In our last bridge we meditate upon the Earthly, the Ethereal and the migrations within Ai Wei Wei's work .
In the movie The Visitor, Richard Jenkins plays a man in New York who a long time ago lost his wife and with her, lost his purpose and joy in life. Accidentally, he crosses paths with an immigrant couple. There is a particularly moving scene when Tarek, a young Palestinian man, sits with this old white rich American from Connecticut and shows him how to play the drums. There is an unspoken bond between them that disrupts borders and time, displaying a Universe through a very particular moment in the lives of two particular characters.
I have created Bridges because I saw myself deep diving into audiovisual feature films as if they were the only way to display a world in transit. I have built Bridges trying to understand some of the layers of meaning in Ai Wei Wei’s work. Because when it comes to reflecting upon the migration experience—be it the migration of materials, peoples, languages, objects, songs—it is necessary to build a migrating art that, much like Ai Wei Wei’s, delivers transitions not only in its concept but also, in its substance. Finally, the core difference between Ai Wei Wei’s art and the drums scene in The Visitor is the ethereal quality of the Chinese artist’s work. In each of his pieces there is a narrative formed by non-narratives, much like Villa Lobos’ orchestral suite O trenzinho caipira (The little caipira’s train).
Caipira is the name given to an inhabitant of rural or remote areas in the interior of the south-central part of Brazil. Villa Lobos (1887-1959) is a Brazilian composer and musician who made his mark in history by attempting to make pieces that suited Brazilian realities, using typically European orchestral instruments and theatrical context. Stories and instruments of Brazilian indigenous and African contexts are introduced to create a mixture so completely Brazilian and at the same time so much more layered and vaster than one country’s borders.
In O trenzinho do caipira Villa Lobos creates a musical piece about a train going through the most remote of areas. The train and the transit is written in the textural elements of the music, never hijacking the narrative into obviousness but imposing multiple stories through sound. Not endorsing one explanation of what happens to the train but giving us the ability to conduct it through paths known only to our imagination. That might be the key to speak of migration.
Reflecting upon the work of Ai Wei Wei, Villa Lobos, Contrapoints, Adriana Varejão, Jamala, Nikolaus Geyrhalter and Tom McCarthy’s movie The Visitor is to reflect about art and its movement. Not as a historical rigid moment—“the modernists”, “the cubist movement”—but as a movement made by a piece within it and by it. Ai Wei Wei moves me to create an art in transit.