'This work is about the abuse of power.' Alfredo Jaar reflects on his immersive Black Lives Matter protest piece at the Whitney Biennial:
At home in New York, Jaar could only watch in disbelief as the events of that day unfolded on television. Although international human-rights law prohibits the militarized use of helicopters, one swooped as low as
Coming from Chile, from Latin America, helicopters are for me a synonym for death flights. In Chile, hundreds of bodies were dropped from helicopters into the ocean by the military dictatorship. In Argentina, it was thousands of bodies. I wanted to structure it in three parts. The first part is the peaceful protest. The second part was when they start shooting off tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. And the third part is the helicopters. That was the footage I was looking for. And when I found it, I started editing.How did you cut the final film?
We needed fans that were powerful, but could be controlled by a computer, so we had to do some research and testing. We found this fan that is used for film effects, people with their hair in the wind, and so on. It is very powerful and makes a huge sound, which was very interesting. I would have used a dozen fans, but these fans were very expensive and we could only afford six. They had to be installed overhead, because that’s where the helicopters were.
The first few years, I was always looking out my window and thinking, “Where’s the revolution? Where’s the people protesting? How is this possible?” But after awhile, you get used to it, because everyone is used to it, and no one does anything. These 155 people, there are artists, there are intellectuals, there are scientists, there are lawyers—people from different disciplines, and the youngest is 21 years old. They are writing a constitution that will be submitted to a referendum. That was the effect of those protests—and the grand finale came recently when Chile elected a very young president, only 35 years old. [Gabriel Boric] was one of the students protesting in the street, and now he’s president.
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