I remember the first time I saw blue shadows, light-diffused shadows on snow. In the warmer and brighter tropics shadows are a strong dark or a well-defined black. I arrived in Toronto in early March, still winter, and everything was foreign to me, but soon I realized that I was the foreign one, not the other way around. All my contextual understanding was displaced; the places were strange, the people, the gestures, the interpretation of those gestures, the manners, the language, the weather….and also the concept of beauty.
As an architect, this was a big discrepancy, and at the time almost an impediment to understand and accept the nature of the city. Toronto’s beauty is not obvious, like it is in cities like Paris, Prague or Rome; it can escape you if you are not paying attention.
John Cage once said that “the highest duty of the artist is to hide beauty”. This phrase did not make sense to me at first. Learning through the life of the big masters:Brunelleschi, Donatello, Mies, Rodin… my position had always been the complete opposite, for me, the highest duty of the artist was to find beauty where no one else could see it. Why would you purposely hide beauty? Maybe,I thought, because to make it more meaningful it had to be displaced from the surface, from the realm of appearance to the one of content so the objects of art could talk about desires, believes, memories, conflicts, faith, history…and in doing so would acquire meaning relative to the way we experience them. I saw Toronto under this new light.
I realized I had to hear what the buildings, the streets, the parks, the benches… had to say, except that, at the time, Toronto was a blank canvas, it did not say anything to me yet, everything just looked the same, brown, and empty… but it contained the hope of finding something new and better than what I have left, so I gave it a chance,I started filling the blanks.
Of course communication became the first obstacle. The language was a barrier, but not for too long, and the fact that Ruth will always be ‘Ruz’ and not ‘Root’, is something one just have to learn to live with! But the untranslatable, the gestures, the hidden meaning of verbal and non verbal expression was a real challenge. As well as trying to explaining why the weather was the least of my worries when immigrating to Canada, meant understanding the absolute ignorance that posing such question implies.
( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/americas/23venez.html)
But to be fair, I did not know much about Canada either, so I illustrated my interrogators, to the best of their abilities, and also demanded answers that would help me explain properly what I could only guess and guess wrong (because my logic did not work anymore). My facts were right but my conclusions, my interpretations of the facts, were wrong…I needed translation.
Estrangement was not new to me, I have always been an outsider but this time I was a guest. In a battle between rejection and acceptance I had to both redefine the known and to make the unfamiliar familiar. Fortunately architecture has its own language... and that language I knew.
Slowly, the buildings, the streets, the parks, the benches… started talking to me, the buildings talked to me about immigration, religion, acceptance,political struggle, separatism, longing from imperialist past, hippies turning into snobs, porn into clean trash, capitalism, social concerns.
The immense amount of parks and the almost negligible amount of plazas and benches talked to be about congreagation laws, about fear, society, public virtues and private vices, the importance of appearances... The signs talked to me about cultural clashes, about resistance, cultural identity.
They city told me what people did not…and through them I understood the meaning of silence,subtlety, the negative behind every indirect answer, the fear in the absence of answer…how unaccustomed they were to this living intensity….
Soon, the brown in the east seemed to me distinct from the brown in the west, the emptiness did not bother me as much as before, and the sameness in the surface was not the same any more. My “wrong"was not as wrong…my “interpretation errors” at first my biggest nightmare became my comparative advantage, because did not hold the weight of only one point of view, I did not know or believed in how things were suppose to be...
I had no context, no status,no pretensions…I did not know what things HAVE to be I only could think on the million of options they COULD be. And I could hear one different voices around me, each one coming from a different place in the world, telling me a different way….
Error became a chance.A chance to hear, to see, to talk, to feel and understand….to create.It’s not been easy, ..and I have walked alone for so long that is hard to believe that other way its possible, but I wake up every day thinking that maybe I am mistaken and another error will give me an unexpected chance to be the stranger I should be.
