Alfredo Jaar in "Protest" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.