We, Wallinger’s companions, can also now witness this event. We witness how Petit carefully traverses a point in space that events have since effaced. I am travelling back to my memory of the BBC news footage of 9/11. Wallinger is probing us to reflect on what we are looking at and the narratives they construct between things. He has taken Petit’s wire and connected the two pieces together and we must walk along it, bounce up and down, our feet must leave the wire and settle down again, lie down and relax and swing our legs over the wire. Like the Doctor, Wallinger has chosen a moment and image that create personal myth and personal language, grounded in politics, a sense of time and place, rooted in history as well as the ubiquitous ambience of the electronic media.
The essay can be read in full on Academia.
