Weekly Photo Challenge: Kiss

Even a Kiss can have many interpretations. It’s not always love and it’s not always good. I say that because after looking at my files i found the most “appropriate” shot for this week’s challenge. At least in my opinion. At least is not something usual. At least it makes us think. I shot this in Berlin and this is a painting done by Dmitri Vrubel at the famous Berlin wall on East Side Gallery part. It’s a mile of the wall  that was given to artists all over the world to paint about the wall itself. This particular painting is based on an also famous photograph of an “infamous” kiss between soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his East German counterpart Erich Honecker. As another sad piece of news i read that this and all the other paintings on the wall of East Side Gallery were destroyed by renovations on the wall itself. Those are scars outliving art itself.

 

 

 

And here is a photo i found on the web of how it is today. Really sadly destroyed.

while it lasts…

I had an incredible chance of getting really close to music in it’s most intimate way. In june of 2009 i was invited to make a documentary feature about the most important music festival of Latin America. Campos do Jordão Winter festival. It was an amazing experience and i still ahve good friends i made there. Great talents. People you pay big bucks to listen to in concert halls around the world. To get intimate with this kind of people is fascinating because they usually use their instruments to comunicate their emotions and not their words. But they are so passionate about what they do they can’t hide anything. They are some of the most generous people i ever met when the subject is music. About other subjects they are not very articulated. Many have family issues and most devoted their entire lives to music. When you think about a rock star you can understand where they get their share and why do they give up so much to do that but concert music takes a little more time to understand. It’s not about fame. Most of them are not known. It’s not about money because it doesn’t pay that much. It’s not about travelling all over because they get stuck in their hotel rooms studying all the time. So what is there for concert musicians to give up their lives and follow their passion for music? An important italian harpist told me something about music: “A painting you see, a sculpture you see, but if i play for you (she play a couple notes) where is it? Its gone”. That’s a big truth about music. When a painter is working he is putting his inspiration on the canvas and we will see it later on. Music is happening right there. You can grasp creation. It’s always in movement as in the words of  T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”: “…but you are the music
while the music lasts.”. When it stops it’s gone. So it is as real as the present. As solid as creation can get. That’s why it is the closest we can get to the divine. To the spirit. That’s why these sweet folks gave up everything else. Because every time they play the can witness it. So they follow the music, the movement it creates. Transforming empty rooms in pure emotion and leaving it as empty as before. That’s such a faithful portrait of life it should be considered the ultimate art. A channel to the divine. If you’re not sure about it listen to the ninth symphony. But do it live. Some musicians don have CDs at home because they say that’s not music but only a shadow of it. As the painting hanging on a wall.

Collective consciousness…

I work in a creative market and people use to say that if you have an idea you better doit or someone else will. They are not talking about ideas being stolen . Many times in everyone’s lives we witnessed this phenomena. Ideas that are almost the same popping out at the same time from differente places. Who invented the airplane? You can find many debates because the fact happened in many parts of the world almost at the same time. Who invented the idea of social network? That’s even harder. What will they say in the future about this? The fact is: as more informations are shared all around the planet the more synchronized is the collective consciousness and soon will be nearly impossible to track authorship. As a matter of fact the author will eventually become a thing of the past is things get any faster. Every idea seams to be done in collaboration. What seams really interesting to me is the mechanism of collective consciousness. Are the triggers in our heads that similar that working with the same info will generate the same ideas so many times is becomes collective? Or there’s an exchange of thoughts happening all around us? I believe it’s something like the last option and i go even further. I’m believe in “life” after death. As everything in the universe we don’t just cease to exist. Everything transforms and so do we. Our bodies turns into nutrients for the earth and water. Our thoughts turns into fragments of this collective soul. It’s my personal explanation for the possibility of psychography that some spiritist can perform or any event where a living person seams to get contact with the deceased. For me there’s a field where all these minds functioning together with all living minds create a kind of common sense of things and evolutes to what we can call creation. I paint and it’s the form of art that works deeper in me. When o do anything else my process is to imagine something and then execute it the closer i can to what i imagined. With painting i just can’t do it. I start with something already subjective because my painting is abstract but most of the times i finish it in a way i never imagined when i started. It’s almost as if i was guided to do it. I’m not saying this was done by other minds but i believe there are influences and the more open you are for if the more they happen. You can ask anybody from art the amount if coincidences usually happens in their processes. I just attended a lecture from an important biographer and that was the biggest subject of the evening. The coincidences. The interesting thing is that everybody in the audience agreed and related with it. It is a constant. These are some “evidences” that makes me believe in a collective soul and a collective consciousness in a not very academic way. You may not believe in it but then again faith is a very personal thing.