Associação Cultural Videobrasil

By devising projects for distant, often difficult-to-reach places, Alice Miceli behaves as a true traveling artist. Her experiments on foreign lands are similar to those of the seamen that Walter Benjamin described in The Storyteller as “past masters of storytelling.” The travels of Rio de Janeiro-born Alice Miceli began at the age of nineteen, when she attended the École Supérieure d’Études Cinématographiques, in Paris, under a scholarship from the French government. After obtaining a degree in cinematography and audiovisual techniques, Miceli returned to Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and, during that year, she took assistant director and trainee jobs in the field of cinema, working with documentary filmmaker Silvio Tendler and as trainee editor in the film Un passeport Hongrois, by Sandra Kogut. 

The detour in Miceli’s path happened when her growing interest in the visual arts led her to take a graduate course in history of art and architecture in Brazil, at PUC-RJ, and to enter the Project Study and Discussion Group led by Professor Charles Watson, at Parque Lage, also in Rio de Janeiro. The first work to emerge from this new process, Ínterim/auto-retrato (2003) used a classic genre in the history of art to produce a reflection about the mutable, indefinite character of contemporary identity. The video was nominated for the 4th Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award, in 2003, and shown in exhibitions and festivals, such as the Videoformes Festival, in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and the laisle.com exhibition, in Rio de Janeiro. 

One year later, Alice Miceli was back on the road. With support from the on-line news agency News Market, she went to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, searching for the photographic identification files of people who were executed in a prison of the Khmer Rouge. The interest in “off-track” places led Miceli to forego the easy way—Yale University or Columbia University also have copies of the negatives—and to choose as her destination the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, an old S-21 prison, where fourteen thousand people were murdered by the dictatorship regime during the 1970s. In fifteen days of research, the artist managed to sort out the time that eighty-eight prisoners had left to live, from their incarceration to their final moment. The result of her trip was the video 88 de 14.000 (2004), in which the identification photos are projected onto sand curtains. The work was at display in a loop at the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival and was a finalist for the award of the transmediale.05 International Media Art Festival, held in Berlin, Germany, both in 2005. 

Even if the amount of sand dropped for each case reflects the time of life spent in prison, Alice Miceli knows, from the laws of mathematics, that the distance between one point and another is infinite. Thus, 88 de 14.000 might be regarded as an updated version of Borges’ The Book of Sand. The issue of the infinitude of time would be the key subject of investigation for the artist two years later, in her Dízima periódica [Periodic decimal] series.

That edition of the Transmediale International Media Art Festival focused on Southeast Asia, and 88 de 14.000 attracted the attention of a foundation for exchange between Asiatic and European artists, based in Singapore. After receiving an invitation to a workshop, Miceli went off to Bandung, in Indonesia, to participate in the project Third Asia-Europe Art Camp: Artists’ Initiatives Spaces and New Media Arts, at the Bandung Center for New Media Arts. 

The work 88 de 14.000 was important for Miceli’s development as an artist, because it awakened in her an interest for events erased from recent memory and by “buried” situations, which influence in a subtle and decisive manner the current social relationships of a people. These were precisely the issues at play in the exhibition On Disappearance. Loss of World; Escaping the World, in which the work was featured, at the PhoenixHalle, in Dortmund, Germany. 

While holding a residency at the Cable Factory – UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Programme, in Helsinki, Finland, in 2004 and 2005, Alice Miceli worked with a representation of the Holocaust, in Little White House (2005). The video travels the path from a nazi extermination camp to the Chelmno nad Nerem village, in the opposite direction of the Holocaust victims. Thus, the work proposes a revision in the representation of history.

The issues raised by the treatment given to space, in Little White House, and to time, in 88 de 14.000, led the artist to ask herself questions such as: “How can one actually cross the distance between two points in a given space? How can one realize, through image in motion, the conceptual transformation that can take place when one crosses a border? What are the possible natures of limits?” Her discomfort birthed the Dízima periódica video series, which investigates the mystery of infinity between two points. The series is comprised of 99,9...metros rasos and 14 horas, 54 minutos, 59,9...segundos, both from 2006. The videos were screened at the Rumos Artes Visuais – Paradoxos Brasil exhibition, at Itaú Cultural, and in the Videometry – Video as a measuring device in contemporary Brazilian art exhibition, at the LOOP Festival, held in Barcelona, Spain, both in 2006.

Miceli’s latest project, still in progress, returns to history once again, addressing the issue: how do we relate to our past today? With a scholarship granted by the Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award, aimed at fostering production, the Chernobyl Project forecasts, for 2007, the radiographic recording of radiation produced in the exclusion zone of the city of Pripyat, in Ukraine, site of the radioactive accident in the Chernobyl nuclear plant. By inventing and developing a never-before-seen technology for the mission—which is being done in collaboration with scientists of the Institute of Radioprotection and Dosimetry, in Rio de Janeiro—, Alice Miceli becomes part of the tradition of artists-scientists, as she uses resources from science and technology in her quest for the specificity of image.