Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The issue of space is a key aspect in the construction of artwork such as Cuando vuelvas vamos a ir a comer a Cantón, III Momentos, and Yo estoy aquí, colgado de la ventana. Is your work designed to reflect on issues typical of contemporary space?

The primary goal of those videos was not reflecting on the problematic of contemporary space, that was never my approach to making videos. Having said that, though, the issue does interest me in a particular way, therefore it is only natural that the subject comes up in most of my works. First and foremost, I think my videos tackle the issue of the city, which is perhaps more of a modern problem than a contemporary one. The city is an important concept in Uyuni, and it's the foundation for Duchamp; Buenos Aires no existe, in which a timeless city is built in the creative gaze of Marcel Duchamp, proposing a direct link between the Frenchman's artistic output in the months he lived in Buenos Aires, and the city's urban features.

Big cities seem like very aesthetically rich places to me, especially at night. In the catalogue text for the Sortilegio exhibition I explained that, as a child, I would sit in the dark and look for hours on end at an aquarium, which was later replaced by a TV set, and then a window, through which I saw Buenos Aires: “...I have dozens of windows in front of me. The bright rectangle stands out against a neutral background. They laugh, although I can't hear them. I feel the same way I did as a child. They know I am in darkness. They notice me in each and every window in front of them. I can even see myself in the neighboring shades. I see Buenos Aires as a big video installation, its monitors filled with fish. Window-television. Window-aquarium. Whatever.”* This text accompanied Ventanas, a version of III Momentos, a video installation designed precisely to be projected onto the side walls of buildings, usually destined to advertising, thus creating a link between daily images, including some quite intimate ones, and the public space.

III Momentos might be about brief scenes from other people's lives, upon which we can build a world. In the cities, we can find ourselves surrounded by fictions under permanent construction. All we see is one scene, the rest is “deframing” (Bonitzer) and, viewed from that perspective, it can turn us from observers to creators. Here, the work tackles a fundamental issue in urban space: we are always close to the others, we can see them. Cuando vuelvas vamos a ir a comer a Cantón is a love letter. The space it deals with is distance. She is far away, he misses her. An approximation is attempted through memory, by using the four pictures that comprise the video. The space is fragmented, as is the body: it is a recollection that brings sensations back. The concrete spatial reference in the video is Cantón, a typical Buenos Aires Chinese restaurant. 

Yo estoy aquí, colgado de la ventana was my first video, and I must confess the fragmentation and the baroqueness in it might have a lot to do with the fascination surrounding the advent of Adobe Première in the 1990s. Add to that a strong and not quite filtered-down influence of great videomakers such as Larcher, Toti, or Greenaway. I was ecstatic with their videos, and to me it had to do with overmanipulating the images. Anyway, Yo estoy aquí...manages to build a type of fiction that deals with the issue of distance between bodies in the urban space. He is consumed with desire for her, she is so close that he can see her undressing herself when she comes home, and he even witnesses her having sex with another man. She lives in a window in front of his own, and yet she's unattainable. 

How did you come about the perception of space as presented in Uyuni? Did the piece start out as a video or as an installation?

I had been traveling through northern Argentina and all over Bolivia, and throughout the whole trip, the only time I handled my camera was in order to store it in the middle of other stuff in my backpack, going from town to town. I arrived in the city of Uyuni already planning the trip back, I would just spend the night and take the train to Villazón. But the train never left; some protesting miners blocked the railway. Each morning I'd walk up to the station, and they would either tell me the train would leave that afternoon, or else the next day. But the train never did leave, so after a few days I left Uyuni in a pickup truck, loaded with people and stuff, and despite the fact that there was no road whatsoever, they promised to get me to another town from where I could continue my trip.
During the five or six days I spent in that town, I walked. I couldn't understand the logic of the place: disproportionately large streets with no traffic at all. I was only able to overcome my own judgment regarding the functionality of space there by framing those avenues, converting them into landscapes. After being transformed into images, the incoherence of space in Uyuni proved aesthetically valuable. I dedicated a few afternoons to recording the Uyuni street corners, and after the end of my trip, I put those images away for years, until I wrote a fictional text about a dialogue between a man and a woman passing through Uyuni. Each of them builds up a completely different city. The formats of the moving images correspond to two points of view: he and she, video and Super 8. I tried to get the same framings in filmic and electronic images, but that's impossible. Incompatibilities in frame proportion, duration speed, and focal depth generate different representations of the same space. Those two images coexist throughout the entire video, with various degrees of opaqueness. In some moments, cinema prevails, in others, video does, and there are cases in which it's hard to tell, in an image, what came from which support. That's how you approach space from a multifaceted point of view, one and many at the same time.
 

Uyuni started out as a video, but soon the possibility of positioning it in space potentialized the approach of multiple readings upon which the place is based. The technique of working with both filmic and electronic image to produce a single image is duplicated on two screens. That which might have been interpreted earlier as his or her sight, is now telling us that each sight is unique unto itself. The proposition here is that space, such as a text, is not unique, even for a single observer. 

In the catalogue for the exhibition you had with Gabriela Golder and Silvia Rivas in Buenos Aires, you mentioned space as ideology. Is this concept more apparent in Uyuni, the installation, or in the video version? Or is this a feature inherent in the way you record images?

To understand ideology as a space in which men live and based on which they think, rather than something that is thought up by men, is a model proposed by Paul Ricoeur, an author I stumbled upon through a text by Graciela Fernandes Toledo. It is interesting to couple that idea with the writings of Frederic Jameson, as follows: “Space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally managed to transcend the capabilities of individual human bodies in order to position itself, to put its immediate surroundings into perspective, and to determine its position cognitively in an external model that can be mapped.” The impossibility of knowing where I stand hampers me from being aware of my own ideology; I don't know where I am thinking from. In that sense, it's easy to understand capitalism as the nature of human beings, since it is the root of the turbulence that hinders the creation of spatial references, thus establishing itself as the only possible space. 

The place from which I speak or think is also the place from which I see and create an image. Being a filmmaker, that is essential to me, because of the things I say and do to the images of the others. I have studied cinema, I was taught how to make a movie, and confronting that model was a painful process. First off, I understood that what existed was not a cinema language, but rather a production model. Then, I understood that the model wasn't about how to do, but rather where to do it from: the industrial model of film production is an ideological stance. I prefer to stay away from it.

In Uyuni, the issue of space is featured as subject matter; the place from which space presents itself to each of the characters, which precedes image, is ideology. Seeing things from different places entails seeing different things, and that's what happens to the characters in Uyuni; what their sights generate is not their ideology, but rather the result of their ideology. 

In your most recent work, El ahogo, as well as in pieces such as Cuando vuelvas vamos a ir a comer a Cantón, photography is the starting point for the construction of image in motion. How do you see this intersection between different image-capturing media in your work?

I use photography in order to reflect on the past. It relates to memory in a very different way than video does, it's much more poignant and deep. This cultural aspect seems part of its nature. “Photography is full evidence, charged, as if it caricatured not the figure it represents (it's precisely the opposite), but rather its very existence. Image, according to phenomenology, is the absence of objects. Now, in photography, what I establish is not just the absence of the object; it is, through the same motion, the same equality with absence, that the object has existed and been where I now see it.”** 

In El ahogo, I worked with photographs and Super 8, the latter represents memories, more specifically memories of the 1970s. That is essential to the issue under discussion, because, since the subject matter is related to the photos, they become historical documents, more than simple memories. My videos have a strong narrative component, and every information provided by the support is a constituent part of a possible account. In Cuando vuelvas...something similar takes place; as I said before, images, photographs are updated memories. 
I believe that's the value I find in using different supports, cultural elements inherent in each technology, which are not the only possible combination of different media, but provide me with points of view upon which I can build a fully atomized account. 

Poems, plotted texts, speech dictating the rhythm of the edit. What is the importance of textual elements in your work?

Text is central to some of my work, but it's always closely tied to image; I try to ensure that the finished work is fully audiovisual, with no prevalence of textual elements. Text often plays the role of music. In my entirely free-structured proposals, music, as well as text, often resolves the big challenge of going ahead, of advancing. Maybe that's why I never use music in my videos; music is too strong an artistic expression, and in many cases it subjugates the image, converting itself into an invisible skeleton that holds the entire piece together, and becoming the only element that leads it further. I try to make that problematic very present when I work on my videos. In Cuando vuelvas...image follows the rhythm of voice, but I believe they merge into a single experience. He who speaks remembers, and image approaches tactile sensations related to those memories, those haptic images (Deleuze), building value along with the text, on the same level, demanding an audiovision (Chion). This takes place in Uyuni as well: images say as much as words do, or more; the image speaks of the ones we listen to as they speak, and it does so on a reflective level. Text never precedes image. All my works start from image, it is the first step; I might find it in some space (Uyuni), in some bodies (III Momentos), a recollection (Cuando vuelvas...), a creative gesture (Instante Bony), a physical sensation related to a personal story (El ahogo) that is turned into image; in some cases, text emerges out of those images, but it's always afterwards.

Filmmakers such as Ivan Marino, Mariela Yeregui, Gabriela Golder, Silvia Rivas, Jorge La Ferla, Gustavo Galuppo, Marcello Mercado, and many others form a powerful electronic art scene in Argentina. As curator and director of an art promotion center, how do you regard that production? What are its lines of force and specific features?

I believe the Argentinian video output is extremely heterogeneous. This diversity, which I see as very positive, prevents us from making generalized judgements. We should be able to tackle the issue case-by-case, and that would require much more space than provided by these lines. I'd like to use this space to make clear that, despite the existence of some filmmakers with very interesting approaches, there is no solid, consistent production. There are many videos, but few are the result of a reflexive, consistent creative process. The young scene seems to be the most deficient one. They're unable to process the whole MTV thing, and the 'flash' aesthetics throws them off. By the time they get to college, most students are utterly defenseless in the face of image, completely vulnerable to the corporate media discourse, and unable to engage in critical confrontation with it in any level whatsoever. After some time in college, the situation doesn't change much. Ten years of "menenism" have left their mark [Denegri refers to Argentinean president Carlos Menem's double mandate]. And it shows in their work. I believe that, in Argentina, we must pay much attention to this alarming situation, and work on turning students into free creators, rather than just useful employees.

* Denegri, Andrés, in Rizzo, Patrícia (curator), Sortilegio (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2001).
** Barthes, Roland, La Câmara Lúcida [The Lucid Camera] (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2003).