Electric Resistance: Monument to a destroyed windmill

The collective Sigil seeks to explore the metamorphoses of the Arab landscape, through a series of visual, representational and site specific interventions. In June 2017, a windmill built by the Sigil collective in collaboration with Yaseen al-Bushy and Abu Ali al-Kalamouni in the Damascus suburb of Arbin, was destroyed by an air raid. Its power was used to run an underground field hospital. Plans for its replacement are currently underway.

Electric Resistance is both a monument to the windmill as well as a continuation of the act of creative resistance. One that takes power literally. Composed of twenty-four cells, once for each month in which the windmill was in operation, the monument acts as a battery, producing a small source of light. The story of the windmill’s construction and destruction, previously published in a book also on display, is manually inscribed on the edges of the copper and aluminum plates.