Timidity spoils anything if you let it

I went to the Amos Rex today to see an exhibition of Leandro Erlich’s works. The website says that:

Amos Rex features the works of artist Leandro Erlich (born 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina), whose immersive art, often carried out at huge scale, blurs our perceptions of reality. In Erlich’s playful world, you can climb the façade of a typical Helsinki building, take a seat as a pupil in a ghostly classroom, or investigate a strange elevator lobby to nowhere. Here, the laws of physics do not apply, and those who enter can no longer trust what they see.

Leandro Erlich’s created one of his most iconic works, Bâtiment, for the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris in 2004. Since then, it has travelled the world, always being adapted to the local architecture and environment. For the exhibition in Helsinki, Erlich took inspiration from the Jugend-style buildings found in the Katajanokka district.

The first picture shows me taking a photograph with my iPad after I had climbed the building. When I returned to the gallery floor I asked two women who I had seen watching me if they could take a photograph for me, and they said an enthusiastic yes.

One of the women then decided to join me but then declined to do it “properly”. She said she felt too embarrassed to lie down and pretend to hang on! Meanwhile some other visitor wandered on and off the set, seemingly not noticing much at all.

We all ended up with photographs that looked something like this.

If other people had joined in (like the Japanese couple who climbed the building when I first arrived) we could have all got some very interesting images.

Timidity prevented that. I think this might count as a lesson in life.