Tropicana Magazine Sep-Oct 2018 #120: Art As Life

THE GAME CHANGER
On Boxing
Day a couple
of years ago,
the Chinese
artist Ai Weiwei was on
holiday in Greece when
he saw a boat bobbing
low in the Aegean, borne
towards the shore on the
early evening tide. It was
a life raft designed to
hold around 25 people,
but at least four times
that number, including
women and children,
were packed on board.
Ai watched a small
team of Red Cross
volunteers wade towards
the vessel, swaddle its
youngest occupants
in bright orange life
vests, then lift them to
safety. He spoke with the
travellers, who had sailed
from Turkey after fleeing
Syria, where their homes
had been destroyed in the civil war. He took a photograph of himself
with a small group of them and posted it on Instagram, the imagesharing
app.
The next day, as another boat arrived, he went back and did the
same. The day after that, he shot a 15-second video clip. Ai was well
aware of the story from the nightly news, but witnessing it in person
turned it inside out. A five-minute bulletin could capture the idea
that boatloads of souls were on their way to Europe thanks to global
unrest, but it couldn’t say anything about their individual journeys,
or capture the sheer magnitude of movement involved.
The 24-hour news media has “ retrained our sensitivities” Ai tells
me. “ In order to understand things, humans have to keep them in
their hearts for a while. Gathering and digesting information, relating
it to what we already know, then coming to a new understanding – this
all takes time. But very often there’s now no time for us to understand
a report or image.”
“ News has become the information version of fast food. We hear
that 700 asylum seekers drowned after their boats capsized, and have
no time to think about it, because the next day another 50 bodies
are washing ashore
somewhere else.
You know, 700.
Children, pregnant
women. We’re so
informed, but we’re
so indifferent.”
Partly to counter
that perceived
indifference, Ai
developed that
15-second clip into
Human Flow, an
epic documentary
on migration with
a cast in the tens
of thousands that
premiered at the
Venice Film Festival.
Ai and his
crew visited more
than 40 refugee
encampments to
shoot it and travelled
to many dangerous
and destabilised
places worldwide.
At many locations,
the airborne drone
cameras that give
the film its haunting
God’s-eye-view
perspective were
banned – so high
vantage points had
to be sought out, or
authorities craftily
circumvented.
“ During the
filming we saw
helicopters coming.
We had to hide, to
pretend to do other things,” says Ai. The only place he’d hoped to
film but couldn’t was Aleppo in Syria. It was just too dangerous.
“News has become the
information version
of fast food. We hear
that 700 asylum
seekers drowned
after their boats
capsized, and have no
time to think about it.”
107 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 | TM