When The Village Voice chose Anthony Freda to create artwork for a story about the 9/11 Truth movement, he first planned to gently mock the Truthers. It was 2006, and as the article stated, mainstream 9/11 accounts like the film World Trade Center had relegated the Truth movement to DIY documentaries and a few sweaty corners of the Internet. But as Freda researched the Truther claims, what they said made sense to him, especially about how Building 7 came down. “At the onset I was hostile to these ideas,” Freda says, “but by the end of my night of research I said that these are serious people with questions that haven’t been answered.”
Rather than attack the Truthers, Freda instead attacked the official narrative. The resulting piece, a collage called Questions, uses red string to connect images, like a detective on TV building a case on a bulletin board. Questions will soon join the permanent collection at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, becoming one in a handful of artifacts there that represents an alternate view of history.
In the background of Questions is a blackboard, with notes and drawings scribbled in chalk. At the bottom is the back of a man’s head as he watches the second plane strike the Towers; above that man is string linking the images of Osama Bin Laden, John F. Kennedy, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, an honorary 9/11 Museum board member. There are also bits of flags and words printed on an old-fashioned label maker scattered throughout.
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