ARTnews

2019-10-17

Last December, news outlets including Fox, ABC, and the Salt Lake Tribune reported on mysterious YouTube videos that showed two exploding rock formations in Utah’s Arches National Park. Some speculated about the scenarios’ authenticity, but the footage looked real enough that the Utah Department of Natural Resources sent staff to assess any possible damage to the landscape. When they found no resources were destroyed, however, authorities concluded that the videos were fake—answering a question posed by a local news report broadcast by Utah’s ABC 4: “Is it real vandalism or a very realistic looking hoax?” The confounding videos proved to be part of a conceptual artwork through which two Berlin-based artists—Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière, who previously collaborated on a site-specific performance for the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture—set out to learn how the public would react if protected natural monuments and ancient geological forms were destroyed. The idea for the project—titled I Am Afraid, I Must Ask You to Leave—was inspired in part by recent instances of cultural destruction such as the attacks against ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra and the monumental Buddha statues of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.