The Thief

By the Thief’s Requiem, I don't mean a Requiem for a Thief, but rather a Requiem by a Thief. The Thief is not Mozart nor I. It is the Project itself. The Thief's Requiem authors a theft by stealing itself away. It interrupts a habit of being by removing a lived expectation. This is the presence of absence.

A friend of mine once asked me what I fear. I said I feared stopping. She said I think you fear not being an artist. We were saying the same thing but her answer was infinitely more precise.

The question is who are we behind the story we constantly tell ourselves. Sometimes something has to be taken from us in order to find out. When removal occurs without gain to the remover and release occurs without loss to the individual, theft can become the greatest gift. This is the opposite of perpetration. It is something more like healing.

Discord often finds its duration in our tendency to cling to negative experiences. By indulging in our rectitude we fail to see our shortcomings. We place blame on something outside of ourselves and tell ourselves stories to evidence the blame. In this way we design our enemies. This tendency perpetuates a self-feeding cycle of point- counterpoint negativity from which few are able to emerge. Only through release can we overcome the riptide. Only through sacrifice can we find the turning point. Only through humility can we hit the reset button.

The point of the Thief’s Requiem is to bring people together in a common offering to one another. By providing the city and its inhabitants the opportunity to interrupt themselves, the Requiem removes, if only for an hour, a habit of separation. For that hour people tell themselves a shared story and listen to a shared soundtrack. They are lifted as if by a wave and brought back down in the same spot but they know it to no longer be the same.

One could argue, and honestly I agree that art cannot do all that this project asks. But maybe art can inspire it. Or maybe it’s high time art quits telling itself the story of being art. Ultimately, this project is just Brussels listening to Brussels and trying to tell Brussels what it hears.