Translator: Kay Wang Reviewer: Helena Bedalli
Yesterday, I was walking through Tirana for the first time in my life.
(Laughter)
And you know this exciting feeling of being somewhere for the first time.
You watch.
"Woo!" (Laughter)
Well, I'm an architect and I watch buildings.
"Boring." (Laughter)
And I'm a filmmaker
and I'm looking for stories, lots of stories here.
And I'm from Amsterdam
and I'm always looking for bicycles.
(Laughter)
No bicycles at all.
(Laughter)
And I thought...I thought...
(Applause)
I thought that's a bad sign for progress.
So, I was walking through the streets of Tirana,
and I met this traffic light.
You know,
when you're visiting a city for the first time,
you don't see the city for the first time.
You're surrounding with a wall of memory.
You look around and you think,
"Hey, I recognize that."
"I know that."
It's filtered through your memory.
It's filtered through what you know.
You bring yourself always with you,
this wall of memory.
Now,
how did Jules Verne imagined himself going to the moon?
No one ever had been on the moon.
Well, even after 150 years,
I have not been on the moon. Have you?
And he imagined himself how to launch people to the moon.
And he thought, "Well, let's make this big cannon."
That he knew.
A big cannon.
And, of course, he's launching, through that cannon,
a big bullet.
So, that we know --
big cannon you need and a big bullet.
And inside that bullet, you can transport people.
Well, I tried to imagine how they felt when the cannon went bang
"POW! POW!"
inside that cannon.
So that was completely out of his memory.
But look at how he imagined this bullet inside.
It looks like a copy of a Paris room.
A classical Paris room.
He thought, "Well, we make it much comfortable."
He brought himself.
He brought his memory.
A bookshelf,
and a leather couch,
and even, if you look at the left, a stove,
because it can be cold out there.
(Laughter)
So we always bring our memory.
And while I was waiting to cross the road,
and saw more Cayennes passing by,
and Mercedeses,
I saw the progress of the things.
I was thinking about that wonderful imprint that we all carry with us.
That we've learned when we were a child.
That's always the thing I ask people,
"Do you remember the road from your house to your school
when you were six years old?"
And even after fifty years, people can exactly tell
how it looked like, how it smelled.
I sometimes ask my students, "Can you make a drawing of it?"
And some people can.
Like this one.
Describing all the houses and the little streets,
and the tissue of the urban circumstances, and the fences.
Oh, this must be an architect.
And some people even draw houses, and some people...
But some people just write words.
"I remember tweet, tweet, tweet of the birds."
So this is what we carry with us.
You know, the world is a mental thing.
It's not what we see, it's what we know.
It's our memory.
The world is in our brains.
So I was waiting, and I was thinking
about this wonderful story.
A student of mine told me about his time in Indonesia
when he went for the first time to school.
He lived in a very remote village, a little village in Sumatra.
And he was walking 45 minutes every day to his school from this little village.
And he brought his brother with him.
Sometimes it was rainy.
Sometimes it was sunny.
That tropical temperature.
Temperature you will know.
You feel the heat and the damp.
And you hear the birds,
And sometimes, a snake!
And those unpaved roads.
He told me this story that at one moment after a walk of 40 minutes,
he hit this very dense road, very heavy traffic there.
He had to pass.
But, coincidentally, his grandmother was there.
"Wow. That's a funny surprise."
And he was so happy to see her,
and to help her to the other side of the road.
So he helped her to the other side of the road.
He went to school.
Came back after school.
And there she was again.
"What a surprise!"
He said to his grandma,
"Can I help you to the other side of the road?"
And she wanted to be helped, and he helped her to the other side of the road.
And the next day, again, he walked with his brother
through the tropical heat.
And he thought, "Would she be there again?"
And she was there again.
And he helped her over.
What a coincidence. He wanted to be to the other side.
He helped her over and after school.
And it went on for weeks.
And then, one day he came to that road,
and there was no grandmother.
"Where could she be?"
But there was a policeman.
And the policeman stopped the traffic,
and he could go to the other side with his brother.
And at the end of the school, he returned to the street.
No grandmother.
The police.
The policeman helped him to the other side safely.
And he thought, " I'll go visit my grandmother."
So, he went to the house of his grandmother,
and he said, "Grandmother, why haven't you come anymore?"
and then she told him, "Because there is a policeman now."
(Laughter) (Applause)
You know, in the nineteenth century,
our psychiatrists already knew that our perception of the world is different.
We can look at the world in a different way.
We can see a duck, and a rabbit in this picture.
So, it's the perception of the world.
And of course, we know the representation of the world is something different.
We can make something out of something else.
We can make a rabbit out of our hands.
And one step further,
we can make hands out of a rabbit.
(Applause)
But that... (Applause)
That picture you don't understand without knowing the other two.
So I was waiting for the traffic light, having all these thoughts,
very rich thoughts,
surrounded by the albanian car fumes,
and I was thinking about a project we once did,
as an architect and a filmmaker.
It's called "Cycling Cities".
I was invited to come as a curator to Beijing,
to curate a film festival.
And they asked me, "Can you make for this occasion, a special film about Beijing?"
"Something you think is special in Beijing."
Now we're talking about a city,
a metropole of 25 million people.
So, EVERYTHING is special in Beijing.
And I've been thinking, "What can you do?"
"What can you do?"
Well, Beijing used to be the cycle city in the world.
There were not...
Fifty years ago, there were more cyclists in Beijing than in any other city.
Everybody was cycling.
And then...
...progress came.
(Laughter)
You're listening...
"Oh well, progress came."
And the cyclists were kicked out of the streets,
and in came the cars,
and no one is cycling in Beijing anymore.
And, with the fumes of the cars, last year
there was more than 50 percent increase of children's cancer in the city.
Isn't that a waste in progress.
It's horrifying.
So.
Well, yeah. (Applause)
It's sad. (Applause)
So, I was thinking, "Maybe we could do something with cycling
and make people more aware of what it takes."
I'm from Amsterdam and it looks like this.
Quite chaotic.
And I thought, "Well, we should do something."
And we had this idea of making a film about cycling.
We just followed someone who's cycling
through the streets of Amsterdam
doing a special route,
passing by bridges, canals,
going through a park, a square.
That's the guy we followed.
And it looked something like this:
So, this is just an average
little street in Amsterdam.
And you see how much...
Ah, he's even carrying a second bike there.
...how much bicycles are in the road,
and it's hard to follow him.
But that's wonderful.
It's quiet.
It's nice.
It's non-polluting.
So, we thought of doing the same,
exactly the same,
in Beijing.
Doing the same thing --
crossing a bridge,
doing big streets, smaller streets,
iconic buildings,
Whatever.
Through parks.
And all filmed from the same angle of the camera.
And, we asked people,
"Do you recognize this spot?"
We showed them
what we filmed in Amsterdam,
and we asked them, "Do you recognize this street?"
And they say, "Yeah, yeah. I recognize that".
"Just around the corner here."
They didn't see there was a...
"Oh, yeah, yeah. That's...We've got the street like that."
So we went through Beijing,
and filmed the same spaces,
not places, but the same spaces.
Here, I am on a scooter. You see how we filmed him.
That's our guy. That's our main character.
And we filmed him.
And we projected both films, 24 shots, aside each other.
And it looked like that.
And when people saw it for the first time, they were amazed.
They were stunned and I was surprised.
I thought, "Well, it's not a big deal.
You see two cyclists doing about the same thing --
in the historical part,
and the historical part of Amsterdam.
And then we got invitations
from all over the world.
From Mexico, they said, "Can you do it in Mexico, too?"
This is in Mexico.
We got invitations from Havana.
We went to Havana.
There was only one cycle left. Bicycle. (Laughter)
So, we stole that one, (Laughter)
and did it with a Cuban cyclist.
Wonderful.
And now, we're one and a half year later,
and we have eight cities and more to come.
We wanted to do it in Tirana.
Won't it be wonderful to do it in Tirana? Don't you think?
(Applause)
So, here you see the projected cities along side each other
and we showed it in Milan at a festival,
a film festival in Milan,
and people came to see the differences,
and what was the same in all these cities.
This is at the festival in Rotterdam.
So, I was still waiting to cross that road.
And I was thinking about this wonderful project,
two artisans in Holland did,
about the same and the difference.
It was a topic about, well, these girls.
You see them everywhere in Holland.
She thinks she's special.
And she is, of course.
And they were looking for other girls
that looked in a way the same.
So, the project is called "Exactitudes".
And you know they're all different,
but you know they're all the same in the same way.
So, it's wonderful if you had
this notion of how you look,
and how you think you are different.
And when you walk in the streets,
you always bring your memory,
and how you think things are looking.
So, finally... (Laughter)
Finally, the traffic light turned on green,
and we could walk.
I walked to the other side of the road.
And when I arrived there,
I turned around and I looked back.
It was kind of the same view I had from the other side of the road.
So I was wondering, "Why did I cross?"
(Laughter)
"Why did I tell you this story?"
I think because I recognize something --
that wherever you go,
there's always this feeling of being home,
searching for what you have in your minds.
That feeling of being common wherever you go.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)