soroush

This work, designed and built by BCT Ph.D. student Soroush Farzinmoghadam, is in tribute to the victims of 2001 terrorist attacks. From Soroush’s website:

9/11 was a terrorist attack on the United States and the entire international community. Thousands perished; innocent citizens from over ninety different nations. It has changed the history much as Japan’s strike against Pearl Harbor. The 9/11 attacks triggered the United States’ ongoing war against terrorism, starting with Afghanistan as a chain of targets intended to overthrow the Taliban, changing the course of world history.
The significance of the incidence and severity of traumatic loss makes a well-deserved concern for a memorial on the UMASS campus in tribute to those loved souls of the blameless victims of that horrifying tragedy, and to the ongoing legacy of pain and horror engendered by that seminal event. It is worth mentioning that a UMASS community member (Christoffer Carstanjen, a computer research specialist) lost his life in that violent aggression. It is also worth knowing that many undergraduate students at UMass were only 6-12 years old in 2001, and only experienced the moment of 9/11 as a child.
There is more to consider beyond the event by itself. The proposed intervention will encompass three different aspects of the 9/11 tragedy. It is to walk the audience through three distinct phases of concentration, encounter, and contemplation respectively. It is also to walk the audience through build-up, the moment of the event, and ongoing repercussions. The audience will start their experience with an unexpected encounter of projected fragments that mingles silence with astonishment, leaving them in an unknown suspension. Beyond, they will see and be able to walk into the second room that is designed based on facts and statistics about the attacks.
The intention of this design is to pay a well-deserved tribute to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy, together with providing information about the whole story. It should be mentioned that this art ‘intervention’ will be exhibited concurrently with University of Massachusetts Guantanamo Exhibition also to be shown in UMASS Campus. The messages these two projects aim to convey, makes this simultaneous exhibition of particular importance.

The opening of the exhibit will take place on Monday, January 27th, at 4:30, in the lower level of the Campus Center. For more information, visit this link:

http://people.umass.edu/mfarzinm/umass-911-intervention.html