History begins with the vanity of Kings
Rafael Guendelman Hale

Secondly, I incorporated ISIS rhetoric. ISIS became known for its extreme violence and performativity in its attempts to establish a unified Islamic territory based on conservative Wahhabist ideology. Its propaganda and audiovisual material became central to global media discourse not only because of their brutality, but also because of their sophisticated use of new media strategies. In the abstract Discovering Hidden Motifs in ISIS Jihadi Texts by Using Text Mining, this conflict is described as the most mediated conflict in history. ISIS’s self-awareness regarding its campaigns can be compared to that of King Ashur. This correlation is particularly striking because both ISIS and King Ashur occupy the same geographic territory. The paradox, however, is that ISIS destroyed Assyrian artefacts while simultaneously replicating the violent rhetoric of the past. Dabiq states: “We entered the ruins of the ancient Assyrians in Wilāyat Nīnawā and demolished their statues, sculptures, and engravings of idols and kings. May Allah cleanse all Muslims’ lands of the idols of both the past and the present.” In this gesture, both cultures become connected through the act of heritage destruction.

Finally, in order to avoid establishing a simplistic parallel between Assyria and ISIS that might reinforce reductive ideas about the supposed intrinsic violence of Arab culture, I decided to include a third voice: that of the United States, specifically George Bush’s speech declaring victory to American troops. The American invasion of Iraq is fundamental to understanding the region’s current instability. Iraqi scholar and Nahrein Network Coordinator Mehiyar Kathem argues that the 2003 invasion is one of the principal causes of the present crisis, since it dismantled the country’s social and political structures.





The inclusion of this third perspective introduces a discourse that frames the conflict through the rhetoric of liberation. At first glance, Bush’s speech appears less aggressive than the rhetoric of ISIS or Assyria. However, a deeper reading reveals its underlying violence. Unlike the other two voices, this speech is less explicit and therefore less naive. Although it presents itself as a discourse of freedom and democracy, the devastating consequences of the invasion transform the speech retrospectively into something closer to irony than persuasion. As Rodrigo Karmy argues in Escritos Bárbaros, American and Western narratives are often structured around the bipolar opposition between good and evil — an idea also explored by Adam Curtis in Bitter Lake when discussing British intervention in Afghanistan. This narrative is closely associated with the religious figure of the saviour: the one who arrives to rescue, liberate, and redeem.

The reproduction of the Taylor Prism was made at a 1:1 scale and inscribed with excerpts from these three textual sources. As a methodology, I first structured a dialogue between ISIS and Assyria, combining passages from Dabiq with the Assyrian campaigns inscribed on the original Prism. I organised the narrative across six columns, each one presenting a different tone. These six sections addressed: a general worldview, graphic violence, destruction, the escape of the defeated, the capture and possession of material goods, and finally victory. To these texts I added excerpts from Bush’s speech. In some moments, the speech generates coherence; in others, interruption and dissonance.

For example, within the section dedicated to destruction, the Assyrian text refers to the destruction of cities (“I burned with fire pavilions and tents, their abodes, and reduced them to ashes”), Dabiq addresses the destruction of heritage (“We entered the ruins of the ancient Assyrians in Wilāyat Nīnawā and demolished their statues, sculptures, and engravings of idols and kings”), while Bush’s speech refers to the destruction of Saddam’s statue (“In the images of fallen statues we have witnessed the arrival of a new era”).

In constructing the montage, I allowed myself the freedom to arrange the texts in a highly personal and subjective manner. In this sense, I approached archival material as something capable of being reread, recombined, and transformed into new spaces of enunciation, echoing Tina Di Carlo’s reading of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The insertion of new text into the original form of the Prism functions as a temporal montage that produces disruption. As Jane Rendell argues in Art and Architecture: A Place Between, bringing together “what has been and the now” creates an in-between space where the repressed dimensions of objects and sites may emerge.

The encounter between these different sources becomes even more explicit through the materiality of the work itself: the physical convergence of 3D printing and clay, but also the collision between digital media — the internet, from which the texts were extracted — and their physical inscription onto ceramic surfaces. This radical insertion attempts to reflect on notions of accumulation, archive, and legacy within a liquid contemporary condition in which texts circulate endlessly online and information appears increasingly weightless.

While making the Prism — a process far more difficult than I initially expected — I became physically aware of what it means to record text into a material surface and alter its form. I could feel the transcendence of an act that projects itself into the future. It was a particular sensation that reminded me of shooting on analogue film, where one becomes aware of the weight of the present in a way that, in my opinion, digital technologies cannot fully reproduce. This sensation gave me a stronger sense of reality and responsibility toward my own actions and their legacy. Perhaps, ultimately, it is about thinking through our own legacy in relation to history.