To  Fran

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To live for hatred is to live serving our enemy. To have an enemy is already to be only half ourselves, the other half always occupied by our enemy. When living under the desire for destruction or the fear of being destroyed one does not really live, but agonizes in the long-term.
Reinaldo Arenas, The Doorman (1989)

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While in an artistic residency in Japan* I was going through a personal situation that made everything seem fragmented. As in any process, the way was guided by intuition and chance. Sometimes you have to travel faraway to find your own reflection in other waters. Being unaware then, this journey of reencounter with myself arrived. I thought: How to move in such a foreign world? How to heal and paste the remaining pieces after a fracture? 

​​Camera in hand, I started touring Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Hiroshima and Naoshima by land and sea, capturing hundreds of images and life fragments that reminded me of the existence of beauty in everyday life. While recording everything that captured my attention, a phrase always came to my mind giving new meaning to what I was looking at: “Things we do for love”.

Back in Mexico, other lands and other seas showed up. With those waters came a new promise of life. Not knowing why, it seemed that my visual archive of two countries and cultures—so different from each other—was trying to say something. I wanted to find a way to put together these life fragments to transform  them into a whole that, in turn, wouldn't hide the fractures of its history. I found in Kintsugi (a Japanese philosophy that repairs broken objects and beautifies them by gluing the fragments with gold dust) the perfect metaphor to understand video editing as that affective binder capable of intertwining images apparently unconnected. Something that I could only have done with the help of my great friend, editor and filmmaker Martha Uc.

In Things We Do for Love, what once were wounds now are lines of light that accentuate the complex diversity of lived moments in the same story. I decided not to use the images' real sound, but to experiment with the emotional and suggestive abstraction of electronic music. That's where my friend and musician Roderic appeared—to me, the power of his music was the perfect light that recovered what had been lived and also a powerful emotional support to merge the collection of filmed moments. The cello—in the musical composition—emerged also because of instinct: Natalia Pérez-Turner's performance gave the work a great affective-depth.

Later, after looking at a chrysanthemum that I filmed on a Tokyo cemetery ground after falling due to a typhoon, the idea of ​​making a sculpture that would depict the water and the sea force and movement—video's two recurring elements—came up. A new phrase came to my mind: “the sculpture had to rise from the ground, just as Aphrodite rose from the waters”. Coincidentally, the colors involved in the goddess of love and eroticism mythological birth are tied with Japan’s national colors. Along this path, the sculptor Óscar Garduño and the ceramist Carmen de la Parra helped me to create the sculptural work at Cerámica Suro workshop in Guadalajara.

At the end of this journey, Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas appeared. Literature always comes just like that: untimely, unexpected, forceful, needed... A new intuition gave life to his text in Louise Phelan and Francisco López-Guerra voices, to whom I dedicate this work.

Just as the space forms a whole with the chrysanthemum petals on the gallery’s floor, the video editing made possible putting together the fragmentary images of my experience, turning out to be a surprising and unexpected ode to life which taught me that, beyond personal experiences, the relentless force reigns tirelessly.

Residence for artists Casa NaNo in Tokyo, Japan, sponsored by Fundación Casa Wabi.

Erick Meyemberg tells us that at the end of his trip to Japan the book appeared The goalkeeper by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. “Literature always arrives like this, untimely, unexpected, forceful, necessary...”

From this book, a new intuition came to give life to his text in the voices Louise Phelan and Francisco López-Guerra, to whom he dedicated this work and are included in Roderic's music.

(1) In those waters, in all waters, [the human being] expects [n] to see his real image reflected. An image that was mutilated thousands of years ago. In that position, nestled next to the coast, we can find them anywhere. Longing for what? What they themselves were.

(2) To live for hate is to live in the service of our enemy. To have an enemy is to be only half of ourselves, the other part is always occupied by the enemy. When you live under the desire to destroy or under the fear of being destroyed, you don't live, you agonize for the long term.

(3) The search for silence, calm and oblivion. Notice that I'm not talking about forgiveness, I'm talking about oblivion. To forgive means to remember and to a certain extent to make a pact with someone we have detested or loved and who has hurt us!

(4) Where we will go will be a place where there is water and land. The reasons are obvious: all beings are amphibians even though some species have suffered serious atrophies. And we are not only physically amphibians, but also spiritually. No one can withstand a single element and those who can live in all of them are undoubtedly the happiest. Take for example, even if only for once, the case of man, a creature, of course, atrophied. Despite living on land, don't you always try to march towards the water? For a reason that they can't explain, but we can, don't they always manage to set off in strange processions to the very edge of the sea? Observe how they all stop at the line where the waters begin and there they remain as if enraptured... What are they looking at? What are they looking for? Why the need to always march from the remotest part of the Earth to the encounter with the waters? They don't know it, but they are looking for themselves. They are looking for the other part that belongs to them, and that they lost out of cowardice or misery, and that belonged to the waters. In those waters, in all waters, they expect to see their real image reflected. An image that was mutilated thousands of years ago. In that position, nestled next to the coast, we can find them anywhere. Longing for what? What they themselves were.

(5) Could they even if they wanted to dry up the sea? Could they do without water and land?

-silence, calm and oblivion-

Excerpts selected by Erick Meyenberg for Things We Do for Love