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Third Person Eclipse



In conjunction with COLLASUS and the ongoing project Des Chapitres Du Conflit a collection of interventions that address and inhabit the former Iraq Embassy to East Germany.

13" x 50" eclipse chart that was found, altered, and returned to abandoned Iraq Embassy, cuneiform script translations, recovered Geha-Werke white out

The original meaning of the word ‘eclipse’ in 12th century Greece stemmed from the word ‘ekleipsis’ that meant an abandonment, or to forsake a usual place and fail to appear. This concept and Greek definition served as a basis for investigating statistical charts that were found inside the abandoned Iraqi Embassy in Pankow Berlin that illustrated two rows of varying perceptual observations of lunar phases leading to eclipses.

On this register, the two eclipses that are depicted coincide with two historical events: the first observed and recorded solar eclipse in Babylon and the fall of the Berlin wall that led to the abandonment of the eastern embassy in Pankow. The first of these events occurred on May 3rd, 1375 BC in Ugarit Babylon, which in present day would have been approximately 50 miles south of Baghdad. The observation was the first recorded eclipse, and was rendered on clay tablets in cuneiform script that is the earliest form of linear written expression that all the following languages are derivative of in modern form. The second eclipse occurred on January 30th, 1991 and appears as it would have from the embassy in Berlin, the day before it was completely abandoned, and shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

In their altered form the charts taken from the embassy were pieced together forming the procession of phases before and after the eclipses. Then, the white out that was recovered from the embassy was used to obscure the current Arabic labeling under each phase, and were instead relabeled in cuneiform script with corresponding dates, times, and keys that represent the sun, earth, and moon. The finished chart was then sent back to Berlin to be discretely displayed inside the embassy on the second floor, and pinned in a tiled light blue room with a window facing northeast that allows the sun to slowly move over the surface of the chart while it awaits a third translation. An information eclipse has occurred, and objective data has become a cryptographic pending cipher.







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