ALFREDO JAAR: I strongly believe
in the power of a single idea.
So the most difficult thing
for me is to arrive at the…
at the essence of what you want to say.
And when you reach that…
that essential idea, it’s…
it’s extraordinary.
I could say that everything I know about art
I learn it when studying architecture.
I approach art as an architect.
And as an architect I give myself
a program so this program will…
will take into account a space.
Studying that space I...I…
I try to reach what we call
the essence of the space.
And then I combine that essence,
that finding with the essence
of what I’m trying to say.
Every single element has
been thought of in design.
Nothing is arbitrary, absolutely nothing.
The work has been fabricated by engineers or by…
by people who have the right skills for
the right installations I’m working with.
I’m at a point where the most
fascinating process for me is just
to think, to think, to think and to think.
And uhm, and then to let someone
else execute the project.
I have been incapable in my career to ever,
ever create a single work of art that
is just coming from my imagination.
My imagination starts working based on research,
based on a real life event, most of the time
a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze,
to reflect on it and to...to
accumulate information.
But the original impulse is…
is this real life event to
which I’m trying to respond to.
So in the case of Rwanda,
I started following the
tragedy from the beginning.
I was outraged, how we were told,
this is happening, this is happening.
Yesterday 35,000 bodies were recovered,
they were floating on the
Kagera River, 35,000 bodies.
And it was just a five-line story on page 7.
So.... So I was following this story
and I reached a limit and I thought,
well I have to go, I have to go.
I have.... There is something
I would like to say about this.
And then so I just went.
And it was the most horrific
experience in my life.
I was getting into huge dilemmas, how…
how do you present this, respecting the
dignity of the people you are focusing on?
So that’s why THE RWANDA PROJECT lasted six
years and it’s my longest project to date.
I end up doing 21 different pieces within
those six years and they all failed.
That’s why I kept going,
looking for the perfect way to communicate
to my audience that experience.
And of course there is no way.
There is this huge gap between reality
and its possible representations.
And that gap is impossible to close.
So as artists we have to try different
strategies of representation.
And THE SILENCE OF NDUWAYEZU
is just one more attempt to represent
a very difficult and tragic situation.
When we say a million dead, it’s meaningless.
So the...the strategy was to…
to reduce the scale to a single human
being with a name, with a story.
And that helps the audience
to identify with that person.
And this process of identification
is...is fundamental to create empathy,
to create solidarity, to create
intellectual involvement.
The text at the entrance tells you a story.
I visited a refugee camp
and Nduwayezu was seated on…
on the stairs of a door...a school that
they had recreated inside the refugee camp.
Nduwayezu actually saw with his own eyes his
mother and his father killed with machetes.
His reaction was to remain silent for
approximately four weeks, he couldn’t speak.
For me, the heart of an exhibition
is really the spirit of the artist.
The spirit of what he’s trying to communicate.
I want people to...to walk in that
space and to feel that they have
entered into a model of thinking
and of looking at the world.
Coming back to...to Chile,
coming back as an artist is…
is an incredibly moving experience.
It was incredibly moving for me to
share my work for the first time
with all of my friends and family.
It was almost like starting from scratch,
because they were experiencing
it for the first time.
It’s a very, very emotional
situation, incredibly emotional.
At...at the age of five, my father decides to
move to this French island called Martinique.
And we lived there for ten marvelous years.
And then at the age of
fifteen, my father announces,
okay, we’re going back.
And we moved back to Chile which
was during Allende’s period.
And so we arrived in a...in
a country incredibly divided.
I’m so obsessed with…
with communicating a very specific
amount of information to the audience.
And uh, one very important
element is the economy of means.
Muxima is divided in ten cantos.
And each canto in itself
is...is structured as a haiku,
which is a short Japanese poem.
What, what fascinated me about haikus is the…
the capacity for fifteen, seventeen
words to communicate an entire world.
My way of thinking is pretty Cartesian
and it’s coming from my French education.
I’m...I’m very logical.
To make sense for me is…
is a very essential aspect of the work.
I was incredibly shy when I was a kid,
so my father took me to a psychiatrist
and the psychiatrist gave him two or three choices
to help me to overcome this shyness.
So he brought me home a little box of magic.
And, and I got into this
world and I became a magician.
And to be a magician helped
me to confront the audience.
And to do something when they knew that I was
trying to hide something, but they don’t see it.
What they see is the magic.
Before moving into filmmaking I was
an actor and I did a lot of theater.
I wrote plays and I directed plays.
And so when you combine the world of magic,
the world of theater and so
those two things plus my…
my background as an architect,
everything is there.
And, and that mise-en-scène that you
see is really a result of those things.
I had forgotten about this stuff. (LAUGHS)
I think it’s important to incorporate a
beauty in the work because it’s part of life.
But that doesn’t mean we
should just stay with beauty.
And we should not be afraid sometimes
to confront beauty and horror
and LET ONE HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM
probably does that in a very direct way.
And it’s based on a Chinese poem that Mao used to…
to throw a campaign asking intellectuals to
participate in the life of
the revolution in the ‘50s.
“Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one
hundred schools of thought contend.”
After one year, because intellectuals
were suspicious of Mao’s intentions,
they finally gave in and
they started speaking out.
And of course they gave great new ideas,
but they were contrary to
the ideals of the revolution.
And then their voices were suppressed.
So here this piece is standing as a metaphor for
the struggle of intellectuals all over the world.
Here we have a hundred flowers being
submitted to contradictory forces.
On one hand they are being
fed with water and light
and on the other hand they are being killed
by strong industrials winds and strong cold.
These flowers will be dying continuously.
We will keep replacing them.
And what connects this particular work
that was shown in Rome for the first time
with the Santiago situation is that instead of a
video that we had in Rome with Gramsci’s grave,
here we are opening a window into the Alameda.
We are less than a hundred
meters away from the La Moneda,
from the presidential palace where our
socialist president, Salvador Allende,
was killed during the military
coup by General Pinochet.
This piece is really making a link with
the immediate history of our country.
By opening a little window into this gallery
that happened to be on the Alameda uh,
a world of connection is created.
And...and that I think is extraordinary,
the power of art to do those things,
to create connections, to make
bridges and that fascinates me.