Written in rubble
The translation, location, and stories behind the graffiti you see in the rubble installation.
Life continues in places the world makes unlivable. Life always finds a way.
Through broken concrete, collapsed walls, and rooms open to the sky, the ordinary insists on itself. A shoe remains where someone once stood. A cup waits where tea might have been poured. Dust settles over the quiet evidence of lives that did not disappear with the blast.
Around this room, photographs show ordinary life. A walk down the street. A moment at the gym. Lives unfolding around you in Colorado. Yet every image faces the same direction.
Every neighbor feels the weight of the rubble.
The rubble is contained within four pillars, the boundaries holding it in place, creating a small enclosure where the destruction cannot move outward and nothing can enter to relieve it.
A quiet echo of the conditions in Gaza. An echo we bring here for you to listen to and reflect on.
2 x 4’s, plywood, spray texture, chisels, paint, concrete rubble, found objects
dimensions variable
Life in Rubble
Installation by Jesse Velez Fabrication support by Madelin Cover, Matt Haslam, and Pablo Pedroso.
Jesse Velez
A professional special effects designer and fabricator based in Denver Colorado, serving entertainment clients across the US and around the world.
He is the owner and lead designer at Raptor House FX, which produces a wide variety of specialty art for film, television, and live events.
He is passionate about storytelling through design, and strives to end each day having added something new to the world.
jesse@raptorhousefx.com
Artist Statement
The object you see before you is both a cage and an open window.
Concrete frames –like the countless thousands left standing above the people of Gaza– provide a defined boundary containing the broken remnants of everyday life. The interior space is small, claustrophobic, but in full view of anyone willing to turn their eyes inside. Messages of hope and scars of assault mark the pillars, and not a single stone or ounce of dust escapes the shape of the cube. The destruction is not hidden, and to overlook it would require intentionally looking away.
I am not Palestinian. I am an American of European and Hispanic descent with no real specific ethnic heritage in my own identity. I am a Christian, a husband, a father of three young children, and honored to lend my hands to this small artifact of the catastrophic human tragedy which has taken place in Gaza. A population which has long been intentionally sacrificed by the rest of the world for evil and selfish gains. Completely expendable to those in power.
I have no authority and no right to offer solutions, only to emphasize the human cost.
Without question, Children are sacred; and once any society justifies their sacrifice - regardless of circumstance - it is morally bankrupt.
I do not have any answers. Only my witness, and my prayers.
Do not look away.
Jesse Velez