development of governments of all nations to think of another model of development outside the current level of consumption. These threats also finally put Western man in his place, his fate is along with the destiny of the planet, he is not the “king” of nature, but a constituent element of it. We are nature.

Néle Azevedo Minimum Monument Paris, France (2015) and Kendall Castle, GB (2016.)

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Closer to home a colleague and fellow Oregon Art Watch Board member, Michael Griggs, died a death of more natural causes this week, an unsung hero of the Portland theater world, as someone called him. Rest in power.

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Electra (12.22), 2022

There is another project embracing the beauty of ice and snow in all of it ephemeral instantiations that I rather like and I think Michael might have as well, given its theatric nature. Instead of standing in line at the pearly gates, waiting to cross into another realm of promised beauty and eternity, one might like to cross through these thresholds, where there is no change in locale, no upper- or under-world, no hell, just soft light.

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds, Maya (2022)

The gates were erected by Sabine Mirlesse on top of the Puy-de-Dôme volcano, home to the ruins of the Gallo-roman Temple of Mercury in the Massif Central, about 7 miles from Clermont-Ferrand (Auvergne, France.) The project, Crystalline Thresholds, was inspired by shapes from the temple door and research notes from the artist’s grandfather who investigated the properties of ice on airplane wings at this very site in 1936/37. The sculptures are exposed to the winds and weather in this micro climate, accumulating ice that will be melting by March or April.

Before and after the ice accumulated – Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Maia and Taygeta (12.22), 2022.

The ephemeral land-art installation consists of seven thresholds oriented to mirror the constellation of Pleiades and four pathmarkers for the cardinal directions. From what I learned from the press release (source for the photos in this section as well as the artist’s website):

Her research is centered around the visibility of thresholds and the interiority of landscape, with a particular interest in how geological sites are divined, interpreted, and recounted.… Her creative practice is rooted in her background in mysticism and literature.

The majority of religions and thought systems across the globe do assume that after crossing the threshold of death there will be an extension of consciousness or some circular continuation of some kind after dying. There is the vision of eternal, experienced life in paradise, or that of rebirth, or the belief that an ancestral spirit is still able to commune with the living.

The walkway along the rim of the volcano and the installation.

I, no surprise, adhere to a more limited view of things to come: eternal oblivion, also referred to as non–existence or nothingness, alternative to an extended conscience, possibilities already considered as early as the writings of Socrates and Cicero. That does not prohibit fantasizing, however, that, newly impervious to pain and cold, one might sail through these thresholds of otherworldly beauty, before the welcome nothingness sets in. We will, of course, never know. Or, to put it more cautiously, you are unlikely to read about it here….

Sabine Mirlesse Crystalline Thresholds Celaeno (12.22), 2022.

Temperatures are supposed to fall into the low 20s beginning this weekend, with snow possible for Wednesday. Thus music today from Schubert’s Winterreise (full cycle), song III. Frozen Tears and song IV. Turned to Ice.