A thought experiment: “Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.” Hito Steyerl’s work often arrests its viewers with vivid images like this one, from an essay she published in e-flux in 2010. Her videos implicate their spectators in the networks of exploitation and violence behind seemingly innocuous activities, such as video games or dancing. Her new video installation, “DRILL,” in the Park Avenue Armory’s cavernous drill hall, excavates the history of the ground you stand on while viewing it. The three-channel video leads the audience on a tour of the vast building. The floor beneath these massive screens has been drawn over with a life-size plan–eerily luminous, like an x-ray–of the subterranean realm below.
Outfitted with a basement shooting range, the building is a monument to warfare, nineteenth-century aesthetics beautifying barbarism. The block-long behemoth was constructed not long after the Civil War with funds donated by well-heeled members of New York’s 7th Militia, Vanderbilts and Roosevelts among them. The tour of the building’s sumptuous interiors is intercut with the testimony of gun violence survivors. The jarring contrast draws the sinister dimension out of the woodwork, carved in places with emblems of combat, eagles, spears, skulls. The film’s percussive score is assembled from the casualty data of mass shootings, the numbers counting those killed or injured. The pulses are so repetitive as to become banal, a sonic deluge that seems like it could extend, hopelessly, forever. The work raises many questions; one that architects might ask themselves: what do we monumentalize when we build? “DRILL” reminds us how much stands on foundations of violence. Are you falling yet?