In Ai Weiwei's work, multiple stories coexist in the same piece. I analyze his ability to build connections between a fragment and a system.
When I first saw Law of the Journey in São Paulo, Brazil, in January 2019 at the Oca museum, I didn't pay much attention to it. I thought it was another sad refugee scene much like the thousands of drawings and pictures featuring boats and bodies washed up on European shores. Now in a seemingly fully inflatable format.
However, I did appreciate how making the whole thing as a balloon gave it a sense of a man-made crisis. We invented this. We inflated this violation of everything that defines human dignity and we can deflate it together. I thought the symbolism of the work kind of stopped there and I stopped looking at it, not reading the explanation board near it.
Originally, the installation featured a stylized 70-meter-long inflatable boat carrying 258 oversized refugee figures. One of the figures - a smaller one, a child - was drowning, being placed on the floor away from the boat (pictures 2 and 3). It was shown for the first time at the National Gallery in the beautiful city of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, one of the EU members that have rejected plans to allow refugees on their territory.
It is social commentary but at the same time, it is a fragment of a real person's life. Refugees – faceless to the ones who look from afar – have died that way. Parents lost their children and we, as spectators, watching without doing anything. Ai Weiwei makes comments about a system that destroys lives, but with the capacity of bringing that faraway story to the passive bystanders.
“If we see somebody who has been victimized by war or desperately trying to find a peaceful place, if we don’t accept those people, the real challenge and the real crisis is not of all the people who feel the pain but rather for the people who ignore to recognize it or pretend that it doesn’t exist,” said the artist when he inaugurated Law of the Journey in 2017.
The title of the work suggests a systemic criticism. In a first look, it might seem like it naturalizes the journey itself, but I see it as if it is pointing at the burning apathy of the people who cover it. Yes, it is natural that people would die in a deadly situation, but governments and the people behind them created the journey here depicted. When there is no other way left, what option would you have but launch yourself at sea? And what options do you have? You, who sees a tragedy unfold right before your eyes.
‘Law of the journey’ is as systemic as it is fragmentary. Completely recontextualized by being in Prague’s National Gallery, it is the tale of every refugee at any time in modern history, but at the same time, it speaks directly to a Czech audience. To particular people at a particular time who could make a difference between more mothers seeing their sons become a victim of the journey, or not.
At the shore, other works of art serve the purpose of unveiling the West's border culture and what it protects inside its walls. Abendland is a documentary film made by Nikolaus Geyrhalter and it shows Europe at Night (image four). Its obsession with technology and security is demonstrated through fragments that reveal the same system that brought 258 oversized inflatable refugee figures to Prague with one of them placed on the floor, away from the ship.