Homesickness Of Red Fire Ant

While conceiving the red fire ant homesickness story in Leming Village, I established contact with Argentine residents and collected some local Spanish songs and poems related to Homesickness. I took the lyrics from the Argentinian singer Facundo Cabral's masterpiece, published in 1957: No Soy de Aquí, Ni Soy de Allá, meaning I don't belong here, I don't belong there.In Leming Village, there are some ancient Cantonese folk songs that are almost lost. I selected two sentences from them: 问你乜人不知年，几多河海变成路. The meaning of the lyrics is that after an unknown period of time, the rivers and seas dry up and become roads. Because of the red fire ants in a foreign land, the Cantonese lyrics on one side of the world and the Spanish lyrics on the other side of the world echo at this moment, about foreign lands and hometowns, expulsion and stay. This became a portrayal of the red fire ant.

I transported a bag of white sugar from Argentina to Leming Village in China. Red fire ants love sweets, and perhaps the sugar has the smell of their hometown. I used white sugar as a paint and wrote the above two lyrics near the red fire ant nest in Leming Village. These two lines of lyrics were moved back to the nest by red fire ant until they dissipated, just like the homesickness or forgetting homeland of red fire ant also dissipated.

在乐明村构想红火蚁乡愁故事的同时，我与阿根廷居民建立了联系，并收集到当地一些与乡愁有关的西班牙语歌谣和诗歌。我在阿根廷歌手Facundo Cabral发表于1957年的代表作 No Soy de Aquí, Ni Soy de Allá 中摘取了同名的歌词：No Soy de Aquí, Ni Soy de Allá，意为我不属于这里，也不属于那里。乐明村当地有口口相传的山歌，我在其中选取了两句：问你乜人不知年，几多河海变成路。大意是不知过了多久，河海干枯变成了路。由于身处异乡的红火蚁，地球一端的粤语歌词和地球另一端的西班牙语歌词此刻形成了呼应，关于他乡和故乡，驱逐与停留、关于迷茫的守望以及遥遥无期的归途。这成了臭名昭著的入侵物种红火蚁的写照。

我将从阿根廷寄来的白糖积撒成字迹，在乐明村红火蚁巢穴附近抄写下以上两段歌词。白糖组成的字迹逐渐被红火蚁搬回巢穴直至消散，就像红火蚁的思乡或忘乡也在消散。

Sometimes due to natural and man-made reasons, the red fire ants will leave the nest and move to other places. When I was in Leming Village, I found some abandoned nests of fire ants. In the story I want to tell, these nests are the remains of the tunnels they built trying to dig through the earth to return to their Argentine homeland.

Echoing the remains of the red fire ant tunnel, and facing each other in different time and space, is this meteorite that fell in northern Argentina more than 4,000 years ago. More than 4,000 years ago, there was a huge meteorite rain scattered in Argentina. Hundreds of years ago, these meteorites became the raw materials for the indigenous people and Spanish colonists to make iron. Decades ago, these meteorites gradually became a popular collection in the meteorite circle. One of them came to American collectors from Argentina at the end of the last century. This meteorite came to China in recent years and was bought by me. The path of this meteorite to my place is almost the same as the path of South American red fire ants taking import and export goods through the United States and then spreading to China. Now that the Argentine government has banned the export of such meteorites, the red fire ants that have left South America are already the most annoying invaders.

I connected the abandoned nest of the fire ants to this Argentine meteorite with some wires.

The call of the homeland to the red fire ants in a foreign land is just like the call of the vast starry sky to this meteorite. The Homesickness of the fire ants in Leming Village is separated by the diameter of the earth, and the homesickness of meteorites is hidden deeper in the universe.

有时由于自然和人为的原因，红火蚁会离开巢穴迁至别处安营扎寨。我在乐明村时发现了一些红火蚁遗弃的巢穴，在我讲述的故事中，这些巢穴是它们试图挖穿地球重返阿根廷故土所建隧道的遗迹。与遗迹呼应的，且曾在时空上相向的，是这块四千年多前陨落在阿根廷北部的陨石。

四千多年前，曾有一场巨大的陨石雨散落在阿根廷，几百年前，这些陨石成为土著居民、西班牙殖民者炼铁的原料。几十年前，这些陨石逐渐成为陨石圈热门的收藏品，其中一块在上世纪末从阿根廷流入美国藏家手中，近年又来到中国被我买下。这块陨石的流动轨迹和南美洲红火蚁搭乘进出口货物经由美国再扩散至中国的路径几乎一致。如今阿根廷政府已禁止这种陨石出口，出离了阿根廷的红火蚁已是最令人讨厌的入侵者。

我将红火蚁废弃的蚁巢加固，与这块阿根廷陨石用金属连接起来。阿根廷故土对异乡红火蚁的呼唤，正如浩渺星空对这块陨石的呼唤。乐明村红火蚁的乡愁隔着地球的直径，陨石的乡愁藏在宇宙的更深处。