A Flowing Monument

Just as soon as ISIS destroyed the artefacts in Mosul Museum in 2015, the destruction itself became memorialised through the widely circulated videos and media coverage. Seeking to understand creation and destruction of symbolic value, Fabio Salvadori constructed a database of digital records of the destroyed artefacts. Through this archiving process he recognised that along with the destruction there were acts of creation in the form of ISIS’s dramatic videos, and the digital monument that manifests through the subsequent distribution, alterations and recreations. A video exploration of this creation goes on to suggest aesthetic strategies to devalue ISIS’s digital monument by manipulating the symbolic value.