Iñárritu, bordering here and there

The visitor is greeted with a cold pat on the 5th set of the EITB headquarters in Bilbao by the virtual reality "Carne y arena" created by Mexican film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Cold and surrounded by dozens of worn and discarded shoes scattered on the ground during the recapture of a detention center for the US border patrol.

Silent but truly significant textile witnesses are those footwear ragged by the sand and the force of the sun, isolated testimonies of the perverse march of Mexicans and Central Americans in need of departure and in danger of never arriving.

To be another, to "get into the shoes" of others or strangers, is the essence of any transformative creative work, whether it be the soul, the work of journalism, literature, music, or the play, or the "experience." Hence, from the knowledge of others, one can spread one's own world.

From this longing, in the installation "Carne y arena", thedirector of the indispensable films Amores Perros, Babel and Birdman invites the visitor to take off his shoes and enter a second room, the object of the sensor and, at the same time, the subject. In this second space, blossoming on the sandy floor, he will share the journey, the horror and the helplessness, for six minutes, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called them "insignificant" and, if I may call them now destroyed , the white mask of the silent subject.

In the multinational space of the installation, the frame inherent in the cinema disappears, the stimuli multiply and the feeling is extolled, the emotional shock of the "experience" is sublimated (we live in the age of subjectivity, and it would seem that the only way to understand it is to be the protagonist). However, the aim of the work, I believe, is to follow this emotional shock by reflection, and thus to translate into reality, its virtual representation and its return to reality, in that return, after entering the skin of the other, into a broader view of the visitor's world.

To this end, the final step of the installation is helpful: we have helped through the desert crossing, we have been intimately acquainted with the narrative experience, we will be shown on some screens the testimonies of people, to know better the protagonists of the real journey to life or death that was later reinterpreted in front of the cameras of Iñárritu. 

So, if we didn't know or didn't want to know, we'll know, for example, that Lina left five children in Guatemala when her youngest daughter was three years old, and when she came to the United States, she took them to her side one by one for twenty years, collecting money regularly, until the youngest one reunited her family when she was 23.

The work "Carne y arena (virtually present, physically invisible)" is a work of special effect and special emotion, in which those condemned to be ghosts are clothed with flesh and dignity. It is the art of the future for a world that should sooner rather be past.

"Carne and arena (virtually present, physically invisible)" can be visited on set 5 of the EITB headquarters until June 20. Tickets.