Associação Cultural Videobrasil

You were in Jakarta in 2001 when you made the 15,000,000 Parachutes video. Exactly ten years later you returned to Indonesia on a field trip. Could you explain to me, from the perspective of one decade’s time, the most significant changes that occurred in the technical and conceptual aspects of your artmaking? 

I believe that as time passes, we wind up polishing and rearranging ideas, toying with different formats, learning from the trade through the practice of editing, and through our relationships. Nonetheless, the foundations of my work definitely remain the same, and I will often return to forms or structures I have worked with some time ago. While the packaging will often change, I am interested in keeping the content the same. I find it crucial to be consistent in this respect. 
Travelling to Indonesia ten years after that first experience was a special revival for me. 15,000,000 Parachutes is a medium-length film which was shot over roughly one month. I wanted to see whether the same magic would arise over a fifteen-day period. And it did: a script laid itself out, part of it was shot, and, for lack of time, the puzzle was not completed. I guess this trip showed me that my momentum and most importantly my stamina remain the same ten years later. There are times in which the elements flow in one single direction; at other times a link will get lost, and the construct will grow in a different direction. Something was definitely built, however. 

What did you present at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2002? 

I worked with the South African photographer JoRatcliffe in a video called One Year Later. We decided to work in a precarious and basic way for reasons pertaining to time, needs, and mutual interests at that particular moment. We had a large-format Diana camera and Jo took the inner framing of the film’s edges out of that camera. Thus we achieved an image in which one photograph is superimposed onto another as if it were a collage, making it possible to synchronize time and space. We filmed for six days in Johannesburg, in the city itself, in the mines that surround the city, in the roads to the suburbs. After that we selected the material, cutting and splicing as if we were working on a Moviola film editor; but those were photographs, not moving images. Once the reel was edited, we stuck two tomato cans to it and ran the film in front of a light box. A camera would record the images passing, and the sound of the two cans becoming tangled and disentangled from the material. We wanted to create a story from within the city. However, in order to be the narrator, you normally must somehow be on the outside; either the story already exists, or else you are outside it, as the person who determines and controls the narrative. In this video, we are both those telling the story and the characters, a position not unlike the way in which we inhabit and experience the city. Furthermore, the city is not a place that can be apprehended in a concrete manner; it is a place that slips away and moves back from your understanding every time you think you figured it out. 

Tell me something about Just Like A That Productions. 

Just Like A That is the name of the production company with which I made several films in the early 2000s. They were mostly medium-length films. I would work on them for relatively short periods of time using relatively basic equipment. Back then, whenever I would ask my friend, the visual artist Fahrettin Orenli, how he had achieved a given effect in his paintings, he would reply, ‘just like ’a that.’ That reply seemed very appropriate. That which seemed complex would resolve itself naturally. 

The films I made at that time opposed the formalisms of cinema and video art. The narratives were always open to improvisation and the circumstances. If I wanted and felt a need to do things, I believed that not possessing the conventional means for making a movie should not be an impediment. My motto was very similar to Cinema Novo’s: a camera in your hand and an idea in your head. I still believe it until this day, but my recent pieces fit that concept to a lesser extent. Theirs is a different procedure, they are perhaps less impulsive, they are less just like that. 

What was/is the most demanding aspect of Oracle, which requires you to use two screens for identical projections? 

For some time I had been toying with the idea of doing something using footage I recorded over several years. The material is a sort of memoir, both personal and of my surroundings, from the 1990s until now. I have always wanted to make a movie with those. Using images stranded from one another in time and space, condensing them in one single point. Working with the notion that all those times and spaces synchronize themselves in one single moment and place. I wanted to discuss both present and future, and Oracle made it easy. The video makes a synthesis of the images I believe are the simplest and most symbolic out of the many images I shot, using various cameras, in different countries in South America, Central America, Europe, Asia, and South Africa. These images portray a moment, a convulsive, indispensable present. 

The work functions as an installation, with two screens at an angle. In front of them there is a bench. The images repeat themselves on the screens; at times they acquire shapes, at times they outline a landscape or a motion. The simplicity of the images is boosted not only by their symbolic content, but also by duality. 

The work is flexible. It also functions as a single-channel piece. I am often interested in working with ideas in a flexible way so that even when completed, they will keep their elasticity. Thus, my feature film El camino entre dos puntos can also be converted into an eponymous two-screen installation. Furthermore, Oracle also gives rise to a series of drawings in light boxes (Light Boxes from Oracle) and an object based on that same idea (Oracle [prototypes]). 

In addition to any other possible investigative narrative, the natural or urban landscape as a character in its own right is a strong concept in some of your pieces. The images produced in some of your works notably originate from shoots in America and Asia. Are you interested in cultural, social, and geographical contexts other than those of Europe, where you have lived for a long time now? Am I mistaken in saying that? 

You are right, and that happens naturally. I believe that my work, in general, reflects the needs of the place in which it was produced. I find gaps over which I can create bridges, through fiction, symbolism, or mere representation. The shocks, contradictions, and relationships are the strongest in places where societies and nature continue their search. I am not interested in the image of a pristine forest, of the ecosystem in equilibrium. I am interested in the image of the desert, of the clash between forces of nature. The same applies to societies or urban landscapes. The weaker side always takes the loss, and that is the side I like being on. It always gives off more emotion, more narrative, more meaning, more absurdity. I am interested in that place. I tend to reduce dualities to their simplest form, but I always preserve the essential elements that comprise them. 

These gaps are less radical in Europe, they are more formal and, although they are there, they are less visible. This neutrality causes reality to seem less real. Sadly, the neutrality in form and in daily rituals has become a common denominator to most European countries. There is a poverty to this reality which my work cannot feed upon. 

What projects are you involved in? 

Right now, I am interested more than anything else in resuming my line of work in field research. To explore and rebuild ideas and landscapes, a type of intervention that will allow me to wander freely and find elements with which to build alternatives, new narratives. Finding work teams also seems crucial to me. To join forces in order to drift on one single current. 

I am working in projects the sets of which are more structured, based on the notion of representation of reality. Their starting point is reality itself; it becomes the representation, the fiction. The main actor is a mirror. It reflects the method of human representation. The mirror shatters into pieces, and I go on seeking answers in its endless reflections.