It was a late summer day in Cape Town on March 21, 2005—a national holiday known as Human Rights Day. Crowds were on the beaches enjoying the sunshine when they noticed a small plane start to write the message DOn’T PAniC in the sky with smoke.
It was a large-scale example of Ruth Sacks’s simple, provocative art works from that time. For this early series of work, the artist was intrigued with the potential of placing phrases picked up from random conversations around her into different contexts. These small interventions in public spaces might have held the attention of passersby just long enough to cause a minor swerve in the course of their day.
Sacks’s phrase “Don’t panic” had already been stamped in various parts of the central area of the city, on paper napkins in restaurants, people’s skin, posters, walls, and cutlery. The stamped messages served as an informal invitation to the sky writing. When the small communication was written in the sky, in letters that were approximately two kilometers in length, the words took on an ominous shade of meaning. What was it that the pilot saw that the watchers on the ground could not?
The day was windy, and the first letters became almost unreadable before the message was complete. Its short existence lives on only in memory, photographs, and in a video that records the moment when Sacks’s sky writing commanded the attention of those Capetonians who looked up at the sky at the right time on that day.
Something similar happened on a clear autumn night in November 2006 in Santa Cruz, the capital city of Tenerife, an island in the Canaries off the coast of West Africa. Residents in the district surrounding the historic Los Lavaderos Art Gallery found themselves and their houses bathed in powerful searchlights that revolved and scanned the area around the entrance to the art gallery. The lights were to continue every evening for one week. Access or escape from the building was denied during this time.
Titled Artificial Moonlight, in reference to the military term for the illumination of a battle area through artificial means, the lights were Sacks’s contribution to the 1st Triennale of the Grand Canaries. She was responding to the curatorial brief of Antonio Zaya, which was to create a site-specific work.
The Canary Islands are a holiday destination for European tourists, yet the beaches are also a destination for unstable small boats crammed with Africans setting out from the neighboring countries of Senegal and Mali, desperate to get to the first stage of a better life in the West. By putting a historic tourist district under nighttime surveillance, Sacks sought to highlight the sad plight of the would-be immigrants and point out the anomalies that exist in the city.
Artificial Moonlight 2006
Searchlights
Image courtesy of the artist and the 1st Biennial of the Canary Islands
Photographer: Teresa Arozena
© Teresa Arozena and Ruth Sacks
Don’t Panic 2005
Skywrite
Photographic documentation of the work
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Mario Todeschini and Ruth Sacks