contradictory simultaneously, os olhos de Gutete Emerita e de Alfredo Jaar

I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my teas reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.
E. M. Cioran

Uma das melhores intro que já vi num site, a do chileno Alfredo Jaar, vale a pena ver tudo. E depois este texto de Cioran na página de índice. Ainda não entrei e já gostei - apesar da alma e da exaltação. depois de transposta a porta, vários projectos. Deles, escolhi a instalação Gutete Emerita (1996): uma mesa de luz, um milhão de slides, cada slide com os olhos de Gutete Emerita. Esta obra foi adquirida pelo Museum of Fine Arts de Houston. Jaar, chileno comprometido e actuante politicamente, criou esta obra no contexto de uma série de instalações e outras acções denunciadoras do genocídio no Ruanda. Noutra parte da mesma exposição, um ecrã branco de luz onde ao fim de um longo período de tempo surge o vulto fantasmagórico de outra mulher, Caritas Namazuru, de 88 anos, que teve de andar 306 quilómetros até chegar a um campo de refugiados. E, perto da mesa de luz, uma linha de texto iluminado:

“Over a five month period in 1994, more than one million Rwandans, mostly members of the Tutsi minority, were systematically slaughtered as the world closed its eyes to genocide. The killings were largely carried out by Hutu militias who had been armed and trained by the Rwandan military. As a consequence of this genocide, millions of Tutsis and Hutus fled to Zaire (now Congo), Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. Many still remain in refugee camps, fearing renewed violence upon their return home. One Sunday morning at a church in Ntarama, four hundred Tutsis were murdered by a Hutu death squad. Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, was attending mass with her family when the massacre began. Gutete’s husband, Tito Kahinamura, and her two young sons Muhoza and Matirigari, were killed with machetes before her eyes. Somehow, Gutete was able to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise Unumararunga. After weeks of hiding, Gutete has returned to the church in the woods. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the sun. I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita."

"So people have to walk along this wall, they read this text and then they move into the next room: This is a 6 meters by 6 meters light table with one million slides. One million because I was looking for a metaphor for the one million dead, and this looks like a mass grave. When you approach the light table, you realize that it's always the same image, repeated one million times.This image shows the eyes of Gutete Emerita. People could take a slide and look at the slide with a loupe, as shown here. I'm interested in the eyes of the audience being only one centimeter away from the eyes of Gutete Emerita. I am suggesting here that her eyes acted as a camera who saw something that we could not see. The question here is: How do we bridge the gap between our eyes and her eyes?" (Alfredo Jaar)



"the first time I saw this piece, I became physically ill at the sight of Gutete Emerita's eyes. I felt dizzy and almost retched", disse o crítico David Levi Strauss.











Noutra exposição do Projecto Rwanda, dois projectores, um com 66 slides, outro com 55, duração 21 minutos: "What kind of slide lecture does one produce to accompany a photography show in which no photographs appear? The Slide + Sound Piece begins in silence, with words projected onto a screen. The words are hand lettered, white on black, like the epitaphs on the boxes. (...) ... is followed with a quote from the African writer Chinua Achebe: "Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him." (...) And then begins a chronology of the genocide as reported in the world's press, juxtaposed with the world's responses and the accompanying body count: April 15, 1994/ 100,000 Deaths . . . May 20, 1994/ 600,000 Deaths . June 20, 1994/ 1,000,000 Deaths. As the terrible litany is projected onto the screen, the sound of the projector takes on the character of a dirge. (...) And then a different music begins, a song from the Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema. As he sings, we read from the screen... [description by David Levi Strauss] ". Texto no catálogo que menciono abaixo.

Sem imagens e quase sem palavras e ficou muito dito, eu queria comentar e não sou capaz.

Alfredo Jaar: The eyes of Gutete Emerita, por John Devine, muito bom
The eyes of Gutete Emerita, as caixas de luz
Aqui, imperdível, o catálogo da exposição de todo o Rwanda Project, no Centre d'Art Santa Monica, em Barcelona
Invisible again: Rwanda and representation after genocide
Aqui, um texto extenso do próprio Jaar sobre os seus projectos: La Generazione delle Immagini