Jizo (2001): Interact magazine commission web project

Co-workers & Funding

Jizo (2001), was created for the digital magazine named Interact, an Online Magazine of Art, Culture and Technology and it was an invitation from the former Centre for Communication and Language Studies (CECL) now integrated at Lisbon New University (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Centre for Research in Communication, Information and Digital Culture (CIC. Digital). For Jizo I created an artificial dialogue between two writers and two texts, the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, and her book Desert Places (2000 [1996]) and the French writer Yves Simon and his book Le Voyageur Magnifique (2000 [1987]).

I quoted the Portuguese translation of Davidson’s book, that I now translate to English for the purpose of this text, highlighting some phrases which I used to create animations,

"All was silent behind the broken wall; outside, a few chickens were plucking in the manure heaps. Then there was A SOUND WHICH WAS SCREAMING TO ME. Children. AVALANCHES OF CHILDREN, who seemed thousands, who appeared through holes in the gravel as if attracted by a piper, each one of them with their little face, their destiny, beautiful, loved, unique and without a future. Because there is nothing for them anymore. There is not enough land, nor trees, nor animals, nor jobs; there is not enough money for their education, their medicines, not even the guarantee of a full stomach. However, they will produce the same number of children again - and these others, and these others - and the physical understanding of that mathematics, of the geometric progression of increasingly destitute lives, made my heart shrink with fear. I knew the statistics - I knew that the resources spent on ONE AMERICAN CHILD were enough to SUPPORT TWENTY-FIVE INDIAN CHILDREN. I hated the moralism that demanded that the Third World accept (and pay for) a version of environmental protection in which trees were more important than people. Whoever used electricity or drove a car had no right to tell peasants to stop felling trees. However, it was India's children who made the obvious clear - regardless of unfair disparities and the movements of capital in the world - WE ARE TOO MUCH. When I heard the cacophony of that stream of life pouring out of the most impoverished of villages, it was hard not to loathe the human species - the thoughtless multiplication.

(...) Any distant suffering that I might still feel from NOT HAVING CHILDREN was mitigated by that sound, which now gradually receded, as the river of life returned to the village and we advanced” (Davidson, 2000 [1996], pp. 281-82).

I also quoted in the interactive piece Simon’s book that I now translate into English,

"Is this child in a desert, in heaven, who owes nothing to men, neither to carbon nor to silicon, who owes nothing to light or night? Who is the one I think about and who only belongs to me, when after all his kingdom is the Universe, and his words cannot be repeated since they are true ideograms, formed not of representations, but of authentic mountains, of authentic trees, lacquered roofs, cloisters, birds with bone beaks and claws, the mouths of volcanoes, real oceans, real seas... Their ideograms look like postcards and say phrases from the universe. They cannot speak, they read, they decipher themselves with those satellite photographs where the cities are blue, the wheat fields are red, and the water is green. They are parts of the world because THE CHILD SPEAKS THE WORLD. She doesn't know the signs to shorten a space and when she designates the distance of the stars, the ideogram she deploys has the extension of the light years that separate them. When they want to talk about love, there is a man and a woman entwined, and when they talk about war, there are a thousand tanks that breathe fire, bombers and nuclear warheads that wait, hidden in their underground, for the signal that will make them launch into towards the sky... SHE OWES NOTHING TO MEN, nor to the sex that penetrates another sex to leave biology, amino acids and a genetic code...
THIS CHILD WITHOUT A PROGRAM IS MINE, just because I think of her, and she knows it... But it is from the flowers, from other men, from other dreams, from other eyes, SHE BELONGS TO THE NOVELS that speak of her. And he's only my son because he flies to me when I think of him..." (Simon, 2000 [1987], p. 229)

Starting from this conceptual framework I created a database named Jizo which evocated the Japanese god of children, pregnant women, and travellers to inquire the role of women and children in society and to emphasize a cyberfeminism perspective where women are not obliged to choose maternity. The website generates multiple overlapping windows and sounds. Screams of women and children mixed with disturbing sounds that make us think about motherhood and what options we should take for the world to be sustainable. Multiple options could be manipulated by the viewer in an html editor, flash animations and random constructions of images and text. Photographs were taken by me in Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, and Spain.