A R T I S T P R O J E C T

FOUR ENCOUNTERS
WITH SCULPTURE

RAYYANE TABET

In Four Encounters with Sculpture, Rayyane Tabet combines found
material and short diary entries to explore four encounters with places,
Objekte, and events. The project attempts to question sculpture as
concept and material.

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doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00094

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Giant Rock is the world’s largest freestanding
boulder. It is located in the Mojave Desert in
Kalifornien. In 1947 George Van Tassel decided
to lease the land on which the rock sat and move
his family there. In the years that followed, Die
rock became a gathering point for pilgrims who
believed that it was a marker placed on Earth by
extraterrestrials. To attract the creatures’ attention
and in an attempt to communicate with them, Van
Tassel decided to drag his 1950 Crosley up the
boulder and park it twenty-one meters in the air.
Every night, he would climb the rock, turn on the
car, and activate the headlights, in the hopes that
someone out there would see him down on Earth.
When I was living in California I spent some time
around Joshua Tree. One night, while camping at
Giant Rock, I thought I saw the headlights of a car
in the distance, but it was just the moon.

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After returning from a trip to Tell Halaf in 1929,
my great-grandfather, Faek Borkhoche, took his
wife Victoria out to spend a day on the Corniche
in Beirut. There he posed for a photograph in
front of Pigeon’s Rock, one of the city’s major
landmarks. Borkhoche had spent the last three
months following Baron Max von Oppenheim on
a dig in Syria to document the discovery of a large
Hittite temple complex. Following the excava-
tion, the ruins were sent to Aleppo where a full-
scale replica of all the elements was made from
plaster and donated to the city’s museum. Der
originals were shipped to Berlin to be donated to
the German government. Upon his arrival, von
Oppenheim was surprised to find that the city’s
conservators had declined his donation due to a
lack of storage space in the museum. Being the
son of a rich banker, he opened his own museum
in an abandoned factory. During the bombing of
Berlin, the museum caught fire and most of the
objects brought back were destroyed. Only the
large statues made from basalt stone survived the
fire. Jedoch, firefighters had thrown cold water
on the hot basalt to dowse the flames, shattering
the statues into thousands of pieces. Days later,
von Oppenheim came to inspect the damage and
proceeded to pick up the fragments and place
them in boxes. At the end of the war he went back
to the city’s museum armed with 27,000 Stücke
and said: “Take these fragments, one day you will
need them. Besides, like this, they take up almost
no space.”

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On the morning of September 1, 2006, I went to
buy a cup of coffee from a shop on Third Avenue
and 7th Street in Manhattan. As I was waiting for
it I noticed someone had left their copy of The
New York Times on the counter. The front page
showed trucks filled with debris from various
sites around Beirut slowly making their way to
dump the rubble in the sea and produce a make-
shift mountain. On my way out, I took the paper.
There is one main highway going south out of
Beirut. During the July War, it was obliterated. A
Jahr später, I was driving that highway, now riddled
with detours, to the beach in Tyre. As I drove on a
back road above the coastline, I watched the sea.
On the hill below, a series of strange forms ap-
peared, compelling me to stop. Not understanding
what I was seeing, I got out of the car and began
to walk towards them, counting. Twenty-two in-
comprehensibly large cylindrical structures dotted
the landscape. A fence blocked my path towards
ihnen, and a shepherd was tending his flock there.
I asked the man about the shapes, and his response
War: “This is what is left of the Trans-Arabian
Pipeline Company.” That moment never left my
Geist. A year later, I found a brochure published
by this company in 1950 to celebrate the comple-
tion of the world’s longest pipeline connecting
Saudi Arabia to the South of Lebanon. On one of
the brochure’s last pages was a photograph of a
man standing on a hill contemplating the terminal
facility just before it was inaugurated. Fifty-seven
years later I was standing in the same spot looking
at the remains of an industrial ruin.

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I bought a postcard from a flea market in Venice.
It shows a man surrounded by large slabs of
marble facing the mountainside from which they
were cut. The back of the postcard read: “Octo-
ber 6, 1932: Today the obelisk left for Rome.” On
November 4, 1932 Benito Mussolini inaugurated
the only modern obelisk in Rome. It was made
from Carrara marble, stood 37 meters tall, Und
weighed over 300 Tonnen. In order to transport the
obelisk from the Apuan Alps, sixty oxen were tied
to the stone and dragged it from the mountains to
the Tiber River. Following the fall of fascism, alle
memorials of Mussolini were removed. Jedoch,
the engraving “MVSSOLINI DVX”—Mussolini
Leader—on the base of the obelisk was five centi-
meters deep and could not be erased. For years
visitors believed that the top of the obelisk was
made of pure gold until one day a man climbed
the stone and came back with the disconcerting
news that what was thought to be gold was just an
illusion of glittery stones.