Alfredo Jaar
Es Usted Feliz
2018
Austin, TX
So much to do today:
Kill memory,
Kill pain,
Turn heart into a stone,
And yet,
Prepare to live again.
During the last four years, I always found refuge in the extraordinary lines
that Anna Akhmatova wrote against Stalinist terror. In her elegy Requiem,
her best known poem cycle written over three decades, she wrote that
'"one hundred million voices shout through her tortured mouth."
These were my thoughts when I proposed this project to the For Freedoms
Awakening Billboard Campaign, hoping that a hundred million voices would
join me in an emphatic rejection of the Trump regime.