I was watching, without paying a huge attention, a talk show on tv (the first one I watch in UK) and there was Oprah Winfrey interviewed about her life by someone. She then said something: “In every tragedy there is an opportunity for triumph”. This few words started rooming in my head…

I then started thinking at how the effect of this sentence might change in a different setting … very demagogical in a talk show, but what about on the street? Somewhere where people have already faced real tragedies and been able to recover from them?

I then decided to use this statement as a slogan to celebrate the ability of human society to recover from their ashes, to find a way out in order to rebuild from where something has collapsed…

I went to John Wilson street in Woolwich, South East London, the very place where last summer (2013) a man was killed and beheaded, in an atrocious way during a terroristic attack in front of many people. I went there just few days before the trial. There at the corner of the street, at the cross way of the traffic light, where the horror had happened and where until few weeks ago there were still flowers and cards, there I put my banner. I hanged it with the same rope left by someone who placed the last bunch of flowers. And I stood back waiting to see the reaction.

People were slowing down their daily running, in order to read, even car drivers were quickly trying to have a look at the sentence. A police patrol came around read the script and moved on. It was as if those few words were speaking loudly for the street and for the community leaving there.

It was a quiet noise hanged on a Saturday afternoon on a fence in John Wilson street.