Kiriakou sits on the board of the Courage Foundation, a Berlin-based whistleblower protection group. Its first-ever board meeting took him to a part of Berlin he had never been to before, and he had to rush from the meeting straight to the airport, so he had his luggage with him.[1]
The street
Pulling his suitcase through the unfamiliar neighbourhood, he passed a Chinese man walking towards him. The man said “John Kiriakou.” Kiriakou looked at him, and the man said, very softly, “I am Ai Weiwei.” Kiriakou’s reply was “oh my gosh, what a small world.”[1]
The two had been in touch previously by Skype, at a time when Ai Weiwei was under house arrest in China, but had never met. They stood on the street and talked. Kiriakou thanked him profusely for having made his portrait out of Lego for the show at Alcatraz. Ai Weiwei invited him back to his studio, and Kiriakou left for the airport an hour early in order to go, dragging the suitcase roughly another mile.[2]
By Kiriakou’s account the meeting was entirely accidental: the artist was simply out for a random stroll.[2]
The studio
Ai Weiwei gave him a tour. He had made iPhone cases carrying each of the portraits from the exhibition, and he gave Kiriakou the case with his own Lego portrait on it and autographed it, along with one of the catalogues from the show.[3] Kiriakou described it as an incredible experience and said he was honoured and humbled finally to meet him.[3]
The portrait itself belonged to a larger work: a tableau laid out in a warehouse space at Alcatraz, made of Lego, carrying line drawings of more than a hundred political prisoners then incarcerated worldwide. Kiriakou was among them, and visitors who had seen the exhibit were invited afterwards to sign a custom postcard addressed to one of the prisoners — a mechanism that reached him directly.[4]