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ALFREDO JAAR, We Shall Bring Forth New Life (Umashimenkana), 2013, mixed-media installation, 12 blackboards, video projection, plexiglass structure and chalk, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Chilean-born architect, artist and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar’s public interventions are at once arresting and contemplative and are born out of his careful reflection on a given context. The works are paradoxical—timeless responses to a specific and highly personal occurrence.
One such intervention is Umashimenkana (2013), which translates to “We shall bring forth new life” in Japanese. The project, which was developed in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, was created for the international Aichi Triennale in 2013. As with several of Jaar’s previous interventions, this piece was designed to create a site of collective memory and a space of mourning, where hope for the future could emerge. Japan was still reeling in the aftermath of the catastrophic tragedy when Jaar was invited to create a response to it. The 59-year-old artist soon began his research process, travelling to Fukushima and talking with journalists, scientists and those displaced by the tsunami.
While visiting schools destroyed by the disaster, where many children had tragically lost their lives, Jaar saw that many of the facilities’ blackboards were still intact. He felt a sense of poetry and beauty embedded within them, seeing them as symbols of the life that existed before the tsunami and those that will persevere beyond it. Such ideas became the subject of Umashimenkana.
At the Aichi Triennale, in a huge, darkened room hung 12 blackboards. Every three minutes, an image of the phrase “Umashimenkana” (in the handwriting of local children) was projected onto each board. Jaar had also collected pieces of colored chalk from the devastated schools, which he described as “chalks that were used by the kids to draw, to write, to express their knowledge, to express their dreams.” These chalks were exhibited in a large Plexiglas box, spotlit in the center of the exhibition space “like a field of color in the darkness.”
In March, Jaar spoke with ArtAsiaPacific about the subtle details of his work, its context and his role as an artist.
ALFREDO JAAR, We Shall Bring Forth New Life (Umashimenkana) (detail), 2013, mixed-media installation, 12 blackboards, video projection, plexiglass structure and chalk, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
Could you discuss the title of Umashimenakana?
The phrase that I projected on the boards, Umashimenkana, is the title of a World War II-era poem by [Japanesepoet] Sadako Kurihara (1913–2005). I had worked with this woman before on other projects in Tokyo and Nagoya. She’s one of my favorite Japanese authors and an extraordinary woman—an antinuclear activist and a marvelous poet. I decided to use this poem [for the project title], because it was based on the fact that Sadako Kurihara was living in Hiroshima the day the tragedy fell on the city—the nuclear bomb. She survived, and that same night her neighbor gave birth to a baby, and so she helped her. The next morning, she wrote the poem “Umashimenkana,” which means “We shall bring forth new life.” Basically, she’s suggesting that, even in the middle of the worst tragedies and the worst horrors, we should always still try to bring forth new life. I thought this was a beautiful call for life, even [in circumstances] surrounded by the horrors. Furthermore, I thought [the tragedy that] happened in Fukushima was quite similar, and that perhaps this was the moment to give this poem a new life.
You have a long history of making public interventions that explore collective memory, but in the past your work has focused on political issues. Umashimenkana was created in response to a natural disaster, but there are also political and social issues at play. What is your perspective on this?
That’s a very good question. It is true that this is the first time that I concentrated on a natural disaster, not a man-made disaster, but it is also true that this natural disaster, perhaps, is also man-made. Perhaps not the tsunami—of course not, the tsunami is just an after-effect of the earthquake—but the fact that, in spite of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years prior, Japan still went nuclear. That you have all these nuclear power stations around the country is a political decision that was deliberately made. It is also true that many people opposed that decision and have been fighting against Japan’s nuclear power stations for years—decades even. Sadako Kurihara was one of the most vocal opponents of Japan being a nuclear power. It is very sad that the 2011 disaster is seen on the surface as a natural tragedy; but the fact that there were nuclear power stations that suffered damages, and there all these issues now with radiation and so on, is man-made. That was a clear realization. Now, was I aware of that in the work that I did? Yes, I was completely aware. And the fact that I used the words of an antinuclear activist is a huge sign of my political reading of the situation.
ALFREDO JAAR, We Shall Bring Forth New Life (Umashimenkana) (detail), 2013, mixed-media installation, 12 blackboards, video projection, plexiglass structure and chalk, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
In much of your work you play with light and darkness. Could you discuss the use of these elements in Umashimenkana?
A darker space is closer to a church, to a temple, to a place where we go to mourn. So by lowering the light to a state of darkness, people immediately take on a completely different mood—scared, unimpressed, worried about what they can or cannot find. [Darkness] creates a certain mood, and I wanted to create that mood of mourning [ . . . ] It was a technical contradiction; we needed [the blackboards] to be in the dark, so that the phrase “Umashimenkana” could be read, but at the same time we also needed some light for people to be able to see the boards. We managed to light them enough for people to be able to see the entire space, and, of course, they got illuminated much more when the words showed up on the blackboards. But the stronger source of light really came from the spotlight in the center of the space, which illuminated the colored chalks, and was really the single source of beautiful light.
The public that the intervention was created for is still in a period of mourning. Could you comment on the use of the intervention as a way of working through collective mourning and memory?
As an artist you have to be quite modest, and you have to be very thankful when offered an extraordinary opportunity such as this one [ . . . ] But when you create public interventions, you never know [how it will be received] and must hope for the best. You hope you will not hurt anyone or make a mistake. You have to recognize that it is not even your own culture, and that you don’t even know the language. I’m an outsider, and I will remain an outsider. And for an outsider it’s even more difficult to take on a challenge like this.