Dans le New York Times : An Art Installation Reflects on the Syrian Crisis and Extinguished Hopes

Issam Kourbaj called a friend in New York last week, seeking a ride to Manhattan from Kennedy International Airport after a flight from London. What he got was advice.

Take the matches out of your luggage, the friend told him.
So Mr. Kourbaj removed the matches, all 1,579 of them, each burned and blackened, each representing a single day of the Syrian uprising running from March 2011 through the middle of July.

The matches were a captivating element in an installation called “Another Day Lost” that Mr. Kourbaj, an artist who was born in Syria and lives in England, set up in London last summer. He had planned to carry the components of that installation — a tent, along with dozens of small items that he arranges to create a scaled-down view of a refugee camp, and the matches — as checked luggage

Without the matches, he made another call, to Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, where he was to set up the tent and the installation in the churchyard. He said he needed matches, lots of matches, matches that had been lit, burned and blown out.

Someone from the church bought boxes and boxes of kitchen matches, and soon parishioners were striking, and extinguishing, match after match. They had them ready for the opening of the installation on Sunday, along with several thousand more for another installation Mr. Kourbaj was to do in the church’s Parish Center, at Trinity Place and Rector Street.

“The significance of the matches is the metaphor of creating the light of day and the dark of day,” he said. “There is the lighting of the match, and the extinguishing of the match is like the sunset.”

Pour lire la suite : ​http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/nyregion/an-art-installation-reflects-on-the-syrian-crisis-and-extinguished-hopes.html