WTC: “The Buffalo Idea”
If you ask Timothy “Speed” Levitch:
Buffalo in Berlin!
I’ve been working to promote my idea for Ground Zero that’s embedded in the new short documentary we’ve been taking around to film festivals called Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor. It’s called “The Buffalo Idea.” It’s an idea that came about from a whole conversation of artists. And we’d like to use the land currently called Ground Zero and turn it into a Joy Park and grazing land for American Bison. The idea is that the central monument should not be an inanimate piece of stone but it should be something that’s alive, that has a heartbeat and that propagates. I think that a lot of what was felt by the people who came up with the idea is that the American Bison represents and indigenous American community that has been experiencing September 11th for 400 years. According to different statistics I’ve heard, there was something like 75 million Buffalo on the continent when the first Europeans arrived and by the 1890’s there was about 200 left. Definitely a tribe of holocaust survivors. A tribe that knows the suffering of September 11th, and the healing. I myself have had the opportunity to stand with free roaming Buffalo in the wild-a great feeling. An amazing experience, almost cosmopolitan. You’d be surprised to see how much cosmopolitanism exist within the average bison and I’m sure the average bison would be surprised to see how much wild exist in the average cosmopolitan. I think they have a lot to learn from each other. On the topic of the current plans for Ground Zero, I think it’s time for everybody to remember Cat Gilbert, the great New York Architect who designed the Woolworth building and the George Washington bridge- his definition of sky scraper was a machine that makes the land pay. I don’t think that the land should have to pay any more. I don’t think we should have to pay. I don’t think anyone should have to pay-I’m not sure what we owe. I think we’re all miraculously and unexplainably born into this and then suddenly everything has to pay. Everyone is debating over these plans, but they’re all the same to me, they’re all making the land pay.
