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| Master of Design student, Eli Lavett, with his work, The Things We Saw |
“Two years ago, just a few weeks after having arrived in Glasgow, I found myself in a bathroom stall — hot tears streaming down my cheeks — while my friends enjoyed their second or third round of drinks in the bar upstairs. I don’t know how long I was down there, trying to catch my breath, steadying myself against the cubicle wall. All I remember is being overcome with grief — a sudden, violent wave of heartache that tightened my chest, gripped my throat, and threatened to suffocate me right then and there.
Eight people had just been killed by an act of terror in the neighborhood where I grew up. As I read the news, an ugly mix of anxiety and isolation began to swell in my stomach, the air having suddenly evacuated my lungs. In that moment, I was completely and thoroughly divorced from reality. I was seven years old again, watching the North Tower collapse on the news and feeling the tremors make their way through my body and up into my throat.”
Eli Lavett
A Master of Design student has unveiled a work at GSA Degree Show today, 30 May 2019, through which has been able to come to terms with his experiences of 9/11 and its aftermath for the first time.
Designer Eli Lavett was only a young boy on 11 September 2001 and the events of that day were to have a profound effect on him. As a New Yorker from a Muslim family he witnessed the best and the worst of humanity in the aftermath of the attack. On the one hand there was solidarity and support after the tragedy, but on the other unrestrained anger from people desperate to find a scapegoat for an event that was so grotesque.
“It didn’t matter that as we ran through the streets of Tribeca that the debris swallowed our neighborhood and forced us out; it didn’t matter that my mother sat rocking back and forth, wondering if we were going to die as we waited for the second tower to give way at any moment; it didn’t matter that they used our school as a morgue, or that none of us were really ever the same after that day. None of it meant anything, because people like me and my mom had become the enemy — to them, we’d brought this on ourselves.”
Eli has been ruminating on the events of that day for years, but it was only when he came to Scotland to study for a Masters in Communication Design at The Glasgow School of Art that he found a way of coming to grips with what had happened and his memories of it. Through his Degree Show work, The Things We Saw, he has not only accepted the pain and heartache, but also found a way to confront and share it.
“I hope to place the viewer within a certain time and place, and to evoke some of the emotions that I felt as a seven-year old in Lower Manhattan, or at least a suggestion of those emotions.”
Eli Lavett’s film work, The Things We Saw, will be on show in the Reid Building at 2019 Degree Show which is open to the public from 1 – 9 June 2019. This year also offers the first opportunity for the public to see the newly refurbished Stow Building as the School of Fine Art Degree Show returns to Garnethill.
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For further information, images and interviews contact:
Lesley Booth,
07799414474