The World Trade Center is portrayed as two Plexiglas columns filled with 2000 small bags bearing the faces of the victims and perpetrators of the 9/11 disaster. At the time I was reading Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) and their concept of multiplicity really stood out to me. In this text, the authors criticize official constructions of popular unity, which are generally enacted in the service of power during times of crisis. There was a substantial number of workers from the Caribbean who perished in the World Trade Center. For me this gives an inkling of the incredible diversity of the lives that ended on that day. While this diversity was ignored by the attackers and government, I wanted to remind the viewer what is sacrificed whenever a community is "unified" by nationalist rhetoric.
Also, the demise of the towers spells out not only the collapse of U.S. isolationism, but also the strange collapse of difference among peoples. Death, as is often noted, is the equalizer of humanity. This piece returns us to Donne and Cesaire as well as Fanon: in that the monumental loss of 9/11, we experience the diminishment and degradation of ourselves and that no man or country can any longer consider itself an island, nor consider itself naturally free.