Cildo Meireles is one of my favorite artists.
'Red Shift' (1967-84) is an installation composed of three parts. The first, called 'Impregnation', is a white room. The objects inside the room are red. There is a red typewriter on a red desk, a wardrobe with red clothes and a refrigerator with red food. While viewing the contents of the room, viewers will hear a soundtrack of water dripping. At the end of 'Impregnation', is a darkened room with a pool of red liquid that apparently comes from a dripping bottle. This part is called in Portuguese 'Entorno', a word that means both 'spill' and 'surrounding'. Walking in the darkness one finds, on the left, a white porcelain washbasin installed at a slant where a red watery liquid runs from a tap. This last part is called 'Shift'.
Meireles: In the beginning it was not specifically red. The idea was of someone who had surrounded himself/herself by objects of the same colour. Later, in 1978, I wrote the idea of two other projects: one was a slanted sink running water. The other was a small blue bottle which produces a pool of the same colour. The accumulation of objects and the bottle articulate well in a false logic manner. The bottle anecdotally explains all the red objects in the first room, in which the sound of water can be heard. As you embrace the darkness, you bump into a tap running red water. At this point, I decided that everything should be red, for numerous reasons but mainly because it is a colour that unfolds considerably, is full of symbolism and has, of course, a strong physical presence.
'Babel' (2001) is a 5 metre-high tower of nearly 700 radios, each one synchronized to a different radio station.
Meireles: 'Babel' was born from the widespread feeling kids have when experiencing the darkness of their bedroom. I remember when I was just two years old, at night I would see a red light from my bed and hear the sound of a radio, those voices. Sometimes, I can identify as the beginning of a work, the image of a spider's web inside a hosepipe, on which the sunlight shines one day. That thought gets stuck in your head for a long time and you have no idea why.
Materiality and Memory: An interview with Cildo Meireles
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