You look through a doorway into a former classroom (I presume) littered with broken glass. The wall text surprisingly identifies the glassware as "broken tea glasses," and Latifa as Moroccan. Were the glasses Moroccan?, I wonder, examining the debris. It’s hard to tell — they’re broken. You can see the marks where the tea glasses were thrown against the wall (unless those marks were painted by Latifa? Or were they pre-existing?). Mostly the shards are on one side of the room — the left. (Does "left" mean something?) But on the right side are a few lone slivers of glass. These are the colors of the glass: yellow, blue, green, red. And clear.
Glass, so useful to humanity, may also be deadly. Yes, "deadly" is no hyperbole. Slaves in the American South would murder their owners by serving them ground glass embedded in ham.
Did Latifa smash those glasses in fury? Or simply as an artistic statement? The littered shards form a crescent. Is this crescent meaningful? The rather antiquated phrase "Fertile Crescent" refers to the birthplace of civilization. Is Latifa suggesting an "Infertile Crescent"? And what is the meaning of "Erratum"? Was civilization itself the error? Does Latifa regret breaking all those glasses? Or becoming an artist? According to Merriam-Webster, the primary meaning of "erratum" is "an error in printing or writing." Maybe one of the glasses had Arabic calligraphy containing a mistake, and Latifa threw all the glasses against the wall, as punishment.
After seeing the show, I sat beside an African-American woman on the subway with tiny glittering jewels sewn into her pants. "Are those rhinestones?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "I think they’re crystals."
They reminded me of the shining glass splinters in Erratum.
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