Wandering around London's Tate Modern this week on a week off from work, I was really struck by a video installation by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwand and filmmaker Cao Guimaraes entitled Ash Wednesday/Epilogue. Basically it shows close-ups of ants picking up sugar-coated confetti which has been thrown on the forest floor. Ash Wednesday is apparently the day after Brazil's main Carnival parties.
I quite often wander into a video installation room and am back out again in seconds but this was really arresting and I sat and watched the whole thing. I just found a piece about the artist on Frieze.com which describes the 2006 film as an "absurd, mesmerizing, faintly magical depiction of epic achievement in miniature". The article goes on:
Work and artistic creation become interchangeable with celebration: the title alludes to carnival, and the sprightly soundtrack is a samba played with matchsticks on a table-top. The video opens with a single ant dragging a piece of gold confetti, then another ant with a blue one. We then see two struggling to get a grip on some confetti and another pair squabbling over their find. More and more ants, and bright circles, become visible, some pieces of confetti disperse on the ground and others are waved like flags as they are toted from place to place. The ants perform amazing feats – racing up steep cliffs while lugging confetti ten times their size. Eventually we see the insects’ destination – a crevice in the earth – and colourful disks disappearing into its shadows before a fade to black.
There is also an article in the Washington Post about the film and Neuenschwand explains that she used a "salami flavor -- and honey mixed with water" to attarct the ants. She goes on:
"There's a very important reference in literature here, in the book "Macunaíma" by Mário de Andrade, to leaf-cutter ants. One of his sentences is, "Lots of leaf-cutter ants, and little health, are the evils of Brazil." It’s a very famous quote in Brazilian culture.
In the United States or Europe, I think confetti is used for other events, too, but here it's mainly for Carnival. There's a sense that you have something colorful and playful like confetti, but in contraposition you have those ants working hard. The ants are kind of carrying the leftovers of a celebration. There's Carnival, and then afterward, the melancholic aspect of the last day of Carnival -- it's the sort of contradictory feelings that we have here in Brazil."
Less intellectually, it also made me think that it would be a great Sony Bravio advert. Watching it, you can almost imagine Jose Gonzalez singing.
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