Interviews

INTERVIEW : PROJECT HIROSHIMA

ART21: Why did you decide to do a project in Hiroshima?

WODICZKO: I received the Hiroshima Art Prize. According to what is written in a text describing the prize, it’s given to those who contribute to world peace as artists. I don’t think it’s really possible to say that someone like myself contributed to world peace. I don’t think I deserve this prize, but once it was given to me, I decided to accept it on the condition that I will try to deserve this prize. I will be spending the rest of my life trying to deserve it. This gave me additional motivation to keep developing more public projects. It was also a possibility to do a large public project in Hiroshima. I proposed a projection, which was to take place the night of the anniversary of the bombing—which was a very important event worldwide, in Japan, and of course, most importantly, in Hiroshima.

The issue is perhaps more philosophical: how can we work towards peace? Maybe it’s not right to discuss here, but I have to say something for the record about peace. My position is that you cannot work towards peace, being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up—share what’s unspeakable, offer unsolicited criticism, defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse—that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public.

I started working on my Hiroshima projection with the assumption that we were going to re-actualize the A-Bomb Dome monument (one of the few structures that survived the bombing—just underneath the hypocenter of the explosion) and reanimate it with the voices and gestures of present-day Hiroshima inhabitants from various generations, starting with those who survived the bombing, who witnessed it; their children, who may still remember; their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. So, all those generations somehow connect through this projection—not necessarily in agreement, in terms of the way the bombing is important and the way the meaning of that bombing connects with their present experiences. The fallout of the bombing is physical and cultural, psychological.

I started to talk to survivors of the bombing, not only the Japanese but also those who were treated as non-Japanese, so-called Koreans. Here, we’re talking about slave laborers who were bombed together with their masters in Hiroshima—for whom, at the time of this project, there was no room in Peace Memorial Park. Their monument was outside; now, it’s moved inside. But their voices were never heard as equal; they were sort of third- or second-rate victims. Now, they could speak through this projection freely and actually bring various personal experiences and critical thoughts about the way they were treated by the authorities in Japan.

We have very young people: for example, the person who was in love with a young man, and they were planning to get married, and the parents of this man opposed the marriage on the basis that she was born in Hiroshima. According to their misguided imagination, she was carrying some genetic disorder that will be a danger for the family in the future. The same person was questioning her own reaction to certain events in Japan that were carrying traces of chauvinism and racism. Another person was talking about conversations overheard in her father’s office, about good times—that is, during the last war, where companies (Mitsubishi, for example) had great military commissions, producing armament in Hiroshima and enjoying economic prosperity. Those fragments were transmitted through this monument, by gestures and voices of participants of various generations.

One person was the granddaughter of this imperial army officer, speaking about the way the atmosphere at home—as she called it, “boot camp”—affected her personality and traumatized her, and also how much school colleagues were responding to her, adding to this as if it was another war. So, she was caught between two continuations of World War II—a domestic environment and school—which seemed to be an unfortunate experience of many young people in Japan.

Connecting various generations of people is the case with many of my projects. There is something happening among participants—that they form certain links, hear each other, join each other, share. There’s what’s happening between them and their families. In the case of the person who told the truth for the first time about this situation at home, she had to speak to her family among those five thousand people standing across the river. It’s easier to be honest speaking to thousands of people through a monument than to tell the truth at home to the closest person. The question is: what will happen after such a statement? The report that I received from her is that the situation is better; she said, “Before we were silent. Now we argue about it, and that’s peace.”

ART21: What are your three citizenships?

WODICZKO: Polish, Canadian, and American. Perhaps it should be off-the-record (LAUGHS) for my own safety, in the present environment of conservative patriotic spirit. I have also French permanent residence.

ART21: Can you say more about your own personal connection to World War II?

WODICZKO: The fact that I was born during World War II, and my childhood was on the ruins of war (both physical and political, and perhaps moral, and definitely psychological) is probably a sign that I am qualified to understand at least a little bit of what survivors have gone through—my mother being a Jew who survived the war, whose entire family was killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and who gave birth to me in the midst of all this.

When I first met the people of Korean origin who lived in Hiroshima and survived the bombing, the way they were speaking sounded like my mother. The most similar aspect was the sense of humor: the type of humor of a survivor, using humor to cope with the worst. It’s enough to be Polish, to have that sense of humor, but being a Polish Jew gives you double qualification to offer this kind of response, like I heard from the Koreans. That was very helpful because they recognized in my face that familiarity, and it helped to develop trust. Without trust, there is no possibility for my work to develop. Trust is the starting point. The people who are participants—who become co-artists—must feel that somebody in charge is on their side, in some deeper sense. This is the background for the Hiroshima projection.

ART21: What is the role of the river and water, in the piece?

WODICZKO: Well, the water is not innocent. The river is as much a witness as the A-Bomb Dome building reflected in the water. It was in fact the river that became a graveyard for both people and buildings. The river was where people jumped to their death because they thought that it would help them to cool their burns, but in fact it only contributed to a quicker death. Those are the events or scenes recalled by some of the memorial projection participants and artists who were speaking through the building—as if they were the building, looking at the river and seeing all of this again—the bodies floating, the people jumping in. At the same time, the river continues its flow as if nothing has happened. There is fresh water coming. The river is like a tragic witness—but also a hope—because it’s moving.

The fact that both the building and the projection reflected themselves into the river (that is both a witness and a hope of change, a new life) somehow completed the picture. During the recording of the testimonies, one person was drinking water. As she was about to drink, I realized that perhaps I should suggest something aesthetically—that she pour the water back into the river. That was, maybe, the only aesthetic intervention in this project, which was met with agreement and support on the part of everybody in the studio. So, that’s why we left it at the end of the projection.

There’s one important aspect in the Hiroshima projection that might be true with all of my projections: the visibility of the texture of the surface on which the image is projected. The images are not projected on the white screen, but on the façades that are carved. They have their own iconic arrangements or texture, made of bricks or mortar. And this is important. There is an image; there is a building. There is a body of the person, projected; and there is a body of the building or the monument, animated. But it is also the skin of the building, the surface, which is seen as something in between. And that’s a very important protective layer—that separates the overly confessional aspect of the speech of those who animate the building and our overly empathetic approach towards the speakers.

So, that creates a distance, which is important for thinking—for recognizing that between them and us there is a wall. Any attempt to identify with the person is a danger. To say, “I understand what you went through,” is the most unacceptable response. The opposite may be more appropriate: “I will never understand what you went through.”

INTERVIEW : ARCHITETCTURE AND THERAPY

ART21: How did you decide to create the video projections?

WODICZKO: When I first began this type of work in Krakow, I didn’t have any experience in filming or projecting motion images on buildings. I’d been working on still slide projections. So, the shift was radical. The projections might look similar in photographs and documents (especially photographs), but they are completely different. In the slide projections, I was animating the monuments with icons and images that I produced in order to actualize them, so they could speak on contemporary issues. Now, I create a situation for others to animate monuments and project themselves. So, the process of filming is a situation for them to learn what to say and how to say it—because I don’t tell people what they should say. I don’t know what they will say. They don’t know, themselves.

Through the experience, I am a completely different artist now; I’m not the one that I was before. My role has changed. I am proposing something that people may or may not be interested in taking advantage of. As I see now, they must reject it. They must say, “No, we’re not going to be manipulated here. We went through this before. There were so many journalists and documentary filmmakers, trying to make art of our misery, and nothing has changed. Why should we do it again?" They must put in doubt the entire operation. But then, they should learn that there is some difference between previous situations and the one I propose.

There’s more room for them, and there’s more time. It won’t be a short, one-hour filming session. They might work on this for a year to figure out what to say and therefore survive their criticism and their doubts. The project must survive. I have to show up again and again, ready to be useful. And they may realize that it’s no longer my project in which they are passive parts, but it’s becoming their project. They are becoming artists, monument animators, and truth tellers. I am becoming more of a protective person, someone who protects their process, like a mother.

There is a playful aspect to it—the animation of the monument and also the editing process, which requires reduction of the length of material and choice of what the monument should transmit. The person and the monument working together—that is an artistic process, and it must have some kind of playful and creative aspect to it. I think that, step by step, those co-artists realize that it’s their project, more and more—also that they can make good use of it for their own lives and for the lives of others. So, they’ve become co-artists, but also co-agents. They are doing something for those who, at this point, cannot do what they do: they cannot speak well, or they’re not ready, or it would be too risky for them to be part of the project. They may later be ready for it, but the project won’t be there.

ART21: Talk about the visual aspects of what you do.

WODICZKO: To talk about beauty is too difficult; spectacle may be more appropriate. The architecture, façades, monuments—the entire city with its various forms and arrangements is an aesthetic environment. So, entering this kind of environment, trying to speak through it, add a new dimension, project a new meaning—I have no choice but to try to be as spectacular as that environment is, or more. Even without discussing the particular aesthetic quality that I am looking for, I must match the spectacular quality of a work with the environment, in order to speak through it.

But we could also approach it from a different angle. To speak of things that are not only difficult, painful—or in many ways the opposite of spectacular or beautiful—it might be worth reaching the spectacular. To convey something difficult, it’s easier if one can have some convincing aesthetic means. We have to see the relationship between what is being said, and how it’s being transmitted. For people to open up and come closer to those who are conveying difficult truths, it may be easier through a spectacular project. So, there is a function of the spectacular, here: an artifice that is more acceptable because of its aesthetic quality.

Art, in general, seems to be a very useful artifice. Film, theater, painting, literature, media art—all of this is a very good conduit for transmitting the things that people would rather not hear or see. This is a possibility for transmitting something uncanny, something that ought to be hidden but comes to light. It takes aesthetic form as an artifice; it’s partially real and partially fictitious. So, those faces: they are partially people and partially façades, partially testimonies and partially spectacles. It’s much easier to accept them for what they’re trying to say this way than, for example, listening to someone speak directly.

It’s not attaching specific aesthetic decisions. When I am speaking through those structures, I have to learn what particular aesthetic method or technique they are using already. We’re talking about a neoclassical vocabulary of buildings: symmetry, bodily metaphor. They are wrestling with their own bodily metaphors—every building and every monument. Even architecture that seems to be far away from neoclassicism still often maintains this same bodily metaphor or play. It’s a play of corporal masses, components that form a whole. It’s an old metaphor: a social body that is made of particular bodies.

Most civic structures are trying to reproduce and reinforce certain concepts of unity and harmony. This kind of perfect, seamless, highly organized façade is something that fascinates people. We have a special relationship with them; they seem to be corresponding to our own desires and tendencies to become like buildings, to become as perfect as they are. We have a pleasure in looking at it because it calms us down; we are exchanging something. This is a process of architecturalization of our bodies and bodification of architecture.

Assuming that what I am saying is at least in part true, then through this kind of dialogue we are able to accept all sorts of things. For example, we are already identifying with the tower (lonely tower!) because we already also feel very lonely and lofty and dramatically alienated. We might wonder what’s happening, when there is a projection happening on that tower—because there is already us inhabiting that tower. Now, there is somebody else there. It’s difficult; it is uncanny because it’s us and also it’s somebody else. But via this architectural form, we somehow build a bridge, link with other people.

I have seen some evidence of it, in the case of earlier projections, when I was closely watching the reaction of various members of the public. It was amazing. Someone said that rhetorical question, out loud: “How is it possible that one doesn’t believe another human being but does believe the tower?” In Polish, it’s actually much more humorous, because belief and tower are the same word. But the question shows that there is a special relation that we have with the spectacle of architecture.

All of those devices that I use in projection are simply attempts to make it as organic as possible, so the boundary between architecture and projected body would be blurred. The skin of the building and the skin of the person would be background and foreground at the same time. It will be shifting focus. And I am not sure if I am always successful. Sometimes I think that, perhaps, I ask too much from those silent and motionless structures.

ART21: How do you view cities today?

WODICZKO: What are our cities? Are they environments that are trying to say something to us? Are they environments in which we communicate with each other? Or are they perhaps the environments of things that we don’t see—of silences, of the voices which we don’t, or would rather not, hear? The places of all of those back alleys where, perhaps, the real public space is—where the experiences of which we should be speaking, where voices that we should be listening to, are hidden in the shadows of monuments and memorials?

That’s where the city that interest me is—in all of those places where we are even afraid to go, and all of those places that we get to when we make a mistake, take a wrong bus, a wrong subway line. One of the objectives behind my projections is to bring to light all of those voices and experiences, and to animate public space with them in a kind of inspiring and provocative way—maybe in a way of protest.

I don’t know if this is political art. Or is this psychotherapeutic art? Or is this an ethical proposition? I don’t know who I am. Sometimes I’m thinking of myself as what Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, called a “good-enough mother”: someone who protects the process in which others can develop and create something in an atmosphere of trust—develop the ability to cope with life—though often damaged and wounded by their experiences. Perhaps projects of the kind I’m working on help those who are ready to take advantage of them, to make that leap.