New York’s High Line has a new attraction. In recent days, pedestrians walking through this aerial urban park, set up 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 me (“You know who I am”), the work is a replica of the Statue of Liberty created by the 51-year-old Italian-American artist Paola Pivi. But her face has been replaced by “a mask in the shape of an emoji, which represents the figure of an Asian boy”, describes the American newspaper. He comments:
“Paola Pivi has taken one of America’s most common symbols to show it in a strange new way.”
The various faces of immigration
A great admirer of Marcel Duchamp, Paola Pivi loves playing with the irrational to make the public react. Done, “a lazy interpretation” from You know me would be tantamount to believing that the Italian American did with the Statue of Liberty what the Frenchman did with his urinal: “transposing a familiar object into an unexpected environment”, he reads the newspaper.
But that would miss part of its point. As explained in New York Times Cecilia Alemani, the curator in charge of the artistic programming of High Line, the work is “an invitation to reflect on the fate of all individuals whose collective experiences, filled with hope and hardship, make up the reality of immigration to the United States.”
Individual fates
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, an orphan Tibetan adopted in 2012. The artist and her husband had met him in Dharamsala, a city in the north ofInd which hosts 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.
Over the next 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 has illegally arrived in the United States since Mexico when he was a child. He has just been granted asylum.
