DIRGE 11.09.11
/ The View from Mrs. Thompson’s
Video commissioned to accompany a live performance of composer Charles Camilleri’s piece Dirge 11.09.11 (for clarinet & piano).
The performance was part of the event Rhythms of Vision dating 11.02.2017, held at Teatru Manuel, Valletta, Malta.
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program note
‘Everybody has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: You never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are.’
‘It seems grotesque to talk about being traumatised by a video when the people in the video were dying. Something about the shoes also falling made it worse. I think the older ladies took it better than I did. Then the hideous beauty of the rerun clip of the second plane hitting the tower, the blue and silver and black and spectacular orange of it, as more little moving dots fell. Mrs. Thompson was in her chair, which is a rocker with floral cushions. The living room has two other chairs, and a huge corduroy sofa that F– and I had had to take the front door off its hinges to get in the house.’
‘There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre absence of cynicism in the room’….’I’m trying to explain the way part of the horror of the Horror was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own – mine, and F–’s, and poor old loathsome Duane’s – than these ladies’.’
David Foster Wallace originally titled his article ‘View from the Interior / Interior Views’ in his first draft. It was later published as The View from Mrs. Thompson’s
The visual presented is an attempt at reflecting the impressions of Camilleri’s piece, informed by Wallace’s article sharing the same subject.
In 2018, the video was acquired by The Malta National Community Art Museum
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