New York’s High Line has a new attraction. In recent days, pedestrians walking through this aerial urban park, laid out on disused former railroad tracks high above Manhattan, can whip out their phones to “photographing an intriguing new sculpture”, relate The New York Times.
baptized You know who I am (“You Know Who I Am”), the work is a replica of the Statue of Liberty by Italian-American artist Paola Pivi, 51. But her face has been replaced by “a mask in the shape of an emoji, representing the figure of a little Asian boy”, describes the American daily. He comments:
“Paola Pivi has taken one of America’s most common symbols to show it in a new and strange light.”
The various faces of immigration
A great admirer of Marcel Duchamp, Paola Pivi likes to play with the irrational to make the public react. Fact, “a lazy interpretation” of You know who I am would amount to considering that the Italian-American did with the Statue of Liberty what the Frenchman had done with his urinal: “to transpose a familiar object into an unexpected environment”, reads the newspaper.
But that would be missing part of his point. As explained in New York Times Cecilia Alemani, the curator in charge of the artistic programming of the High Line, the work is “an invitation to reflect on the fate of all individuals whose collective experiences, full of hope and hardship, make up the reality of immigration to the United States”.
Individual destinies
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In this case, the mask with which Paola Pivi covered the head of her statue represents, in a distorted way, the face of her son, Norbu, a Tibetan orphan adopted in 2012. The artist and her husband had met him in Dharamsala , a city in northern India that is home to a very large community of Tibetans in exile. The adoption procedure was more complicated than expected and resulted in a grueling four-year legal battle.
This episode, for Norbu as for his adoptive parents, gave another resonance to the “freedom” that the statue of Auguste Bartholdi is supposed to symbolize for newcomers to American soil.
During the coming year, every two months, Paola Pivi will change the mask of her statue, so that it lends her face to other migrants. Norbu will be succeeded by Marco Saavedra, a restaurateur from the Bronx who arrived in the United States illegally from Mexico as a child. He has just been granted asylum.
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