Chelsea’s Wall

Chelsea Manning is an IT specialist and former member of the US army. In 2013 she was sentenced to 35 years in prison by a military court for the disclosure of secret military documents to WikiLeaks. In April 2015, Chelsea Manning published her first tweet out of the military prison in Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where she is currently imprisoned, and even though she has been denied access to the internet, she has been able to regularly tweet through her lawyer.

Chelsea’s Wall picks out and amplifies Manning’s voice, a Twitter stream that talks about whistleblowing and its direct personal consequences, prison life and her physical transition to becoming a woman. The projection onto facades gives the bodiless tweets a physical presence, localizing them and giving them a place outside the virtual. The exhausting pace of social media is suddenly stopped, distorted and literally magnified, so that Chelsea’s tweets turn into an ephemeral giant made of light invading the streets of your city. Out of the tumultuous, never-ending flow of information on the internet, her tweets may be finally read as what they really are: a political thought, a burst of emotions, a call to action and an invitation to never surrender.

This public intervention was co-produced by !Mediengruppe Bitnik and The Influencers 2015 and realized in October 2015 at the same time in Barcelona and at the Elevate Festival Graz (Austria).