Alfredo Jaar (pronounced Yar) is a Chilean-born installation artist and architect whose work is frequently commissioned by cities or countries that want him to reflect a part of themselves back to them. Some invite him to make work in order to gain clarity about a current problem, others need help making sense of the past.

• In Montreal, he activated the cupola of a prominent building to advocate for the houseless population.

• In Fukushima, he memorialized a group of schoolchildren who died in the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Every installation is different in materials, process, and theme.

Never knowing what he’s going to make ahead of time, his practice involves spending months in the location so that its culture, its people, and the place itself can inform—and ultimately co-create—the final work.

In 2011, Jaar was invited to Finland for a commission. He spent months there, as he always does, but as his time drew to a close he hadn’t found anything to make work about. No social or political unrest. No hidden underbelly. Nothing rotting beneath the surface. The people seemed content and well cared for. Life ran smoothly.

Jaar never makes work just for the sake of making work, so he was preparing to return to New York (where he’s lived since the 80s) without completing the commission.

He spent his last days exploring the outermost reaches of the archipelago—tiny specs of land that dot the sea. Planning his trip back to the mainland from the farthest away island, Utö, Jaar was annoyed to learn that the only ferry back was at 5:45 am.

The ridiculousness of the schedule was confirmed to him the next morning when he boarded the ferry and found it empty. Alone with the ferryman, Jaar wondered aloud why they would schedule the only trip off the island at a time when no one would take it. The ferryman brought Jaar around to the other side of the ferry and pointed to a boy, Markus, asleep.

Utö had a population of around forty people, and Markus, its only resident of school age, needed to leave at 5:45 in order to make it to school on the mainland in time. They had arranged the ferry schedule, which affected all the islands, just for him.

So moved by a society that would go that far out of its way to accommodate the needs of a single person, Jaar created an installation titled Dear Markus. He invited Finnish cultural leaders—writers, scientists, politicians, artists, intellectuals—to each write Markus a letter. Jaar installed those letters as billboards along Markus’s ferry route to school.

Years ago, I referenced this work during a presentation I gave at a local college. At the time, documentation of the installation was nearly impossible to come by. I’d only managed to find two images of it on the whole of the internet. My slides were grainy at best, but I didn’t care. It only mattered to me that Dear Markus had existed in the world. I didn’t even know what any of the billboards said. I imagined they were wonderful.

Unbeknownst to me, Petra Sairanen, the artist who invited me to speak and who was in the audience during my talk, is Finnish. The next day, she sent me her translation of one of the billboards from my deck:

Hi Markus,

Have you ever wondered, where is the center of the world?

I have thought about this a lot. I have come up with two answers.

First of all there is no center. Paris, Moscow, and New York are just place names, and you can't travel to the heart of the world, except in adventure novels.

On the other hand, the center of the world is always there where one senses and understands the world. Every sensing person or animal is their own world's center point.

The Nordic poet Gosta Agren meant just this when he wrote that only one's mother tongue (first language) is spoken everywhere in the world.

Apparently you were asleep when the artist from New York saw you on your way to school.

I think that he too was thinking about these impossibly simple ideas. Perhaps he felt he was far away from the center of the world.

Antti Nylen

Writer

I’m thinking about this now because I imagine we’re all feeling far away from the center of the world. I’m wondering what I would want someone to write to me to guide my trip each day. Or what I would want to write to them.

In going to Sairanen’s website so I could link to it for you, I discovered this beautiful piece titled Light Belongs to No One.

Light belongs to no one, of course, because light belongs to everyone. Just as we belong to the light. And to each other. That’s the soul of Jaar’s work, I think, and that’s what I would want my billboard to say:

Dear __________,

We belong to each other.

Love,

J