BARCOS DE PAPEL [Paper Boats/Papieren Boten] - ARIAH LESTER

As a an artist in these times, having migrated from Venezuela to The Netherlands, belonging to two worlds and to any of them, I feel the compromise to build bridges among realities and cultures, between people of different kinds, between theatre and pop-music, between folk, jazz, and opera. I create worlds where imposibles come together through experimentation; so we can envision new futures, so we can be excited about the unknown, the new, rather than afraid of it.

I've had always a fascination for impressionist painters. Perhaps because I'm a rebel myself, always trying to break the norms, to reinterpret reality under my own terms. Works like the one's of Monet where highly criticised during his time because their logic was against all the rules of classical painting. The impressionists were looking at the world not from the laws of physics and light, but rather trough the lens of a 'Feeling' quality. A very personal perspective that didn't accommodate to what the world dictated reality was at the time.

After all, is Reality what we See or what we Feel?

When I look at the 'Painter's boat', I see a life of privilege and calmness, of peace and expansion, that I haven't been able to live so far and I crave for. The work proposes an idillic situation for the gestation of an art object, for creativity to kick-in unexpectedly. But for a migrant that takes care financially of his whole family, creating doesn't come often from a feeling of expansion but rather of contraction, a act of pushing, like the real birthing of a child; an act that carries pain and is accompanied by a big amount of pressure.

Last year, in a boat of that character and fragility, some Venezuelan refugees drove towards Curazao to scape from the horrid crisis that our country faces, some were people like me, with my education and experience, needing to leave everything behind. They drowned.
"Barcos de Papel /Paper Boats" speaks about people that doesn’t have access to that life style where art can be developed in such a way. It is a song about a boat that isn't suspended on calm waters but rather defying nature, in the look for a life of such calm and dignity.

It could have been easier to select a work of other kind. But my purpose as artist is to take major challenges.
So, I created an avant-garde pop song that does that; it honours the work of Monet by doing what he did to classical painting: opposition. The song ends with a vaudeville-like coda that tries to imagine the music that Claude himself could have heard during the 1880's, but through the lens of my modern perspective (as I'm born exactly 100 years after). Finally, the song is mainly in Spanish, with an English hook, and I dare to sing in Dutch for the first time, in the attempt of reuniting the worlds I belong to.
Enjoy my broken accent!