every sec­ond is like, for­ev­er, and every year is like 11.3 centimetres

When placed against a wall, fly­screen flick­ers with moir’s and pat­terns that shift from one per­spec­tive to the next. The illu­sions are remark­able but the real­i­ty of the fab­ric is less inter­est­ing a sim­ple fibre­glass weave gen­er­at­ing a reg­u­lar grid of rec­tan­gles. Into this trick­ery I’ve stitched frag­ments of sound­waves. Each frag­ment is tak­en from an anti-war speech giv­en at a ral­ly in Ade­laide in Sep­tem­ber last year and the text of each frag­ment is not­ed in the title of the piece. The title of every piece also notes that each frag­ment has been accred­it­ed to a dif­fer­ent, hypo­thet­i­cal anti-war speech from through­out his­to­ry the speak­er, the war, and the place, date and time of the speech are all noted.

So I sit at my stitch­ing frame, head bent far down, chin to chest, stitch­ing, stitch­ing, stitch­ing, and con­sid­er­ing. What do peo­ple do in times of war when they bare­ly appear as such like these days here. What to do when, despite the dai­ly media cov­er­age whose news is as reg­u­lar­ly repet­i­tive as the grid on the fly screen, I feel so removed. And unwill­ing. So I sit and stitch and this action becomes an action of inac­tion, like all my oth­er dai­ly actions. And they become actions of wait­ing where every sec­ond takes for­ev­er and every year is just absurd.

Louisa Bufarde­ci, 2007