Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena: vestiges of another scene

Data for a minimal biography: Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in violent times (1971). When he was two years old, for political reasons, his mother was arrested for six months, “and this affected me profoundly,” declared the artist in an interview. From 1979 to 1984, he and his family were exiled in Sweden, for the same political reasons. From 1984 to 1989, he settled in Uruguay, a period in which democracy returned to his country and he started studying painting. In 1989, he returned to Sweden, and has lived there ever since. From 1997 to 2002, he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, which he left as a painter. After that, he went on to dedicate himself to photography and, later, to video.

Out of his varied works we have selected two recent ones to debate here: a video, whose title is Untitled 2004, and a series of photographs, Gilberto’s Place, of 2007. Untitled 2004 takes place in an unidentified woodland (despite the artist having identified it as the eastern part of an island in Sweden), a place rooted to the romanticism of the Nordic landscapes (and also of fairy tales). The sun is setting, until it (almost) vanishes: it is sunset, full of mortuary symbolism. For a few moments the landscape freezes. Night comes, or so it seems. Then Fabra proposes such a minimum narrative that it induces one to feel that the artist is fighting narratives: six camouflaged soldiers and a seventh dead one (dead?), all Swedes, stated the author. The dead soldier blends with the soil. He is completely in sight. The rest is material for interpretation. In this scenery, the characters (almost) don’t move. The dead soldier will emerge later on and his colleagues finally carry him off. In the end, the trees mesh.

The artist operates on the limit of visibility, and the scene is artificially lit, theatrical, but minimal. Like Boltanski, Fabra guides us to an invisible and quiet place. This video, like the rest of his work, offers more questions than answers. The atmosphere is generated by the suspense of the dead times: something maybe ominous, is about to happen. And the spectator is challenged to wait for what is about to happen. Differently, in front of a picture—in which it is possible to cover everything with just one glimpse—, it is not necessary to wait. However, Fabra always wants to paint; his photographs and videos will make sense if they capture the gaze that paintings call for. His language is not cinematographic. Neither is it the one of conventional video. It is in a fragile frontier, between painting and video.

Bill Viola usually makes references to painting, but he is more cinematographic than Fabra. In Viola’s videos, cinema meets painting and sound. This video by Fabra deliberately (almost) leaves out sound. The light would seem to come from cars driving down the highway nearby, throwing shadows. A resource of the same kind is used by Viola in The Passing, which shows in images—also nighttime and submarine—the limits of life, and does it opting for the light that comes from above. Fabra says that the lighting of the nocturnal landscapes in Untitled 2004 comes from a kind of stick used by the Swedish army for nocturnal battles: “Made of magnesium, a small parachute comes down, deeming it possible to picture a very broad landscape, which becomes exactly like sceneography.” But the sticks also recall fireworks, the fleetingness of things, the magic world of (lost) childhood.

Fabra films with a fixed camera and usually focuses on the foreground. “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject,” as Walter Benjamin suggests in his famous paper “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” “So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.” (1) 

With this video, Fabra wanted to determine the time of things. And to generate a visual world against everything that was being seen in the communications media, subverting the budgets and the products of television, at a time in which it has been flooded with images of censored material. McLuhan saw this clearly when he warned that every time a new media appears, all those already existing are affected, as they must adapt to the new circumstances.

The scenes that Fabra films are portraits of (almost) still figures, as if they were images of framed paintings hung up on walls, part of a pictoric gaze. Viola’s figures, on the other hand, move, like in The Passions, for example, in which the author seems to be a painting specialist at a museum. But the succession of scenes by Fabra converts his video into a kind of moving painting, a video-painting. Like painters, Fabra works in the tradition of optic images and could even say: “I paint without painting.” The scene is framed in a romantic sunset (Robert Rosenblum pointed to the pictoric influence of Northern European tradition, especially romantic landscapes, on modern European abstract).

What is interesting to Fabra—as stated—is the specific development of uniform, of military attire, to which he gives identities while simultaneously questioning them. To the neoclassic Jacques Louis David, too: when Napoleonic times arrived and it was necessary to organize the State, he contributed by drawing and painting military uniforms.

“Photography has not replaced painting, nor has video replaced photography. A more and more complex grammar was generated, a richer language,” stated Fabra. Thus, when he dissolves the images of soldiers, putting them into a dark sunset, he could make one think about the inadequacy of photography to document a fact. But, pointing further in this direction, Fabra sets up the scenes he is going to photograph in studio (entering a tradition inaugurated by Poussin, who set up the scenes he was going to paint in advance). His compositions recall theatrical mise-en-scènes, appropriate for a front view from the inside of a cube.

In his later videos he also does not include data from reality. Thus, reproduction is no longer documental, witnessed. On the contrary, his photographs and videos have, under a cold, mechanic, neutral view, a contained albeit strong expressive load. His photography translates a zone of his memory. In fact, “the partial eclipse that prevails … is the direct result of cancelling the common ground, historic specificity, however connected to a specific story the images may be. (This connection is more and more elusive until … it becomes a general allusion to lost childhood, to loss in general).” The thing is, if photography is generally considered a medium for memory, and video, a medium for the present, it is surely possible to introduce memory into moving images.

Furthermore, Fabra is also interested in the theme of military camouflage, i.e., soldiers and armaments mimicking their surrounding, so that they become invisible to the aerial surveillance of their enemies. A technique whose history is in the history of art. Dalí assured that the camouflage of World War I was fundamentally cubist and Picassan, whereas that of World War II was surrealist and Dalinian. It is camouflage, but, at the same time, a symbol of primitive man.

The photographs in the series Gilberto’s Place would make one think of self-portraits, but, not being that, allow the artist to distance himself from the scene. They are, shall we say, disquieting, tragic scenes of violence and death. Gilberto’s Place 1 was, surely, taken within a garage. And that is not a mere coincidence. That is the place where objects and weapons in the hands of people are born and die. And, according to a hypothesis shared by Arthur C. Danto, from the arsenal of the garage came all the iconography of North American pop art. This garage invites the spectator to extrapolate his/her image of the wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. The character photographed presents as camouflage a pile of greenery on his body. However, this Nordic garage is perfectly tidy, and the rolls of wire are rolls of industrial wire, not barbed wire.

Thus, Fabra accentuates the tension. Gilberto’s Place 2 is a scenography that recalls clandestine burials in the times of the dictatorship, the digging in search of those missing, with cypresses to one side of the photograph—probably taken in the plant beds of Rodó park, in central Montevideo. This brings to memory a mountain in the shape of an eagle, a painting by Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

In Gilberto’s Place 3, Fabra assimilates tales of torture in the picture of a flayed body, which recalls Vesalius’ anatomical theater (16th century), in which a group of students study the anatomy of a gutted man.

The art of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena is that of a Latino based in a Nordic nation, the country of Ingmar Bergman, living with the demons, the Nordic ghosts, with the anti-Mediterranean.

The images he creates express the same terrors announced by the sculptures of German gothic cathedrals. They may be the projection of the infant world of suffering he had to live (exile, expulsion, separation from his mother). All his projects, confesses the artist, “revolve around something very personal”: from a childhood marked by tales of terror, by a kind of theater of cruelty, and not precisely by fairytales.

Ángel Kalenberg (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1936) is a researcher, art curator, and art critic. He managed the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales for thirty-seven years. Curator of selections of Uruguayan artists sent to the biennials of São Paulo, Venice, and Paris, he was also responsible for the Latin American selection for the 10th Biennale de Paris and was a member of the International Committee of the 17th Bienal de São Paulo. He was vice president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) and also participated in the Aica – International Association of Art Critics. Among other books, in 1991 he published Arte uruguayo y otros, in which he brought together texts printed over twenty years of work as an art critic, and collaborated in The Dictionary of Art, published in London in 1996. In 2000, he was appointed correspondent member of the Brazilian Art Critics Association.

(1) Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books Inc., New York, 1969.

Most of your works show images of the Swedish army and war references, always fictionalized: we see soldiers, but there are no enemies. Is this the central point of your work—pointing at the way in which military power has been mythisized, something that exists to feed itself, more than for real need?

In recent years, what has interested me more and more is the media image of war facts and of organized and institutionalized violence: the way the means of communication, and especially TV, currently represent the activities of the Armed Forces. This is what I am mostly interested in studying. Ever since I started studying the images presented by the media, I rapidly established in my head the connection with Swedish romanticism which, in most cases, is greatly related to images of war. In Sweden, specifically, where I studied, the Academy of Art was originally a military academy that taught soldiers how to draw, as this was the only way to graphically document the battles. That is why much of the work I currently do is heavily based on the Swedish national romantic tradition. Nature in this country plays the role of a scenery in which the national imaginary deposits many of its fantasies, fears, wishes, etc.

This curatorship presents Uruguayan artists who discuss a society that is saturated with images and ready discourse. Your videos often point to what Jean Baudrillard defined as the “the era of simulation and simulacra.”

I keep very present, before everything else, Baudrillard’s text on the Kuwait War, in which he says that this war was never how it was shown, that it never existed, but was, in reality, a series of images that the United States generated and conveyed to the world. From this experience and from the criticism that the North American army received, a new strategy was developed for Afghanistan, in which the concept of the embedded journalist was developed. In the same way as information machinery works on hyperrealism, I feel the need to walk the same line to tackle this. More than ever, simulation is an important weapon, which may be very powerful in the hands of an artist. I think that this is a vital concept that artists have to understand today. In a certain way, sometimes my strategy is the same: generating an image that seems real, but is not. A mise-en-scène that does not heavily confront the official image, but is a slight detour into a parallel world. My greatest ambition is to promote doubt and, consequently, reflection. I could say that I work on low-intensity video activism.

Was moving from painting to video also a way of communicating better with the audiences of today?

Television is undoubtedly the tool that teaches people to look nowadays. Also, for this reason, video is the most efficient tool that we, artists, have to communicate beyond the spaces that we traditionally use, like galleries and museums. TV is the space that we still need to penetrate.

In Gilberto’s Place, the soldier—who we generally see in a group, in your creations—appears alone. Another difference is that he shows himself individually, revealing his face. Both his camouflage and his surroundings make the spectator feel he is a fantastic or a mysterious misanthropist. Why this change and what did you plan to investigate in this work?

Gilberto’s Place comes from a specific case in Uruguay: the escape and capture of Colonel Gilberto Vázquez, later ousted. He had been one of the heads of intelligence during the military dictatorship. There are components of spectacle in the episode starred by Vázquez. After he was arrested, and as he was awaiting deportation to Argentina, he escaped to a Military Hospital and was caught again. What really caught my attention was that when he was arrested he was in disguise, “camouflaged,” as a beggar. The event, greatly broadcast by the Uruguayan media, was what triggered this work, in which I investigate my own fantasies regarding the event. It shows an almost ritual moment, a state of reflection of this person, vanished in his solitude, hidden, abandoned by his peers. It is the return to a savage state, and what we observe is the result of this process.

Can the constant presence of camouflage in your work be seen as a symbol of the need the contemporary man has to “make himself seem” so as to be able to comply with the rules of our times? Needing a “second skin” to survive in their medium?

To me, camouflage is a very important symbol, with a very great personal load. Very intimate, I could say, due to the fact that in my life, due to different circumstances, I developed an almost chameleon-like capacity to adapt to different means. But it is only a cover. It is a metaphor of self-reflection: different difficult circumstances of my life helped me develop the capacity to camouflage myself “into the other.” These circumstances are particularly related to exile and to the necessity of living amidst cultures that are very different from mine. Living in Sweden now, the “height” of camouflage is when a Swede thinks that I am native, which is really an involuntary effect, not something I sought.

From a very young age you lived the bitter fruit of dictatorship and exile. While you developed work on camouflage, did you notice these dynamics or did these interpretations arise after the critique?

In the beginning, there was attraction to something that would become the aesthetics of illusion. To me it was fascinating, in the sense of visualizing an imminent albeit hidden danger. That is, in the beginning there was a very strong aesthetic load, but with my own evolution and a little influence of certain critiques I started reflecting about other components that are part of this and relating them to more personal things, like my own life and my personal relations with the organized and institutionalized world of violence.

What project are you working on now?

I am developing a project called Juba. It is going to be an installation based on images I found on the Internet. In Baghdad there is a sniper who operates under the codename Juba and films the exact moment he shoots American soldiers, often killing them. The material itself, the way it is shown on the Internet, accomplishes the function of providing propaganda in favor of the Iraqi insurgence. It is evident that this sniper, in reality, is many snipers, but what the video intends to establish is the illusion that there is a superpatriot who, alone, is in charge of making justice against the enemy invader. In this case, Juba is a metaphor that makes us think of Rambo, the fantasy of the Iraqi supersoldier. What interests me in this material is not what Juba does, but what he sees and what we see too: an American soldier in a street in Baghdad, standing, on guard, doing nothing. And, in this moment of apparent calm, a shot is heard and the soldier falls. I am replaying these videos with the help of puppets, in a very exact way. But, as always, when you are working with this kind of material, there is distortion that has to do with the doubts and fantasies it causes. It is not enough for me to see what Juba sees. I want to see more, and the only way of accomplishing that is taking his place.

You have a work on suicide. What is it about?

It is a project that does not refer precisely to suicide, but to suicide attacks. For the time being, it is on hold. It is based on reports coming from different conflict areas, specially the experiences of young Chechens responsible for attacks in Moscow. The idea is to discuss with Swedish teens what ideas or facts could lead them to commit a suicide attack in their country and, from that discussion, produce a series of videos that show these “attacks.” From the psychological point of view, the work presents a very complicated problem for the youths who are going to participate, which makes the preparation process much longer than I would have thought. At the moment, all the material is in the hands of psychologists, who are going to help me define the way to develop the project without it representing a traumatic experience to those participating.

What sources of information inspire you most: news, the Internet, fiction, history?

At the moment, more than anything, I am interested in two narratives that have been helping to bring me closer to images that are hard to overcome, and that help me in my development as an artist by showing me a work strategy. It is the Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, and Adolf, by Osamu Tezuka. The book by Amis narrates the life of a German doctor in the 1980s, in New York. He has an irrational way of acting, but after reading for a while it becomes clear that the facts take place in the opposite direction of time, from the present to the past. Thus, he breaks up with a woman, seduces her, and ends up meeting her. It all starts making sense when the book arrives at World War II, and the character travels to Germany to work as a doctor in Auschwitz. As the story moves backwards in time, he will not help to kill, but will take people out of common graves to take them to the ovens that will return them to life; the Bank of Germany will make a donation in gold, the doctors will place it back in people’s mouths, and so on until all the families have been reunited and are back in their cities of origin. This narrative led me, for the first time in my life, to think about the workers in a concentration camp as people. Amis is not a revisionist, but he leads us to think about another possible history—instead of the one we are used to hearing and suffering—with just one elegant maneuver, telling the narrative as if it were a film being shown backwards. Adolf, by Osamu Tezuka, is a graphic novel that tells the stories of Adolf Kamil, a Jewish boy who was born in Japan, Adolf Kaufman, a boy with Japanese and German blood who lives in Germany, and Adolf Hitler. In addition to featuring fantastic elements, the story shows a Japanese outlook on World War II and the Nazis.

In an interview to Uruguayan daily La República, you said that you were building a “calligraphy of violence.” How is it being composed?

The “calligraphy of violence” has two levels. At the time of the interview to journalist Nelson Di Maggio, I referred to a work that now belongs to the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It is a work in progress, composed of books. At the moment, there are two volumes: Kalashnikov and M16. The term calligraphy refers to the simple fact that these two books are “written” by weapons. A binder prepared two volumes following my sketch. Each block of sheets was submitted to gunfire from one of these weapons that, when crossing it, generated a specific “calligraphy.” I am preparing the third volume, which will be “written” by the precision rifle of a sniper. Now, speaking about my work in more general terms, “calligraphy of violence” refers more and more to mimicking the gaze of those who express themselves through the most violent means we know today—generally national or transnational armies, in defense of national or transnational interests.

The origins of the work of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena come from early on: precisely three and a half decades ago, when the artist was two years old and was deprived of living with his mother for almost six months, as she had been arrested for political reasons. Some time later, when he was eight, his whole family moved to Sweden, escaping the horrors of the Uruguayan dictatorship.

Five years of exile in a completely different culture forged the essence of disquiet that the author now makes into art. Dissolution of difference, the creation of false realities, and notions of homeland and collective identity are central points of his work.

With the return of democracy to Uruguay, the Fabra Guemberenas returned to their homeland, but Juan-Pedro had already brought from his experience abroad two reasons to return to Nordic lands: his interest for art and the need to live in Sweden under different circumstances. This was for the adjustment of personal accounts: the replacement of a “mental prison,” in which he was forced to dive in his childhood, for the liberty to start another life there, completely decided.

The gateway into the new Swedish phase was the disputed Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, where, from 1997 to 2002, he studied to become a painter. Surrounded by an avalanche of war pictures that had started circling the world due to the North-American invasion of Afghanistan, he decided to use these documents as a starting point for the work that would later catapult him into the international scenery.

From painting to photography and video, Fabra’s gaze crystallized in True Colours the aesthetics that became his trademark. Presented at the 50th Venice Biennale, in 2003, under the concept of Dreams and Conflicts – The Dictatorship of the Viewer, the work reproduced Swedish army members in military maneuvers, in minute detail and through repeated actions, but at no moment can one see reasons to justify the effort of their activities.

“We were faced with a historic moment and from then on would be flooded with television news of war. This led me to think that, as an artist, I did not need to be subjugated by these images, as, in the same way, I could also produce them,” he said in the interview for this FF>>Dossier. “When I started working on True Colours, what most inspired me was what I saw on television news. This was the reason why I found it necessary to use video to speak about that world.”

The option for the electronic medium did not mean he was abandoning his pictorial roots. In all of Fabra’s works, the sequences are carefully composed, colors are carefully studied, and the effects seek to take the gaze of the observer to a degree of total absorption of the “video-screen” that is presented to him/her, without this meaning, however, guarantees that what one sees is, in fact, what is being shown.

Within these purposes, camouflage is to the artist not only a tool of defense and attack used by the characters in his work, but an element catalyzing the aesthetic ideal that interests him. “Since it arose, somehow, camouflage has travelled hand in hand with the history of painting of each country. Studying camouflage in each army is studying a picture chain in these places. From this point of view, and with my painter gaze, I feel attracted to invert the aesthetic process that generates camouflage. I start looking at camouflaged soldiers and, from there, I try to imagine the landscape, what elements I have to create and add to have the final picture.”

In this exercise, the disciplining of human beings curiously takes place amidst the rebelliousness of nature, and it is on cliff sides, on high mountains, and within dense forests that the Uruguayan’s soldiers will blend into the landscape, becoming minerals, vegetables, or animals in a pure state and perfectly blended into their surroundings.

Not only armies are part of Fabra’s menu of investigations; scouts also appear in the artist’s work. In Scout Project, through the usual night photographs, mysteriously and fascinatingly lighted, one sees children prepared for a period of survival in the jungle. Executed after True Colours, the project intended to expand on the approach of strategies of discipline and domination of nature starting at the most tender of ages. “In my head, between operating an axe skillfully and using a greater weapon there may be just a small step,” said the artist.

Married to an architect and dedicated to the task of raising two small children over the last three years, the author says that he is using a pause of “minimum artistic production” to reflect on his life and work. Living in Stockholm, where he is working on a course on camouflage, he is developing three projects in Uruguay, which he visited in April. The first is Graf Spee, a work that he is developing in partnership with artists Jan Håfström and Carl Mikael von Hausswolff and that is being shot in the country.

In 2008, Fabra is going to present an installation at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, Uruguay, in addition to organizing his first large exhibition in his homeland, where there will be recent and ancient works. He is also working on an ample photographic project that is based on a tourist publication from Uruguay, produced by the military regime in the 1980s.

“In the toughest moment for the country, what they wanted to show the world was an updated image of the old dream of ‘Latin American Switzerland.’ In the same way as this book establishes another reality, in my version I am inventing a country that not necessarily shows or represents what Uruguay is today.”

Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales 
The Uruguayan exhibition venue shows its new curatorial line.

Royal Academy of Art of Sweden
The art school in which Fabra graduated as a painter was established in 1773 by King Gustav III (1746-1792), one of the most celebrated “enlightened absolutists” in history, who also established what is today the National Museum of Fine Arts of Sweden.

Calligraphy of violence
In an interview to Uruguayan daily paper La República, on February 27, 2005, the artist speaks about the start of his career, when he was selected to participate in the Venice Biennale, and about the purposes of his work.