Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Blurry sights

This text about Claudia Aravena should have been written by Guillermo Cifuentes. But our best and very special common friend died without doing so, in May 2007. This might have left a large empty space between the proximities that could have been established between his and Aravena’s work. Such proximities were evident in aesthetics options, narrative strategies, political approach, sensitiveness, humor, and closeness.

I therefore write, with no vestiges of spirit-writing, but surely without being able to avoid the vestiges of one’s work in the other’s, and vice versa. Beyond having studied together, in something more than just the partnership in the A Cuerda collective, the interferences, exchanges, the mutual contamination, the altering focus of identities between ‘one and the other’ were beautiful.

Thus, without being able to separate in my memories what created an affectionate blend between them, I am trying to recreate a rapid picture, what you could call a snapshot, aimed at reaching out, in some way, to a certain generation of which I am somehow also part.
My first incursion into Aravena’s work took place in Miradas Desviadas (1992). There I encountered a Latinity whose sensitivity I did not yet know, coming from a Chilean scene immersed in travel logs and personal reports beautified by covering layers, fusions, slow motions, velvety statements, voices in confessional tone, Paris locations, and other ‘accents’ considered typically French. Until then, the Chilean producers cultivated explicit proximity with France, the result of over a decade of exchanges, not always balanced (almost promiscuous?), between both countries through the Festival Franco-Chileno de Videoarte.1

The fact is that this kind of video produced in the early 1990s really touched us and in Aravena and Cifuentes we had the best examples of a trans-Andean narrative that suggested ecstasy due to its visuality, attitude, and linguistic dexterity.
Works that followed Miradas Desviadas, like Estáción Terminal (1995), berlin: been there/to be here (2000), and lugar común/common place I (2001), are reconstructions of identities that grab us through a kind of audiovisual enchantment, having the power to touch us, even without romantic odes, rehearsed actors, sophisticated production, or virtuosi sequence shots. I refer to the chase for a syntax that since the 1990s has launched itself in the challenge of building sense, of narrative invention, of conjugation of written text elements, of the economic structure of poetry, almost in verse. Since then we have been speaking about a format through which a need for expression would be comprehended. There would be a search for syntax, showing a different audiovisual experience, a close relative of short films, but without the mimicry of its most common clichés, crossed by reconnaissance trips, colored by the French video, in all pertinent to the Chilean context. Our general thoughts were more focused on a cinema situation of sensations and notions in which, far from the search for the emotions so dear to cinema, one would find connections of ideas, lives being lived intensely, sincere opening of hearts, and challenges being faced with the camera in hand. This generation invented its own history, which extended beyond recordings, as a way of believing in a future in which everything was cloudy and hopeless.

In the 1990s, it was relating to producers like Aravena and Cifuentes, guided by thinkers like Nestor Olhagaray and Jorge La Ferla (and having the French Robert Cahen, Alain Bourges, and Jean-Paul Fargier as frequent counterbalances), that we learned more deeply the (evident!) cultural differences and started better identifying the possibilities of authentic dialogue between South American neighbors. At least among us, after all, greatly legitimizing elements of the maneuvers of this Latin circuit, we have possibly overcome the chatter and discourse of institutionally imposed exchange and see ourselves less naive. It was works like those of Aravena, and her untiring search for her place in the world, that helped us believe that the birth of a language beyond conventions may also include images as thoughts and more ethereal means of communication, without forgetting the weight of our dictatorships, and of the several forms of cultural misunderstanding—some persistent to this date.
In Aravena’s case, specifically, it was not only Latin-American idiosyncrasies that would move her, as the questions of identity in her videos started being reflected in a broader unfolding of this theme, like, for example, her Palestinian descent in works like Beitjala (2003), Greetings from Palestina (2004), and Out of Place (2005); from her place-without-a-place as an immigrant in Berlin, in projects like been there/to be here (2000) or Common Place I and II (2001) and from contemporary fears common to all cultures, a theme discussed in a stronger manner in Fear (2007). These are projects for a lifetime, for the recognition of what may come to be identity based on negotiation with the context in which you are living.

Memories and Reverse Effects
Languages are really uncertain ‘regions,’ which suggest we walk accompanied, for the risk of darkness. Aravena and Cifuentes walked together. In their videos, memory often replaced movement, and common space was drawn in many ways. It is like thinking: once isolated, I get used to a blurry vision, I start losing ground, working with an overcome syntax, I go wrong in context. In the scope of being alone, we are owners of all degeneration and doubt that we face. Including of the images we create. Seeing yourself in the other is a way of studying detours but also sanities. Aravena and Cifuentes knew that the effective bases for a collaborative process are very fragile. Maybe that is why they supported each other. One on the other, both in the works they created.

The other, not just the double, but the ‘minimum me’ as a triple, supported in the video work (comprehension of itself).
And it was among the instabilities of new media that Aravena reaffirmed herself, narrowing herself in video, this medium that some would now call ‘banal.’ And since That is not a Loop, that’s Real Time (1999) she has also sought in the space of installations a support for the vertigo of rhetoric effects around novelties of media. She sought in space, which fades away in the vision of philosophers of acceleration and virtual image, an anchor to save herself in the sea of uncertainty.

Processes are latent works. OK, not always. Just in special cases. Thus, Aravena worked on the Palestina Project (2003-2005), a work-process, recognition with excessive validity. The processes strengthen the certainties, the definitions of language seem to rest momentarily.
In Fear/Miedo (2007), Aravena hits the nail on the head on mentioning the unmentionable. It is hard not to feel the impact of the construction, once again structured on a repertoire of archetypical memory, now collective, in which guts are now exhibited more for what is universal than for the intimacy revealed. A video to be revisited.

Illustrated existences
In a recent conversation with Aravena, we came to the risk of concluding that we are all illustrators of writing. In many texts and contexts our works serve just as starting points or as reference for the crossing to ‘statements’ by curators, critics, and festivals. We serve some very specific purposes, sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting longer, in illustrations that intend other things beyond our works, in catalogues with several pages, in oceans of many names, titles, trends (I still hate that word!). The risk of concluding is assuming that what we do is only important when added to greater interests, of different structure, that our work often arises but does not reach merit.

Well. This production is the basis for routes that other producers follow today, be they aware or not of the flights previously made. Cifuentes died without justice having been paid to his brightness. These are the famous crooked lines of recognition and of the strategy that does not match the existing rules. The work is left, maybe with that taste of bitterness that does without sympathy. The way we travel, well or badly, is also inevitably our work. In a response, by reaction, by consequence, by fatality or by poetry.
Here a narrative would fit, as is the case with Aravena’s videos: her words in the voice of others, the voice of others in her words. Representing issues, issues about speaking of herself, of culture, and of the lack of belonging to a culture.

Aravena talks to us about mirroring. The ‘me in the crowd.’ You among several others. Us in our estrangement (once again we have pictures, portraits, of a family: once again Guillermo Cifuentes, Robert Cahen, Alain Bourges, Patrick de Geetere, Chico de Paula, Ivan Marino, Arturo Marino, Alejandro Restrepo, Carlos Nader, Inês Cardoso, myself, and many others I think of through crooked lines), more than speaking about a generation defined by dates of birth, I refer to certain insistences and convictions of language.
How does the current context affect the production of these people? How does the context exclude or accept them? It is necessary to reinvent, with or without drama.

How much Latin America, Chile, Arab world, Palestine, Germany, and Berlin is there in aravena? The marvel lies in seeking knowledge, in discovering, seeing, listening, letting yourself be moved by through the works of Aravena, but not taking them as illustration. 

(1) The Festival Franco-Latino-americano de Videoarte, in its 14th edition, became Festival Franco-Latino-americano, but the entry of countries like Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, and Argentina seems to have made the festival more expensive for the French government and little effective in terms of Eurocentric cultural influence, after all, the event has always been promoted by the French Ministry of Foreign Relations. But what matters is that we have been observing a curious circuit among neighboring countries which for many years had been mentioned on the media but that only after that point started existing in fact through festivals like the French-Latin-American, the Southern Cone Festival, and naturally the constant exchange made possible by the programme organized by Videobrasil.