A decade passed
September 30, 2026 - Australia

I can’t recall how I found out about your project originally, but after writing the essay in 2016, I had mixed feelings about being a participant in the project. Was I doing it because I wanted to be part of this controversial art project? Was it somehow ego-related? Did that make me a bad person, considering the subject matter? Or was I doing it just because I wanted the flipbook? Why did I want the flipbook? What kind of person did that make me? Etc etc

In the end, I couldn’t decide what was driving it, so I decided to sleep on it. A decade passed. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 came and went. And this morning I read the essay I wrote ten years ago and thought, yes, I still feel the same.

I first heard about the attack on the Twin Towers when my radio woke me on the 12th of September. At first, I thought it had to be a bad joke. Then I turned the TV on. The events had taken place some hours before, and the images of the towers being hit and collapsing were being shown repeatedly, along with footage of pedestrians running through clouds of dust.

I was pregnant with my first child at the time. Worst case scenarios flooded my mind: nuclear war, apocalypse, the collapse of civilisation. I imagined I would have to go and hide out in a cave somewhere and raise my baby in the wilderness. I was suddenly terrified of the world I was bringing my child into, and for a few weeks felt that I’d made a mistake deciding to have children. I saw the world as being quite innocent before that day, but of course it wasn’t. It’s just that I was being bombarded by the horrors of it at a new intensity, whilst experiencing the overwhelming responsibility that comes with bringing a child into existence.

I had to go to work that day. There was the general opinion amongst my progressive, critical colleagues that the US deserved it, that they had it coming. Any notion of empathy for innocent victims was met with “What about all the people the US have bombed and terrorised over the past 50 years?” This knee-jerk cynicism, expressed as political awareness, really upset me. It seemed just as misguided as the patriotic hysteria consuming the US. I remember getting into arguments with people about it. I had friends in the USA, I had been to the top of the World Trade Centre, and I felt an emotional attachment to the place and the people. But already taboos were developing around the way we could talk about the event.

A friend who taught at preschool spent the following days fielding questions. One child asked “Why do they keep flying the planes into buildings? Why don’t they learn after the first time?” In his eyes, the incessant footage we were bombarded with represented a series of separate events, the pilots of the planes not learning anything from the first collision, stupidly repeating the same mistake over and over. Thinking about it now, that seems a pretty apt metaphor for humanity. We keep repeating mistakes, even though the effects are disastrous, horrific. We never seem to learn anything.

When I stumbled across your flipbook, I had an instant, visceral reaction. Part of me found it absolutely compelling – the whimsical technology, the familiar yet disturbing imagery – but I also remember thinking “you can’t do that!” The contradictory nature of my reaction intrigued me. In a sense, it mirrored exactly what I felt at the time. The images of the towers being struck were horrible and beautiful at the same time. I watched with dread, and yet I was unable to avert my eyes. It was a powerfully symbolic gesture, attacking the world’s largest super-power at its capitalist heart. The symbolism was bound up in the towers themselves, architectural wonders of the 20th century, and yet ultimately so vulnerable. I remember thinking “why didn’t anyone anticipate this?” It was unthought-of, unthinkable, until it happened. And then it seemed inevitable.

For me, the images of the towers haven’t lost their impact over time, or through repeated viewing. I still feel that sense of horror and incomprehension, the dread that consumed me twenty-five years ago. But the idea of owning a flipbook is appealing. Does it trivialise the event? I see it as a bizarre piece of 21st century memorabilia, a unique way of remembering a moment in time. The fact that the media saturated us with these images in the aftermath of the event takes away any sense of it being wrong in my eyes. Anyone who lived through those times can’t help but have their own version of that newsreel running in their head.

Sarah