Naama Roth at Etablissement d’en face

Artist: Naama Roth

Exhibition title: By The Tail

Venue: Etablissement d’en face, Brussels, Belgium

Date: September 16 – October 22, 2023

Photography: ©Fabrice Schneider / all images courtesy of the artist and Etablissement d’en face

A certain time ago engineers, urbanists, and architects had a meeting in a new building with large windows.
It was hot. They were thinking and talking a lot.
A black bird flew into the space.

80 years later the new building with the large windows was demolished. The engineers, urbanists, and architects had of course all died by that time. The black bird as well.

A certain time later an underground factory was built on the same spot.
It was a secret factory. Drones were made inside.
Above the factory, a park was made with well designed paths in brown gravel, fountains, and modern lanterns with LED lights.

Trees were loaded onto white trucks from a neighbouring country and planted
in the park. Once all the trees stood in the park, black birds flew from far away to the new trees in the park. They were observing what happened on the ground and underneath.

Again, much later, the park and most of its visitors got flooded by what some
people described as a 20-meter-high wall of mud.
The ceilings of the secret underground factory collapsed through the enormous weight.
As if by miracle, some trees and most of the black birds survived.
The whole content of the factory, including all the smashed bodies of the workers and the flattened drones, were loaded onto white trucks in the middle of the night and buried again, but this time for good.
Only the black birds witnessed the whole secret operation
without saying a word.

Even much later, some say much earlier,
(we are speaking in terms of hundreds, even thousands of years) there was, at the same spot, a bush.
It was very very hot.
So hot that even metal would melt.
The word vacation did not anymore or not yet exist.
One could hear and even see with some luck, approaching the bush, very small black birds that were shrieking.
They were very hungry and thirsty.

Not so much later a bigger black bird flew to the bush. The small black birds were saved.
Once the small black birds got bigger
they all flew away and were never seen again.