Thoughts on the Project from Marcos Ramírez ERRE

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

Antecedents:

Initial Visit: I will start by explaining my reasons for selecting the place to visit. Once I researched and studied the suggested locations, it was easy to find the ones that were most appropriate for me. The difficult part was to shorten my list to only three choices.

In the end, the circumstances and interests associated with my artistic practice determined the options. I hesitated at first because I was concerned that the suggested destinations, so remote and beautiful, had little to do with me, or my work. My art focuses on human beings and the social relations they generate and the different phenomena that emerge from the contact between different cultures, as well as the artistic, philosophical, and, of course, political, implications that result from such contact. Thus, I felt I should pick places with many people, or a mixture of peoples, where the air would be filled with an important cultural force that defined the location as much as the beauty of its surrounding landscape.

Once these issues were resolved, and once I decided on the ideas that would help me select a location, I checked the list again. This time was not so difficult. Only five of the destinations met the criteria I set. So I selected three sites that I found very interesting: Göreme National Park in Cappadocia, Turkey; Ha Long Bay in Vietnam; and the Three Parallel Rivers region, in Yunnan, China.

In the end, as you know, I received the third one. If you asked me about my impressions before, during, and after my trip, I would like to give you a clear answer.

As I was studying information prior to the trip, I had a chance to visit several websites that offered facts about the region, as well as a great deal of photographs of the things I could expect from the experience. It was captivating, especially because I have always been passionate about history, art, and beauty, and the project promised to be a wonderful cocktail that incorporated all of these ingredients.

Once I arrived there, I was even more impressed. No computer image, photo, or video can substitute for the beauty and magic of such a place, although I have to say they can help—although that’s a different topic altogether.

As the visit progressed, we realized that we were facing a surge of experiences that, because of the pace of our travel and our tight schedule, were difficult to assimilate.

Even then, I think that my partner and I behaved properly, and stoically met all of the challenges presented to us, as well as being gracious guests. We must say that, at first, we were not aware of the long hikes at such high altitudes that the expedition involved, or that we would be going on such hikes almost on a daily basis.

That was one of the greatest lessons of the trip: the need to tune and adapt our bodies to nature and to our surroundings, and even at the risk of making an overstatement, of pushing our bodies to unaccustomed limits. In the end, all was balanced by the chance to meet some wonderful and interesting people, and to meet some of the most striking landscapes we have ever visited.

Upon returning, as happens with all memories, the most important experiences are tattooed on your soul and your mind, while we forget the unimportant. Over all, the memory of the experience in that place will be one we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. As for the places we visited, each and every one had been carefully selected, from the exceptional beauty of the remote village of Yubeng; to the marvelous sensuality of the city of Lijiang, with its old town and canals, surrounded by flowers and by a kind of beauty that overflows with tradition, history, and pride. Rock, our first guide (who had assimilated his Anglo-Saxon name in order to ease communications with Westerners), and our driver, Mr. Lee, were very good to us. They took us to Lijiang, guided us, and helped us with everything we needed.

From the get-go, it became a priority for us to establish a different kind of relationship with our guides than they had with their regular clients. We tried to develop a friendship and an exchange, not just take advantage of their knowledge and skills. We tried to foster a relationship based on mutual respect, fueled by constant communication, by appealing to their sense of humor, which was often similar to our own. For several days they were our travel companions, taking us to such locations as Lijiang, the jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and Liming, among other places.

When we reached Zhongdian, in the heart of Shangri-La, there was an exchange, and we met the people who would travel with us on the second stage of the trip. We bid a sad farewell to our friends Rock and Mr. Lee, and met Dorge and Mr. Yee, who guided us through the region from then on. They become our guides and companions, and took us to such places as Dequim, Yubeng, the foot of Mount Kawagebo, and Birong Gorge, all of them marvelous sites, art of a unique land and experience.

If you ask me how my expectations changed from my earlier ideas and preconceptions of the project after the initial visit, I should say that they changed a lot and very little. Even if it may seem confusing, the answer makes sense. Before departing, I had decided not to carry with me any sort of preconception…that could interfere with my enjoyment of such an original experience…[and] nothing of what I could have foreseen was close to our actual experience.

These experiences made the project that I am presenting, which incorporates elements of fixation, reading, and association that are inherent in my previous work, as well as elements related to the majestic wave of information that, like a shower of light, covered our visit and produced the essence of the project.

Project Proposal

What I intend to achieve in my residence during my second visit to Yunnan, China, is the following: I intend to travel to the region to research a certain construction technique, and, upon completion of that investigation, engage in the reproduction of certain architectural elements. Those very beautiful elements, used in local architecture, are also produced locally, which is why they define very uniquely the artistic, religious, social, and cultural spirit of the region, and will play a fundamental role in the final production of the piece.

Simultaneously, I intend to capture, in high-definition video and film, familiar events associated with the everyday life of the people of the region, as well as some of the marvelous landscapes that I experienced during my visit, and any others I might encounter during this second trip. The intention of the latter is to find and search for beautiful locations that reflect the essence of the region. The first part will focus specifically on researching the methods for manufacturing adobe bricks following a local formula, or the different mixtures of soil, organic materials, and other elements that I will use to construct a wall following the same methods used by the local people.

Exploring another important architectural element, I would participate in the construction of window frames carved from wood. These will be a fundamental part of the final piece. They will be constructed using local wood and richly engraved with the imagery and motifs characteristic of the region, which also implies getting advice and support from local artisans and artists.

Perhaps in order to make things more clear, I should explain my project:
The concept implies a kind of wall or partition that is similar to residential or religious buildings from the Shangri-La region. These consist of adobe walls built at a specific angle (about 80 degrees) that allows them to remain standing. Such a wall, which would be about twenty feet long by ten feet high, will include an internal metal structure that will contribute to its cohesion and prevent it from collapsing on contact from any external force. The adobe wall will be crowned by a crest made of masonry or carved wood, also corresponding architecturally to the finish of buildings in the area. It will also incorporate two windows, placed at the same height and distributed proportionally on the wall surface.

The windows, made of wood and intricately and uniquely carved and painted, will each contain two very thin plasma video screens on each side of the same window. The screens will substitute for the glass panes of normal windows. Two will be placed on the side that is considered the outer part of the wall, the other two on what is considered the inside of the wall.

On the outer, external part, we will see the videos of the personal, everyday life of a local family, their everyday family actions, how they eat, laugh, play, and so on, that is, how people live inside a home. On the inside wall there will be two more screens showing the videos of the public space, as if toward the natural beauty. These screens will show the magnificence of a space that is a fundamental part of the legacy of a people perfectly aware of the beauty around them.

Through the video screens—depending on which side we are on—we can observe the public space (if we gaze from “the inside”), or the private sphere (if we are looking from “the outside”).

The defining idea, or motivation, is the following:
I consider myself more of a builder than a sculptor.

Additional project element:
Recent media reports announced the construction of a great concrete wall, 180 meters (540 feet) high and two kilometers (1.2 miles) long, that will contain the Yangtze River, but will raise water levels and submerge entire villages, including houses, mansions, temples, pagodas, orange groves, and fields, among other things. The international reaction to such an enormous loss of human, ecological, and cultural resources has not taken long. I am interested in working this into the context of the piece, so I have decided to add on an additional element.

This new element will consist of four water tanks with very thin walls, constructed of transparent acrylic, that will be placed right in front of the plasma screens in the windows. When viewers get close to the piece, these “fish tanks” will fill with water, hindering the view of the images and creating a clear reference to the terrible loss that is taking place at this moment by the construction of this giant dam in the Three Parallel Rivers region.

The water in the tanks will slowly flow upwards. Once the water reaches the top of the tank, a floater will trigger a device that will drain the water into another tank. Then, the tank will slowly fill again, thus blocking the view of what, at least to me, is most important thing: humankind and its culture, and the natural and beautiful environment that surrounds them.

This project ties closely to my interests as an artist and to the work patterns I have developed throughout my career, both formally and in the use of construction materials: my constant attempts, when creating new work, at adopting methodologies relatively new to me—in this case, the use of video.

It is very difficult to establish if a project such as this can be the starting point in the creation of a new work, or of several blocks of work, or the expression of new concerns—although it has happened with my recent works. Inevitably, every new work affects the works that preceded it and their readings, while at the same time it modifies the future perception of certain realities that become important and affect future works. As to how much this piece could modify such a structure, and affect and influence my future work, it is not for me to say…only time will tell.

Report from Lucia Sanroman, Assistant Curator at MCASD

(Sent regarding Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s second site visit to China)

Marcos Ramírez ERRE made his second site visit to China from June 20 to July 20, 2007. On this trip he spent the majority of time in Zhongdian, one of the largest cities in Yunnan Province, which he visited during the 2005 trip and where he established good friendships with the tour guides who took him to the more remote parts of the Three Parallel Rivers area.

Ramírez wrote that he was shocked by the changes the region has undergone since his first visit. He took the second trip with two purposes: to hire local carpenters to build the traditional windows which are an integral part of his Human/Nature piece and to take video footage of the areas and people who would be most affected by the construction of massive dams planned for Yunnan province. To Ramírez it was important that the work be a record of a lifestyle that would eventually be erased by the construction of the dams, the most well-publicized of which is planned for Tiger Leaping Gorge, a canyon on the Yangtze River located about forty miles north of Lijiang City. Even though this site is a protected World Heritage site, the Yunnan provincial government has been lobbying UNESCO for over a year to remove one portion of the site—the proposed site of the dam—from the definition of “Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan,” thereby subverting the regulations that accompany the designation as a natural World Heritage site.

For Ramírez, the second trip was alarming. The remote locations he had visited only two years ago had undergone dramatic transformation—due in part to heavy promotion of the region by the Chinese government as a prime destination for Chinese tourism. As Ramírez points out, the city of Zhongdian is the capital of a county now officially named Shangri-La, a place as mythical to the Han Chinese as it is to Westerners.

The influx in population has generated a building campaign that is changing local building methods. The wood and mud houses which captivated Ramírez on his first trip, and on which his piece for Human/Nature is based, have been set aside for Westernized cement and block constructions with little or nothing left of traditional styles. Tibetan monks and nuns, in whom he had found extraordinary examples of spirituality with their active rejection of materialistic values, seemed to have found the need for cell phones, Nike shoes, and other objects of conspicuous consumption previously unavailable even to the wider population. As a result, the area has become increasingly polluted. Lakes and rivers, which on his first trip were full of water, are now drying.

These changes have shifted the focus of Ramírez’s artwork. While previously the work had been planned as a meditation on the disappearance of a culture resulting from the control of water as an energy resource, now it will also consider the effects of China’s economic growth as manifested by tourism and other subtler, but equally damaging, effects of modernization.

Some elements did proceed as planned. During this second trip, Ramírez began production of his work. He worked with local craftsmen to fabricate the window and cornice details in traditional Tibetan style and also began work on the wall and four videos, based on footage taken during the second visit. He has also decided to add a new feature to the work—text, to be placed on the gallery walls, in both English and Chinese, providing data related to the rapid development and environmental degradation in the region.

Letter from Marcos Ramírez ERRE Regarding his Second Site Visit

Following is an e-mail, which Marcos Ramírez ERRE sent to the San Diego curators in September 2007, describing his July 2007 visit to China. It is translated from the Spanish:

Only two years after our first visit in summer 2005, we were shocked and surprised by the accelerated growth of the tourist industry in Yunnan Province’s Shangri-La County and the pressure on the region’s natural resources that the influx of massive numbers of visitors has brought.

The changes in the area are directly related to the emergence of China as a global economic power. China now boasts an 11 percent yearly increase in economic growth. The hasty integration of this country into international markets has had a reciprocal effect in the rise of available commercial products for export. This has obvious consequence within the country, as the population becomes interested in buying and using those same consumables. After more than seventy years of Communist rule, the general population has its appetite whetted for an alluring lifestyle previously unavailable and forbidden.

These issues were evident and decisive during this second visit, and have resulted in a change in the focus of the project.

The consequences of China’s globalization were unavoidably inscribed in the landscape of the city of Zhongdian, where we stayed, and in the other places we visited in Yunnan Province. Factors related to the pressure brought on by development are evident in shifts to the traditional beliefs of the inhabitants of this Tibetan region. To me, the economic growth and modernization hit like a wave against a rock, slowly eroding the historical sense of spirituality and religiosity of the inhabitants. Their spirituality has its roots in deep religious convictions, particularly Buddhist beliefs, which have traditionally formed the basis of a deep sense of ecological equilibrium that promotes an inherent balance between human beings and their environment.

It is useful to remember that the conditions I am describing take place in a space of cultural and political confrontation. Yunnan is a Chinese province that borders Tibet on the southeast. While this region today belongs to China, it historically belonged to the kingdom of Tibet. If we understand the concept of “nation” as a human community generally established in the same territory, joined in one degree or another by historical links in language, religion, and economy, then this region poses delicate questions: How will China’s modernizing impetus affect the Chinese population? In particular, how will it affect Tibetans living in China? What will the effects be on the shared terrain where the two cultures overlap?

I don’t know! But what I do know is that it is precisely in this Three Parallel Rivers region, with its delicate ecological equilibrium and its multiethnic and multicultural makeup, and specifically in Shangri-La (where Tibetan culture is dominant), that a crossroads is being created, a knot of contrasts and dilemmas.

It is around this set of issues that I will now focus my work. The form of the work will not change but I am not certain at the moment if the piece will focus on political or religious concerns as a way to speak about the ecology of the region.

What I can say with certainty is that this work is a form of witnessing. I strongly believe that we must observe and witness the way in which globalizing commercial policies create social changes altering this very rich area. These changes have directly affected the health of the ecosystem in Northwest Yunnan, one of the richest area of biodiversity in China and possibly the most biologically diverse temperate region on earth.

—Marcos Ramírez ERRE, September 11, 2007