Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert パオロ・ウッズ＆アルノー・ロベール

Special Interview｜Paolo Woods

Feb. 23, 2023
(Interview and text by Nana Tazuke)

Working in collaboration

── Happy Pills is a long term project. How did you and Arnaud get to know each other?

Basically, all the projects I’ve done have been collaborative. I believe very strongly in collaboration. I have worked with a journalist from Switzerland, Serge Michel, for many years. At a certain moment I moved to Haiti and lived there for four years. In the meantime Serge became deputy editorial director of the Le Monde newspaper in Paris, so he could no longer travel with me, but he introduced me to Arnaud Robert, who is also a journalist, writer, and film director from Switzerland. Arnaud had lots of experience with Haiti. We got along very well and immediately started collaborating. Our first project was about Haiti, and we tried to approach this country from a very different perspective. The way Haiti is portrayed in texts and photographs is usually very stereotypical. Arnaud was looking for an artistic approach, and we found another way to tell the Haiti story.

── How did you start the project Happy Pills?

When I was finishing a big story with Gabriele Galimberti about the finance industry, called The Heavens, Arnaud was working on a story for Swiss radio about the development of medicines in high-tech Swiss laboratories. And so our interests crossed again. I wanted to do something about another industry that is central to people’s lives, such as the pharmaceutical industry. And Arnaud was very interested in telling the story through the consumers. So we started the project Happy Pills, which became a book, an exhibition, and a film. The result will be shown at KYOTOGRAPHIE.

── Can you tell me about the film?

The book, the film, the exhibition, and magazine articles are all aimed at different audiences and touch on different areas of the project. The film is very intimate. It is about six different consumers around the world. We tried to get as close to these people as possible and show what their daily lives are like and how much their pills are a part of their lives. In the book and exhibition you will learn a lot about the industry and social conditions in the different countries. We have filmed and photographed people in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, and in the United States, one of the richest countries. 

── You said that the portrayals of the six people in the film are very intimate. How did they react when you came to film them? 

One of the reasons this project took so long was that we had to find the right people and they had to accept us into their lives in such an intimate way. I think that’s one of the strengths of working with Arnaud Robert as a journalist. It took a lot of research. You enter a teenager’s room in Massachusetts at 6 a.m. when she is still asleep. You go to a wild gay party in Tel Aviv. You follow someone until the moment they die. Those are extremely intimate moments. We really felt that it was necessary for us to get this close. 

Dream comes true – beyond the limits of being human

── Tell us more about your exhibition at KYOTOGRAPHIE. What will it be like? I have a feeling that there will be a lot of information in it.

Since the first exhibition of the project at La Ferme Des Tilleuls in Switzerland, Arnaud and I have been working together with the curator François Hébel, former director of the Arles Photo Festival and Magnum Photos, who is now director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. We thought a lot about how to adapt the project to different spaces. The exhibition is now on tour and will also come to Kyoto. We want to give visitors the opportunity to take a journey through our project. The whole idea of Happy Pills is like a big puzzle. We hope that visitors will be able to see the different pieces of the puzzle in the exhibition and in the end see the puzzle as one big picture, which is about us as consumers. 

── So, the puzzle is about us?

The purpose of pills is healing. But many pills which are sold and consumed today are not for healing from a disease. They are for healing “from ourselves,” from being humans. Because being human means being limited. Since humans have existed, we have always aspired to go beyond our limits. The main limit, of course, is that we die, but we have lots of other limits as well. To try to go beyond these, humans have used religion, philosophy, or ideologies. Now people also use pills, because pills allow them to do things that they were not able to do before. But this is something that has always been part of our nature as humans. If you look at literature, you will find many stories about a magic powder to get a person to fall in love with you, a magic oil which will make you invisible. Much of literature, and I imagine Japanese literature as well, is full of these stories about something that will transform you. Alice in Wonderland, a book by Lewis Carroll, is referenced in The Matrix: “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” And now we have an industry that enables us transform ourselves like that. We photographed people with all the medicines they have in their house. It shows how much we depend on chemistry. Near Chicago we also photographed the production of the most expensive medicine in the world: it costs 2.1 million dollars a dose and it changes your DNA. This was science fiction a few years ago, and now it exists. We are trying to show all these different elements, which then make up our chemical desires.

── A frightening effect from a pill.

In fact it is incredible. A revolution is happening in the pharmaceutical industry, and our relationship with it is enormous. That’s why we wanted to do this story. It is also interesting because the pharmaceutical industry is an extremely modern industry, in the sense that it combines the most advanced research with marketing. The two together, for good and bad, make it extremely important as an industry. 

Taking pills is not the same as caring for your health

── You show venders walking the streets of Haiti with towers of pills. People in Haiti can buy medicines as a single pill and not necessarly in blister packs. On the other hand, in the US there are many poor people who don’t have insurance and can’t buy medicines. How did we get into this situation?

First of all, the pharmaceutical industry arrived in the poorest countries faster than many other industries did. It doesn’t have to be the best pill or the pill that actually cures. In Niger, for example, people are still dying from malaria, a disease that is preventable. When we went there, young people were taking very strong painkillers called Tramadol. These pills are promoted by the industry, which produces them mainly in China and India. We visited a small village in Niger, where there is no electricity, no running water, not even a telephone signal, but you could still find blister packs of painkillers. On the one hand, there’s no access to health care if you have diabetes; and extremely strong opioids (painkillers) are sold on  every street corner. And a large part of the population is addicted to these opioids. 

This is the case in America with OxyContin. The pills are accessible everywhere in the world. Health care is not. In Haiti, people don’t have access to doctors, or good-quality hospitals, but they have access to pills. The people selling them often don’t even know what they are selling. Some pills are expired, some are fake, some might be wrong for your illness. Although the pharmaceutical industry is globalised, access to health is not globalised at all.

── That means we are quite dependent on medicines.

Yes. Even in developed countries, people don’t need to rest when they are tired from work, they can find a pill that keeps them going. So, it’s the idea of super capitalism: push more, more, more. There is a very high consumption of drugs, not to cure illness, but to turn off pain. And that is something that was very interesting to us. 

── But medicines can also give people more freedom.

Exactly. We once did a story about contraceptive pills in Peru. In the Amazon region 25% of girls have their baby before they are 18. There is a real stigma in Peruvian society towards women taking their reproductive rights into their own hands. It’s a very patriarchal society. Now there are young women who realise that they will be much freer if they take control of themselves and their bodies. In that case, a pill is a liberating revolution. We also did a story on PrEP, a medicine you can take to avoid contracting HIV. This is a medicine for unprotected relationships. That is also a revolution. We could have done these stories in any number of different countries. I am sure there are lots of very important stories in Japan. It is interesting to see how chemistry and pills are affecting people’s lives, even in places where we wouldn’t have expected it.

Where is your own limit?

──  I am sure that KYOTOGRAPHIE will be a place where visitors will ask you a lot of questions. I would like to ask what you think about the problems your exhibition addresses. 

We are living in a capitalist society. The basis of capitalism is “supply and demand.” It’s the same with pills: there is very good and improving supply from the pharmaceutical industry and there is strong demand from us as comsumers. When people talk about the pharmaceutical industry, they usually immediately take one side or the other: good or bad. But the story that Arnaud and I tell is not about whether the pharmaceutical industry is good or bad. It is about our own relationship with this industry. If my mother gets sick and the pharmaceutical industry saves her, I love this industry. If my brother is addicted to OxyContin, a legal medicine made in North America, and dies from an overdose, I hate this industry. So, for me, it is more than a “good” or “bad” rating. It is more about when and where I, as a human being, say: “I am limited.”

──  Obviously you are familiar with and take up many social issues around the world. I would like to ask you what you think about today’s society.

Well, I don’t know many societies other than the one I live in. I would say that almost all of my work is about decyripting capitalism. I’m interested in exploring how the destructive aspects of capitalism can somehow be limited. This is something that is very important for me. All my life, I have seen countries getting weaker and companies getting stronger. That is one thing. The other thing is love. I can’t think of anything that is more important than love. And fortunately, they still haven’t found a love pill. So, I can’t take a pill and fall in love just like that. 

──  Do you have a message for visitors to Kyotographie?

Well, first of all, “Welcome!” I am very much looking forward to being part of this festival. I hope that visitors won’t see “exclamation marks” in our exhibition, but “question marks.” I hope they will ask “Huh?” and not say “Wow!” I like it when people question themselves.