nazia du bois

Another Sao Paulo summer day, another thunderstorm. Every day through the high-summer months of February and March as the hour approaches late afternoon something Biblical and majestic starts to happen in the sky. The whole world slowly darkens as the sky closes down, drawing a blanket of graphite over everything you can see. The air, already heavy, gets musky with the smell of the leaves about to be drenched. You can almost see the insects scurrying for shelter as the first droplets plop fatly onto the ground, through the vines on the trees. I am of course no stranger to thunderstorms, having grown up in the land of the kalboishakhis. Memories of dancing on the roof under the sheer weight of the monsoon rains are still fresh in my mind, as is the vision of my grandmother’s garden in Dhaka’s Cantonment, bright wet green after the rains and strewn with the little unripe mangoes we would then make  into deliciously spicy kacha aam bhorta. But this rain here in Brazil is different. It’s somehow less welcoming, it’s not the kind of rain you’d play and dance with. It’s deeper, darker, heavier. Amazonian. It reminds you, with every drop and splatter, that you’re living in the middle of a jungle. On borrowed land. Perhaps even on borrowed time. It’s incessant, for one. It’s not the quick refreshing downpour of the Asian afternoon that we’re used to, and can plan nashta and shopping around. It lives on its own time, the sky heaving and pouring until you think there can’t possibly be any wet left, and yet still it falls. The world lights up in a startling electric white with every bolt of lightning, followed by the kind of ear-shattering thunderclap that grabs hold of your heart in a strange, primordial fear. I have screamed out loud involuntarily more than once at these bolts of thunder, and am always struck by how here even the most piercing scream would be completely drowned out by the sheer volume of the noise of nature.  The trees sag under the weight of the water, drooping to protect themselves, and the gutters in this hilly city rush like small rivers, meeting at the bottoms of the hills to flood and soak the cars and even the living rooms of the poor souls who don’t live on higher ground. Every day there is news of more destruction from the rain, and as we drive around afterwards, we see images with a kind of brutal poetry – roadside trees upturned with such force that their surrounding concrete lies jagged, pointing in shards into the air, walls too waterlogged to stand, crumbling onto pavements. I’ve been reading two of my favourite authors recently – The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton and The Tell-tale Mind by V.S. Ramachandran. De Botton’s thinking, about how the very shapes and colours and weights and textures that surround us evoke in us emotions that we are hard-wired to experience, feels very real to me here. Our house is on a quiet residential street, on thankfully relatively high ground. There is a large, purple flower-laden tibouchina tree out front, and in the back, there is a small but verdant garden, with a guava tree, a pitanga tree, and many bushes and plants I don’t know. There is an unmistakeably jungly quality about the garden – so much so that garden almost seems the wrong word to describe it. It’s as far from the kind of gentle English garden, laid out with a nice vegetable plot, creeping roses and sun loungers, that I imagine when I hear the word garden, as its possible to be. The green here is dark and bright all at once, assaultingly deep. The sun, which shines all morning, divides the garden into patches of scorching white heat and areas of dark, hot shade. The wildlife, from insects to worms to birds, is absolutely everywhere. And the overwhelming sense I get, whether I am lying on the white cotton hammock that I bought back in Recife last year, or whether I’m inside, by the window, watching the storm with a soothing cup of tea – the overwhelming sense I get is that if we were all to leave, all the residents of Sao Paulo, to leave, tomorrow, it would take mere moments, days,  for this great city to be consumed back into its natural state of jungle. It’s that primitive feeling of living on borrowed time (in an existential sense of course) that I am thinking about today, as I wonder why my heart and brain react so differently to the rains in different parts of the world.

We went to a talk by Antony Gormley at the South Bank Center recently. I’ve always liked his work, so was looking forward to it very much.  It was oddly comforting. The audience was full of the kind of people who go to talks by sculptors at the South Bank Center on rainy weekday evenings in London. Quietly genteel, slightly damp and mostly greying, full of academics and eccentrics, the kind of thing that I’ll really miss.

We’d been working, just that very week, on a touch technology brief for one of our new clients. It always strikes me as so serendipitous when something you’ve been thinking about in the back of your mind bubbles up in completely different parts of your life within hours or days of each other. Our creatives had been talking about sculpture as the purest form of human interaction with our environments. And in some way we were trying to make the link between what touch technology now allows you to do that pure audiovisual technology never did – namely, to make stuff. Making is physical, tangible, real and deeply human. The need to make, to use our hands, is so deeply ingrained in us, and so much more, I believe, than just the faddish ‘makers movements’ we’re seeing everywhere today. The thing I was interested in was how the pure physical act of making something with your hands can make you see yourself differently, as you become a creator of something outside of your own body, that isn’t just on a screen (ever strike you how rare that is these days?).

Anyway, Gormley touched on some of the same things, only just about a thousand times more eloquently. His famous pieces that most people in Britain would recognise easily, like his Horizon Field sculptures of the male body (his own) cast and positioned in places of vast aloneness, or of his pixelated men, all deal with some of the themes that fascinate me time and again about sculpture. ‘Sculpture has the power to stop people in their tracks and demand that they really examine their context’, he says.  By forcing people to confront the physical he demands an examination of their own presentness in the world and their own self. At the same time he’s demanding a stillness of attention, of not rushing past as we’re so wont to do, aiming, he says, to ‘transfer the stillness from the work to the viewer, by creating an obstacle to easy reference, by demanding thought, engagement and imagination’. I guess it’s this great demandingness of sculpture that’s one of the things I like about it, the way it forces you to re-see (I realise I am creating rather a lot of new words here) and reassess. I’ve always loved Giacommetti and Henry Moore, and I realised after the Gormley talk that one of the threads that run through my love of all their work is the way the human form is made present and questioned at exactly the same time, both through the sculpture itself and through you.

Gormley does it in the nameless faceless quality of his everymen, and in that beautiful phrase of his, ‘the uncertainty of edges’. I think his pixelated men do so most cleverly, a really simple idea that means so many things to so many people. How pixelated our lives now are, how edgeless (who knows who’s checking your FB profile out right now?), how easily replicable, how digitised, binarised, the list goes on and on. And that’s exactly his point. The pieces are all, in the end, about the subjectivity of the ‘user experience’. No one person is going to stand in front of any of his pieces and think the exact same thing as any other – in that, it’s the same as any piece of art. What’s distinct is in how he forces you to confront your own corporeality, not in any grossed-out way, just in a way that reminds you that you too are a physical body, not just a brain and eyes and typing fingers. A reminder that you cut a shape in the world, and with that, I like to think, a reminder that with that presence comes a responsibility, to behave, to think, maybe even to do good.

He calls this whole idea ‘propriaception’ or auto-observation – the idea that through the existence of these sculptures you become aware of your own existence. It’s a deeply powerful thought, that still, a few weeks on, has me gently musing. It’s amazing the power that art has, to burrow down into a deep level of your consciousness that nothing else can quite reach.

PS – The title for this post comes from the name of my favourite cafe in Beijing, where we spent many hours as students pretending to memorize long vocabulary lists. It in turn is named after the Tarkovsky book about cinema – I’ve never actually read it but have always liked that the namesake Chinese cafe has held more meaning for me than the book itself. 

Not sure why everyone suddenly seems to be into zoetropes lately. Given that they’ve been around forever, and any animation geek will tell you how they were the birth of modern animation,  it’s funny that they seem to be having a bit of a rebirth in brand usage. ‘A zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures’ say the Wiki gurus.

Especially because the way they’re being used isn’t often that related to the product. It’s just a cool creative device, that I suspect gets sold in whenever creatives just want to work with the cool device of the day. Remember when everyone had at least one of those choppy stop-motion animations on air? This is really just another version.

I suppose the mixing of ingredients for a tea drink and the speeding up of a wheely-thing for an energy company seem at first glance to be fine links to the notion of the zoetrope, which is, after all, in motion and involves a mash-up of perspectives. But just the fact that as a creative device it’s selling both household energy and tea drinks (however full of ‘joy’ and ‘imagination’) right now seems to point towards the tenuousness of both those connections. I suspect we’ll see a couple more and then it will die out quite quickly.

Flicking through the June 2012 edition of Vanity Fair this caught my eye, on page 25.

A few pages later, on 41…

And then on 47, by the Dorchester Collection…

It reads ‘you can admire the masters, or you can put yourself in the picture’. The frame device, being, of course, the premise of Piaget’s whole new campaign.

Are all the creative directors in luxury hanging out in the same places? The weirdest thing about the first two – Escada and Piaget – is that they’re faced by exactly the same person – Bar Refaeli.  Almost identical shoots, same model, same season, different brands. Unbranded (as below) you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re part of the same campaign (and yes, I know you could pull out fresh summer days vs dusky evenings etc but that would be splitting hairs)

Maybe it’s just me, but this is more than just boring, it’s worrying. The real issue here isn’t that the everyone keeps coming up with the same ideas in beauty/luxury. It’s that the category is so straight-jacketed by the same hackneyed tropes we’ve seen for too long – likening women to flowers to enjoy, paintings to behold, jewels to covet, etc. Luxury needs to cast its net wider than these overused and one-dimensional devices which are all, to state the sad reality of it, inherently male in their gaze. Just because you still see it everywhere doesn’t mean it’s any good.

Spotted these two print ads within a page of each other in this weekend’s Independent magazine – the first by the Moroccan tourist board and below it, Eurostar. As with all of these spottings, both campaigns feature exactly the same creative idea, and are running at exactly the same time.

I believe the original inspiration comes from Beijing-based conceptual photographer Jasper James’ work, below.

I have to say I much prefer the original work, unbranded. I know that the genius of creative types is so often in the  fusing of diverse influences, but maybe sometimes the best stuff is best just left alone…

I do like the Eurostar re-brand though.

On the one day of the Easter weekend that I actually had off, I went to the Hajj exhibition at the British Museum, which everyone’s been saying is very good. Mindful that the exhibition closes while I’m away in Asia on work, I was very keen to catch it before leaving and so packed it into an already hectic day. It was worth the effort, but not in the way I might have expected.

The exhibition’s sub-title, Journey to the Heart of Islam, was really also the curatorial idea. There are so many aspects of the Hajj that an exhibition like this could choose to focus on – the community, the rituals, the journeys themselves. Focusing on this last aspect, the exhibition cleverly staged itself as a kind of mini-hajj,  leading viewers on a journey of their own as they learned about the arduous treks of Muslims pilgrims of the past as they struggled to reach Makkah from as far away as Malacca, Bombay or Timbuktu, on journeys that lasted years and took many lives.  All of this was richly evoked and it was clear that no expense had been spared by either of the show’s major patrons, Saudi King Abdulaziz and HSBC Amanah. But somehow, as I walked in pace with the crowds, I felt something to be slightly awry, something not quite in the right place. And then, as I stood in front of this piece of contemporary artwork by Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem, it clicked. What I was feeling was the intensely disconcerting feeling of seeing something you know intuitively, in a place deep inside you, suddenly through the eyes of another.

This felt like an exhibition for non-Muslims. But of course. The British Museum is for the British public, only a small percentage of whom are Muslim. This is a great and brave educational task of enlightenment they’ve undertaken, at a time when the Western world needs a more nuanced understanding of the words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ more than ever. (For an excellent analysis of why these words have lost all meaning through mindless overuse, see Simon Kuper’s article in this weekend’s FT)

That the Hajj is a closed experience is an understatement. Although almost three million pilgrims now gather in Makkah yearly, not a single person amongst them is a non-Muslim. To be so would be to risk, at worst, decapitation. This leads to a strong feeling of exclusion. And exclusion, as we know, breeds fear – a fear of the unknown that will always colour non-Muslim accounts of the Hajj. Surely, I could almost hear people think, three million Muslims silently gathering from all corners of the earth in the same single place every year reeks of the scariest kind of fundamentalism. The exhibition tried its hardest to pull a veil over such sentiments. But in doing so, perhaps it does even worse.

Curator Venetia Porter has, by and large, done a fine job of portraying the humane, compassionate, peaceful and cultured face of Islam that so rarely gets any Western air-time. But it too often veers into the schmaltzy – every other wall emblazoned with some poetic quote about the transcendental beauty of community, the commingling of brothers and sisters in peace and harmony, the  most spiritual moments of their lives. I’m not denying that these moments of enlightenment happen whilst on Hajj – I’ve heard many such stories from Hajjis I know. I just feel that romanticising it to a point where it begins to sound like the greatest spiritual journey one can ever undergo, but one which, if you are non-Muslim, you are necessarily barred from, is a dangerously divisive thing to do. And it’s not totally reflective of the reality either.

As we left, I said to Joel that it felt like an evocation of how one might very well want to see the Hajj, beautifully idolised and in the ancient past, full of grand journeys of great wealth and great fulfilment; disconnected from the many unsavoury aspects of the actual experience today. Scant mention was made of the crime, crowding and sickness that’s now a reality for Hajjis, or even of the thousands who have been trampled to death in the stampedes of recent decades. Sure, with the Saudi royal family bankrolling the show, these incidents were hardly going to get a mention. But without them, it felt a bit like a hollow shell of understanding what Hajj is like in reality, in the present day, to Muslims everywhere. I see it as something you go and do that then changes your life. I think of people I know whose Facebook status updates become devout and almost alter-ego-like when they’re in Makkah, or who return vowing never to touch a drop of alcohol again. Or those who return firmly believing they will run their business differently, be kinder to their staff, help out in the community more. Those are the smaller, more tangible and more powerful effects that going on Hajj has on the lives of young Muslims today.

The British Museum’s exhibition had as its piece de resistance an actual-sized replica of the Ka’aba itself, in a central ‘destination’ room at the end of the journey that was the exhibition. It was gorgeously draped with the famous embroidered panels of calligraphy and surrounded by other pieces of sumptuous artwork – all of it very impressive. But the room had still been titled, in large bold letters on the wall, ‘Mecca’, instead of Makkah - something that had no doubt been pondered over by some committee for many hours. It was a decision that, to me, said it all.

Landing on the ground this morning in London after a week in Sao Paulo was a shock to the system. From 35 degrees to barely 4 in less than 12 hours. Yikes.

It did bring home that Sao Paulo is really on the other side of the world. Where Christmas is warm. Even though I know there are plenty of summer Christmases around the world, there’s something about it that still throws me. I still remember an enormous and slightly terrifying Santa + Hello Kitty character waving that Chinese cat wave (backwards-forwards) atop a tropical typhoon warning in Hong Kong’s Shatin area a few years ago. In the posher neighbourhoods of Sao Paulo today, Christmas lights are ablaze and buildings are festooned with climbing Santas, motorised reindeer, and all sorts of Christmassy paraphernalia. In their race to outdo each other with bigger-better-best, Paulistanos really do remind one of China. But the weird thing is that all this is happening in the blazing summer heat. Santa doesn’t look so comfortable in his woolies. The fake snow convinces no-one. And yet even the local Havaianas flagship store doesn’t stock Christmas themed flipflops. There are plenty of red felt Christmas hats, but there’s no Christmassy beach gear despite the fact that a lot of Brazilians will be spending some portion of their Christmas break on the beach. Somehow the combination of summer + Christmas in any practical sense hasn’t caught on, and there seems to be no visual language in which to talk Christmas except for the snowy Northern European ho-ho-ho elves-and-reindeer kind. Brazil is deeply Christian and, on the whole, Christmas (natal)  is huge. But why raise children to celebrate a festival in the manner of a culture so far removed from their own that they may never really feel it belongs to them?

It raises interesting questions about the cultural ‘ownership’ of these sorts of things. Something that’s been on my mind since a recent piece of work I did on the growing global popularity of  Halloween. I found that a big reason for it amongst twenty-somethings from Nairobi to Mumbai is the desire to ape Americana in a bid to be seen as part of the cool, hip, Westernised crowd. No real surprise there. Even my friends back at home in Bangladesh seemed to be celebrating Halloween with real gusto this year, in group costumes at themed parties. But when it comes to Halloween, whose early Celtic pre-Christian roots have been all but forgotten, the sameness of the American pumpkin-and-gothic-horror visual language being transplanted globally doesn’t jar in the same way – perhaps because there’s no denying that modern Halloween is an American creation.

Christmas, however, doesn’t belong to any one culture. And with its greater spiritual resonance in the lives of so many, it somehow seems to me to deserve a more authentic summer tradition than an imported one that feels at best inauthentic and at worst, tacky. Maybe it’s just me. But here’s hoping.

Similar to the Google experience at Cannes with their free-love style sandbox, I enjoyed too the open art/graffiti piece that Yahoo hosted along Le Croisette all through the week. For four days, artists from Collabo Arts worked on these large-scale murals all day, taking them down every night and starting afresh every morning. With all the inevitable trips up and down that promenade, people got to see the pieces of art in many different stages of development, and I for one was reminded what a painstaking process street-art can be.

Some days, I do love my job. This afternoon in Berlin we learnt how to do (make?) stop-frame animation. We were helped by Matt Cottam and Timo Arnall, both legends in their own right (Timo was one of the makers of Dentsu’s Making Future Magic project, one of my favourite things from last year). Our afternoon’s task was to ’explore the expressive potential of post-it notes’ (lovely!).  We then made little films using StopMotion – very clever filming and editing software. It did really make the point, one last resounding time, that’s been made all through this conference, that we need to all be making more stuff, and thinking less. It’s just a completely different way of being to how we normally are as planners, and all the better for it.

Our team’s story was about a little blue post-it who met a little pink post-it and fell in love – until the little red vixen post-it showed up. It’s not about to win any Oscars, but I’ll stick it up here once we’ve got a usable edit back from the guys.