One thing that interested me when I received the invitation to this lecture series is that it is called La Generazione delle Immagini. Because I've been working with images for the last twenty years, but in the last two years, I've stopped using images. Right now I'm going through a very pessimistic phase about the power of images. I think that today you cannot trust the image, you cannot believe the image. There are too many of them. I fear them. So, I will show you some projects starting in 1986, five or six public projects that intervene within the city and connect the city with the inside of the institution_in this case, the museum. And I will end with my most recent work. Finally, I believe that context is everything, so for most of the projects I will start showing some slides of the context and explain a few things before the project itself so that everything makes sense.

PROJECT: RUSHES
This is a gold mine in the middle of the Amazon in Brazil. The hole that you see here was made by the hands of the people working there. This hole was made without a single machine. What you see here are pipes that bring water to the bottom of the mine. The Brazilian government decided not to invite a multinational corporation to work here, even when they knew that when they work this way, they are probably wasting 60 percent of the gold. Because in this way at least 100,000 people have jobs.

I spent a few days here, arriving without a script, and I spent time talking to people, and after a few days I started shooting. Only when I become invisible, I start shooting.

What I'm showing now is not my work, this is the documentary material before I do a project. Half of my work is spent like a photo reporter that goes to a place and takes photographs and gathers information. But these images are never sold as photographs, and never printed in magazines or newspapers, or never shown as photographs on a wall. In fact, if I take thousands of photographs it is precisely because I'm not a photographer. I think I respect images so much that I am hoping when I take five thousand images that one or two will be good ones.

This photograph is one that I like very much, because of the way he is looking at me, and for the hole in his T-shirt that corresponds with his heart. But it is definitely the gaze, the way he is looking at the photographer, at me, at you, is what interests me. That gaze that says: "I'm strong, I may look miserable but I'm strong." This is the last part of the process, here the miner is looking for gold. And this is the gold right there, and he has to sell this to the Brazilian government, who will pay him the market price, but deduct a commission.

This is a subway station in New York City where I rented the entire subway station and I displayed eighty-one posters of the gold mine. This is a station where some trains stop but other trains do not stop, so sometimes I wanted to give the notion of movement coming from the image itself. And every six or seven segments I had the price of the gold in different world markets. This is a subway line that goes from uptown New York City to Wall Street, which is one of the world's most important stock markets. So I wanted to connect the work of these miners in the middle of the Amazon in Brazil with the reality of people going to work on Wall Street.

I created direct connections with the station. Every time there was a garbage can, for instance, I would install images of garbage. I used a cinematographic language; sometimes I would use reversals, or repetition. And I tried to break all the rules of advertising; for example, I would put a small poster on top of a big one. And I also controlled the quality of the images, and took out all the yellows and reds and blues, so all the images became purple, to eliminate all possible exotic readings of the images. Because the station is very long, I didn't tell one story, but I tried to tell different stories in different segments, because the people can get off the train at any point in the station. There is a law in New York that prohibits one advertiser from buying an entire space, so they gave me the poster spaces, but the clocks belonged to Marlboro cigarettes. Sometimes I would do these poetic gestures of repeating the image and changing the color. Basically in this project I wanted to create a parallel between the lives of people living in New York and working in the underground, which has this connotation of being a dangerous place, with a another situation happening in another country, and to show that these connections are real and exist.

PROJECT: A LOGO FOR AMERICA
This is a project in Times Square in New York City, and it uses a sign which is called the Spectacolor sign, there, below the Minolta sign. My project consists of a film that lasts one minute and was shown every six minutes, twenty four hours a day, for one month. It starts here with the map of the USA. This project is related to the fact that I was born in Chile, and when I arrived in New York I realized that everybody says "America," but when they say "America" they are referring to the United States and not to the whole continent.

So this image stays up for seven seconds: it says "This is not America." And it is calculated that in one month, one million people saw it. Then the US flag and "This is not America's flag." Then the word "America" fills the screen, and the letter "R" in the middle fills in, and the two parts, the half-circle and the triangle rotate slowly to the left and as you can see, it becomes America, the continent. And it stays like that for another seven seconds, hopefully for one million people to see it. And then America the continent doubles up and erases entirely the word "America" from the screen. And they come back to the center of the screen as one continent and starts rotating. So the north becomes south, the south becomes north, and the axis is Central America. And the word "America" goes up and goes down from left and right. And then it freezes here for another seven seconds with the word "America".

This was written about in all the newspapers and magazines, and there were many TV programs about it, and in one radio program that was broadcast to all the United States (National Public Radio), the journalist went out and interviewed people on the street about what they thought about this project, and half of them said: "This is illegal, how can he do this?"

PROJECT: MUSEUM
This is the capital of the United States, Washington DC, and the main avenue is called The Mall, and on one side you have Capitol Hill where the Senate is located. And at the other end of The Mall you have the Washington Monument. This Mall has very important buildings on both sides of the avenue. One of these buildings is this museum, the Hirschhorn Museum. I was invited to do an exhibition here, and in analyzing the museum, I quickly realized that it had a bunker structure. It is also surrounded by very tall walls, with surveillance cameras, and as you can see, it is a very, very heavy structure. This museum responds to the idea that most people has about culture in the United States, that culture and art must be kept in a very safe place, completely isolated from the world.

This image shows what was happening in Washington when I started working on my show. It was a celebration of the return of the so-called heroes, coming back from the so-called Gulf War. The Gulf War is a name that was given to the horror that took place in Iraq that was really just a massacre. An estimated 100 000 civilians were killed in complete invisibility, and as you may recall, all the press coverage showed us were video games.

So here again is the facade of the museum looking at The Mall. And the museum has only one window, and this is the room where I wanted to do my project, because it is the only place where I can connect my work with the outside world. This is what we see from the window of the museum, we see the Archive Building_the constitution is guarded there_the Ministry of Justice, and the FBI building. So the first thing I did was to paint the entire window with gray paint and just leave six little square openings looking outside. The idea was to close this only window even more, so that we could focus better. Underneath each opening I placed a small mirror. And in front of each mirror I placed a light box with a text on the frontside and an image on the backside.

So when we see the piece from a certain distance we just see the word "MUSEUM", I used a very classical typography with a "U" that looks like a "V". When we approach the piece we start looking at the window, and we see the reflection of the image in the mirror. So in the first one we look outside at the FBI building and we see inside an image of a victim of the so-called Gulf War. And so on with the other openings: outside, the Archive Building, inside, another victim .

I contacted 37 photo agencies looking for images of victims of the Gulf War. I was able to find just a few. So in this project, I wanted to connect the outside that had been witness to this obscene celebration of a massacre, with a different reality on the inside.

PROJECT: THE AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE
This is a museum in Berlin, and it's called the Pergamon Museum. The Pergamon Museum was built especially to house this altar, which is called the Pergamon Altar. And the frieze around the altar was constructed in front of it, all around the museum. So this reconstruction is completely fake, because originally this frieze belonged to the altar, but now it is facing it.

The Turkish government has been reclaiming this altar for the last twenty years, because it belongs to them. These are windows facing the altar.

I had been living in Berlin for one year at that time, and I realized a great contradiction: on one hand there was a lot of racism going on against immigrants, for the most part Turkish immigrants, and at the same time I was shocked to discover that in a museum built especially for it, they were venerating an element of Turkish culture.

I created an installation with neon signs with fourteen names of places where attacks against foreigners had occurred within the previous year. This is the first time that they allowed an artist use the steps of the altar. In M”lln, for example, a Turkish woman was killed with her two daughters by a fire started by skinheads. In Rostock, a group of skinheads attacked a refugee center, and it took the police one week to finally intervene. So this piece was a kind of memorial to the victims of this racism.

I also used the windows on this wall: I placed black and white photographs of the details of the frieze and of the details of the real-life violence outside the museum. So, for example, this is a detail of a group of skinheads and we recognize them by the way they dress, those heavy black boots for example, and I placed this at the entrance of the museum. And this is an image of violence on the frieze, this is a foot on top of a face_the detail is taken from the frieze. This project was extensively covered in the German media, and these words became signs of something very important and the images of them were published in all the newspapers. This is a case of a public project in a public space where the work circulates through the media.

PROJECT: EUROPA
This is a museum space in Stuttgart. I was given two spaces but I left the first space totally dark as a kind of antechamber before reaching the second space. This piece is called "Europa", and it is about the war in Bosnia and the indifference in Europe towards the suffering in Bosnia. I did this in Germany because I agree with one school of thought that places the blame partially on Germany for the beginning of this war, with their early recognition of the Croats. As you can see, these are six light boxes with images of fire on the front side and images on the other side that would be reflected in thirty mirrors. The images of fire suggest ethnic cleansing, but they're also very beautiful and seductive because I need people to come close to the work to be confronted with the horror. And then by moving in front of the mirrors we are confronted with reflections coming from the other side of the light boxes. We have to commit ourselves physically in order to see, if we do not make an effort, we will not see. And the images we see are always reversed, fragmented, partial. We cannot comprehend the whole reality in all its complexity.

These are the hands of a man who just buried his brother and he's showing to the camera his empty hands. As an example of how the mirror works, this is what you get when you see the image from here (eyes) and when you move to the right you see this (full face). Or here we see this (hands), and as we approach it, we see this (faces). Here these two very old ladies are trying to help each other walk across a completely destroyed street. As you can see I used many images of hands, shaking hands, empty hands, hands as a sign of solidarity that never came from the rest of Europe. At the same time I had this installation inside, I had a public project outside. This is a ten meter wide billboard, and it says, "Images have an advanced religion, they bury history." We also have five European Community flags at half-mast as a sign of mourning. In Germany when the mourning is very important, they hang black fabric from the sides. Because of the high visibility of this public project, hundreds of people called to the museum to ask who had died. And the museum's secretary would answer "Three hundred thousand people in Bosnia".

PROJECT: ONE MILLION FINNISH PASSPORTS
The three Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, are the three most generous countries in helping the developing world. Every year they're always the three top donors in terms of development and social programs in most developing counties. In the last ten years, they have welcomed one million refugees that have become citizens of those countries. But this project takes place in Helsinki, Finland, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I was shocked to discover that Finland is completely different than the other Nordic countries. They have what they call a "zero immigration policy". Ironically, the year I was having this show, Finland was applying to the European community, so I created this project called "On Million Finnish Passports". As you see, the passports are behind high security glass because the authorities requested that people did not have access to them. This measures approximately ten meters by ten meters by eighty centimeters high.

And why one million? Because I calculated that in every European country approximately twenty percent of the population is foreign or of foreign descent. Finland has five million inhabitants, so twenty percent would be one million. As you may know, Finland is a very rich country with a very large territory. What I wanted to do with this piece was to ask the following questions: Who will be the next one million Finnish citizens, now that they are joining the European community? Do they want to remain insular and isolated, or do they want to welcome new faces, new ideas, new colors to their territory?

The lighting was such that you could see yourself reflected slightly on the glass, so you would see the passports through your own image. I like very much this image, it's a kind of sea of identity waiting to be filled.

There was a lot of press and reactions to this piece. The most moving reaction was that a few people came back to the museum with their own passports, and threw them over the glass as a sign of solidarity.

PROJECT: CAMARA LUCIDA
This is Catia, in Caracas, Venezuela and this is a new museum that was being built there when I was invited to create a project for its opening. This museum is placed in Catia, the poorest area of the city of Caracas, an area of the city where there are no cultural institutions. All the houses that you see here were built by the people living there by their own hands.

They started building this museum in a park, and in this park, besides the museum that was being built, there was already a sinister building housing a jail, one of the worst prisons of Latin America. The community has been asking the government in Caracas for twenty years to destroy the prison, because, among many obvious reasons, the prisoners throw objects and yell obscenities to the children in the park. But instead of getting rid of the prison, they decided to build a museum across the park. This is a very popular area and a very poor area. Most of the daily business activities occurs in the streets.

I was invited to do a site specific project for the inauguration of the museum, a museum that was totally rejected by the community of Catia. They would have preferred a sports complex. I created a project called "Camera Lucida" as a homage to Roland Barthes and as a homage to the lucidity of the people of Catia who accepted to participate.

This is the first day of the project. I'm there on the stage talking to a group of mothers of the community of Catia explaining my project. We organized a small group of six people who helped me to distribute one thousand disposable cameras to the people of Catia. We went to thirty-seven different local institutions, like hospitals and schools, to distribute the cameras and explain the project. We invited the people of Catia to photograph their community, their friends, their parents, their school, in complete freedom. We asked them once they had finished to bring their camera to a small office we had set up, not at the museum itself but near the museum, because of the resistance to the museum.

This is the opening day. I was given the entire second floor. This is an image by Rosa Morillo. Once they returned the camera, we gave them ten days to come back and pick up their prints, but when they picked up their prints, we asked them to select one print that would be shown at the museum's opening. I wanted to start the exhibition with this image that suggests a new frame of reference. And then we see a second image and we move to the second floor. When we arrive at the second floor, the first thing we see are the names of all the participants, and on both sides of the wall we can see Catia.

When we distributed one thousand cameras, I expected may be one hundred cameras back, and I thought, if I receive one hundred cameras, I have an exhibition. But out of one thousand cameras, seven hundred and fifty came back. A few weeks later, only four hundred and seven came back to select their best image. So the exhibition opened with four hundred and seven photographs taken and selected by the people of Catia.

I could not resist doing something myself so I created this sculpture with the skeletons of all the cameras, and this sculpture is called "The Eyes of Catia". We had a wall where we had to explain the project to the audience and give thanks to all the institutions that helped with the project. And we had a little display showing the cameras with their labels.

We didn't have enough money to print all the photographs in the same size, so I had four different sizes from 1 meter to 1,50 to 20 by 30 centimeters. And I only designed a grid so all the images could fit, but they are all put up totally by chance, I didn't make a choice between the good and the bad ones. Each image is framed with glass and also includes the name of each participant.

The idea of this project was to offer the community the opportunity to conquer this space, to make theirs the walls of this institution that was imposed on them. After the exhibition the community got two members of the community on the board of this institution.

As you can see, the hanging was totally by chance so sometimes you might find a very nice portrait and then an image of garbage in the streets of Catia.

Now I'm going to show you a few close-ups of a few images that the people of Catia took themselves and I will read their names. Victor Herrera. The prison by Oswaldo Yanez. This is the lack of services in Catia by Jimmy Alcides. The problems of the homeless by Vicki Carrasquez. Catia is the only area of the city where they have homeless people. This is Ronald Rosada, who did a little installation on his bed. This is from Franca Capobianco, Douglas Yerxis, Jose Rivas, Domingo Gonzalez.

At the opening I looked for people who had participated and I photographed them near their work. This is a mother with her son and the son is there in the blue T-shirt. This other kid photographed his sister with a camera in her hand. This girl here didn't take this photograph but she was in the photograph and wanted to pose for me so here she is. This last image is by Alejandro Chivdathe, and it's one of my favorites. Here he is seen throwing a soccer ball to the photographer, a soccer ball as a symbol of the sports complex that they would have preferred to have, so he's doing it with rage but at the same time he is completely powerless.

PROJECT: REAL PICTURES
This is my most recent work and I've focused on this project for the last two years, and it concerns the genocide in Rwanda.

This is a text screened at the entrance of the museum:
"Genocide: acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."

"If genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and protection of international law." Hannah Arendt. "On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying the Rwandan president Juv‚nal Habyarimana was shot down above Kigali. What ensued in the next ten weeks was a genocide. It is estimated that at least one million people were killed. Two million others sought refuge in Zaire, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. About 2 million more were displaced within Rwanda.

The world turned a blind eye to the systematic killings. In fact, the first UN reaction to the massacres was to pass Resolution 912 on April 21, reducing the UN forces from 2500 to 270. When French and Belgian paratroopers were sent in, it was only to carry out the smooth evacuation of all foreigners. The main reason the international community did not intervene early on was European and American unwillingness to make a substantial commitment in an area of no strategic interest.

The media's attention was finally grabbed by the mass exodus into refugee camps. Conveniently blocking out talks of genocide, Washington and the world promised to react in front of the humanitarian disaster in the camps. Cholera and dysentery claimed tens of thousands, but this number was only a fraction of the estimated 1 million victims of the genocide. Alfredo Jaar visited Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda in the summer of 1994. This exhibition is the result of that trip.

"Images have an advanced religion. They bury history." Vicenc Altaio.

This exhibition shows more than five hundred and fifty photographs, but they are all encased in black archival photographic boxes. It was a very dark space, it was almost a religious space, with a lot of silence. With these boxes, using them as a module, I created these monuments as a memorial to the people of Rwanda. The logic behind this piece is as follows: I feel we are bombarded by too many images, we don't see them anymore. The media gives us the impression of being present somewhere but when we turn off the TV or close our newspapers we are left with an incredible sentiment of absence. So here I wanted to work in reverse, I wanted to start with an absence in the hope of provoking a presence. The logic was to say, let's forget everything for a second and let's start from scratch. Let's start from the beginning and think about the meaning of one life and one death. The logic was that we were bombarded by images of Rwanda but we obviously didn't see them because we didn't do anything. So I thought maybe now that I will enclose them in boxes maybe we will see them better.

I'll read one example: "Ntarama church, Nyamata, Rwanda, Monday, August 29, 1994. This photographs shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out into the daylight. 400 Tutsi men, women, and children who had come here seeking refuge were slaughtered during the Sunday mass. Benjamin looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove to his friends in Kampala, Uganda that the atrocities were real and that he had seen the aftermath."

Sometimes at the end of a sequence like here, I take a much more subjective and almost poetic direction, like: "Taken five seconds later, this photograph shows the rich blue sky, a bit of the treeline and one perfect white cloud hovering above the church. The stench of death still lingers." Next to the exhibition we had a small resource room where we showed what the press did with this information. There were books about Africa, there was NGO literature for people to take with them, to help the NGOs working in Rwanda, and there were many magazines. We offered a place for people to comment on the exhibition. This is just the first week. Some of the magazines: Africa Reportt: Rwanda: Too Little? Too Late?"

Next magazine: Media Critic. Cover title: Missing a Massacre. Here, The New York Times Magazine with a reportage by Sebastiao Salgado: "The killer in the next tent", and it is subtitled "The Surreal Horror of the Rwanda Refugees". It's not surreal. Here, different reports by Amnesty International and other Human Rights organizations.

This project, titled "Real Pictures", is the project I was referring to when I said I was interested in the title Generazione delle Immagini, because here, as you saw, I'm having a real problem with images. And after this project I was blocked for one year, it was a turning point for me, because for twenty years I've gone to places and photographed things and showed the images in my work, and now I have started hiding them.

PROJECT: THE EYES OF GUTETE EMERITA
I will show now my last project which is also about Rwanda. You have to walk through this hallway and then turn to the left and arrive in my space. This is a black wall with a line of white text that measures 8 meters long. The text is inside the wall and it is illuminated: there is light coming through the text. So people enter this space and walk eight meters very slowly in order to read and enter a second space.

The text says: "Over a five month period in 1994, more than one million Rwandans, mostly members of the Tutsi minority, were systematically slaughtered while the international community closed its eyes to genocide. The killings were largely carried out by Hutus militias who had been armed and trained by the Hutu military. As a consequence of this genocide, millions of Tutsis and Hutus fled to Zaire, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Many still remain in refugee camps, fearing renewed violence upon their return home. One Sunday morning at a church in Ntarama, 400 Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered by a Hutu death squad. Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, was attending mass with her family when the massacre began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes was her husband Tito Kahinamura, 40 years old, and her two sons, Muhoza, 10 and Matirigari, 7. Somehow, Gutete managed to escape with her daughter Marie Louise Unumararunga,12. They hid in a nearby swamp for 3 weeks, coming out only at night in search of food. Gutete has returned to the church in the woods because she has nowhere else to go. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun. I remember her eyes, the eyes of Gutete Emerita."

So people have to walk along this wall, they read this text and then they move into the next room: This is a 6 meters by 6 meters light table with one million slides. One million because I was looking for a metaphor for the one million dead, and this looks like a mass grave. When you approach the light table, you realize that it's always the same image, repeated one million times.

This image shows the eyes of Gutete Emerita. People could take a slide and look at the slide with a loupe, as shown here. I'm interested in the eyes of the audience being only one centimeter away from the eyes of Gutete Emerita. I am suggesting here that her eyes acted as a camera who saw something that we could not see. The question here is: How do we bridge the gap between our eyes and her eyes? So, for this lecture series called the Generazione delle Immagini, I will finish with these eyes, the eyes of Gutete Emerita. Thank you very much.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE:
Q: I'm interested to find out how you get sponsorship or funding for your work ? Do you do it yourself or do you have a team ?
A: At the beginning of my career, I received every single grant you can imagine. After that, when I reached a certain status as an artist, institutions started inviting me and commissioned new works. In that sense, I feel extremely privileged because I have the freedom and sometimes the budget necessary for work. I must say that institutions are not monolithic, sometimes you are able to find inside an institution someone, an individual, who believes in you and is willing to help you produce your work.

Q: You're from Chile and you've worked for years in the USA. Do you have any intentions to go back to Chile and do projects there?
A: In the first five years after I left Chile I did many projects about Chile and against the dictatorship. Because of that, I was censored in Chile until the end of the dictatorship. For example, when I was here in the Aperto section of the Biennale, nobody in Chile published anything about it, even when I was the first and only Chilean and Latin American. The same thing happened for Documenta the year later, when I was also the first Chilean and Latin American to be shown in there. But now things have changed and we are planning a major retrospective of my work in the next two years.

Q: What are the boundaries between social interventions and art?
A: I will quote Jean Luc Godard, a filmmaker I greatly admire. He said: "It might be true that you have to choose between ethics and aesthetics. But it is also true that whichever one you choose, you will always find the other one at the end of the road. Because the definition of the human condition is in the mise-en-scŠne itself." I don't see any difference between ethics and aesthetics, I believe everything we do is political. The term "political art" has been used as a label to marginalize a small group of artists that have something to say against the system. As a rule, I always reject to participate when they do an exhibition of so-called political artists. I've always felt extraordinarily privileged as an individual because, as an artist, society has given me time to think, to think about society, ask questions, perhaps even try answers. But with this privilege, comes a responsibility. And I think that today the cultural world is the last space left open to do these kinds of things. Not only in the visual arts, but in film, theater, writing, dance, music.

Q: What's your relationship to the Third World?
A: I reject that expression "third world": it is obviously one world. Let me put it this way: We are different societies and these societies have a different level of development, in different areas of development. For example, the US leads the world in computer technology. So we can say that in that specific area, the USA is more developed than, say, Ireland. But in an another area, let's say music for example, in my opinion, African countries such as Senegal or Mali are producing music that is much more creative, much more exciting than most of the music being created right now in the rest of the world. So we can say that, music from Mali or Senegal is today much more developed than, say, Italian music. In my work, I try to close gaps between worlds that seem far apart but are deeply connected. I try to build bridges, create connections, reveal. But I fail most of the time, that is why I keep working.