Witness

de Miriam Schaer

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. "I developed Witness from a New York Times article that described the bombing of Baghdad's historic street of booksellers during the American occupation of Iraq in 2007. I started by running the text of the original article through every language available on Google Translate, then printed out the new and transformed pages. Albanian, Esperanto, Georgian, Malay and Serbian descriptions of the massacre now lived side by side with pages in French, Italian and Thai. Next, I hand-cut each page into the shape of my own hand, sewed on hand-twisted book cords, then charred, dirtied and dyed the pages to emulate the books that survived the bombing. In our age of constant, instant news and global distribution, we are all witnesses; and, accepting the maxim that there are no innocent witnesses, all morally complicit to the extent we choose to look away or fail to act"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.