KCAPUT

“Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts is to discover the images signified by them. The intention of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make ideas comprehensible. In this way texts are a metacode for images.”

- Vilém Flusser; Toward a Philosophy of Photography; London; 2000

If Flusser says, “Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up”, can we reverse his statement thus: The torn up image cannot signify, except through text.

In KCAPUT, a series of installations and texts, I engage this possibility by forcing a juxtaposition, a slippage. Caput means head in Latin, Kaput in German means destroyed, over or broken. A kind of verbal decapitation signaled by the crossing of the C is explored, as is the fracturing of embodied language.

In 2001, the Taliban destroyed two colossal statues of the Buddha in Bamian, Afghanistan. The erasure of the statues, on the one hand, resulted in the resurfacing of descriptions of the monuments, which date back to the 5th Century CE, and on the other, the urgent attempt on the part of various organizations (UNESCO, Metropolitan Museum, etc.) to reconstruct or memorialize the destroyed monument. The statues were already in a state of ruin before the bombing, and the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry in Zurich has gone so far as to create a 3D computer model of the statues, as they looked prior to the blast, accurate within a few centimeters. Of course it would seem Borgesian, even ridiculous to imagine the reconstruction of the ruin with such accuracy.

In KCAPUT, The image of the empty Bamian niche (a 3D computer reconstruction of it, nonetheless) can then be seen as a kind of black hole. In its stark blankness it is open to projection and is activated by an archive of descriptions of the destroyed statue.