Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Random notes, random sites…

There is something quite exciting about being able to work on ones own and not having the burden of academic conventions or critical expectations that one can take too seriously as one proceeds to make or observe something in the world around oneself. One feels a bit adrift but at the same time liberated and able. In your mind, you suspect that the work could be about who you are rather than what you represent in those other narratives. Introspection becomes defiant rather than passive and random observations become strategic. One is trying to un-see and see at the same time. Caribbean society can be perceived as one of the first sites of Colonial construction in this hemisphere. The beginning of a certain problematic relationship with the mythology of Modernity in which we are still perceived as either units of labour or as units of consumption in the global conversation. That is why these industrial sites were founded in the first place. Little else was/is required or expected. From the late 1970's, the satellite dish became as prominent in the landscape as the much represented coconut tree. One was brought to our shores by boats or by the waves via global currents changing our physical landscape to become a beguiling symbol of the “Tropical” and all its indulgences; the other came through today's electronic media, the air waves. This not news though, to anyone who has navigated the post “structural adjustment” arena with its readily available and wide choice of cable channels as well as automatic weapons. When I had to write this text I was immediately stumped. Even if I stopped looking the thing kept on moving. Islands are circumstances in flux. They remain as sites, where insularity and isolation intersect and negotiate with openness and confluence with the wider world all at the same time. Rivers flow out to the open seas, the winds and waves work on the shores. Boats, planes and people come and go daily. Each time one proceeds to write something there is the sense that the circumstance is shifting. Consequently, it is not surprising that there is quite a lot of video production and technology in an island like Trinidad, where I reside, for example, and in most islands of the southern Caribbean. Each island has many production facilities and at least one or two television stations and even more. Most are either privately owned or partially state owned. Most production is focused on state objectives driven by the political regime of the moment and quite heavily by advertising agencies for the propagation of local and international brand names. There is the occasional music video for the local musician, the beauty pageant or talent competition, the news, the attempts at local soap operas and the usual cries/laments for support of local video and film production. Most of this began in the early to mid-1960's because with Independence came television as our window to the outside world and with it came further instructions for Development and Modernity. There is scant space and support for video production outside of these accepted domains of rationalization. There is no dream space. There is no validating or validated space to see oneself or to tell ones story. They are not seen as required. There are no formal or informal locations for it to occur or to be disseminated. So as the technology to produce video work becomes more and accessible through digital cameras and cheaper software, the physical and critical space for this work remains remote and inaccessible. There are occasional local film festivals that show videos in the intervals but most of this work is seen away from the islands in situations like Videobrasil. In fact, these artists presented here are not that familiar with each other or with each other's work. Only one of them is formally trained in film and video production and so has a captive audience through working for the state media where he lives. This means that the connections, conversations and the narratives which are unraveling in these works are only now occurring to all of us, even myself, in the process of putting this project together. What these artists have in common is the similarity of conditions in which they operate. Their responses are less about representation than it is about articulating themselves with available technology. A critical perspective comes into shape as a consequence of their investigations. A few years ago Trinidadian artist Mario Lewis had to have lens implants to correct his failing eyesight. In the process of doing medical examinations, he began to see his predicament in metaphorical terms. The use of his own personal experience as a metaphor and his “self” as a sign is not an approach that we could take as given in a society so at odds with the image of its self. What are we to make of the idea of the “blind spot”, the name of one of his exhibitions? As the artist put it, “an area where vision or understanding is lacking”, one in which we suffer “the inability to recognize or respond coherently and/or effectively?” So we became part of his “visual examination”, in which he wanted to “usher the viewer into critical introspection”, a space where our “visual perception and sociological conditioning” were questioned. The image of the artist having his eyes tested referenced Rodchenko's image of Osip Brik as well as the “Masks and Mirrors” by Lygia Clark, therefore placing his process of investigation where it intersects with diverse but interconnected narratives. Lewis documented people and spaces in Cuba and the United States on their days of independence and respective revolutions and they blend into each other in disorienting ways. Natalie Butler from Jamaica asks, through her video investigations: “How do we connect with our surroundings? Usually we are moving too fast and our senses are too overloaded to properly digest what is there all the time. Slowing down, using technology to observe rather than reconfigure enables me to remain focused on the essence of what is.” In her works there is less stylization and more blunt and direct recording of sites and events such as her receding shadow in a pool or a static streetlight. On a recent visit to the island of Aruba, I came face to face with General Richard Amaya Cook, an eccentric, who was immediately recognizable to me because I had seen Remy Jungerman's video in Rotterdam a year before. There was no mention of him or his fortifications and look-out tower in the tourist guide book. Just as the General had delineated his own territory, Jungerman had reconfigured the markers of recognition for reading where we were. I now knew on a drive to San Nicholas that I was there as soon as I saw the General going about his business. Jungerman has often speculated about chaos and the random nature of modern technology and communication systems, which alarm and intrigue him at the same time. Osaira Muyale's bold-faced strategy of recording random sensations and reflections is an important means of asserting herself. In much of the work being produced in this region text/word and image become fused together as components of one symbolic mechanism. It is our only defense against a historical and media construction that persistently renders us silent. Muyale's notations define the shape or condition of that silence. Yao Ramesar's works shift unselfconsciously between documentary and the fantastic. His work often asks us whether a process of documentation can become the means to construct a vocabulary of self-expression. Ramesar's documentary process is often a highly subjective and stylized response to his subjects and the space they occupy. He moves around, and around with his subject rather than trying to fix it in one spot or to assume that it can be pinned down. Documentation and self-expression conflate not so much to distort or to compete with the circumstance but to grapple with how he experiences them in time and space. This work, like much contemporary Caribbean work, is generative and evaluative. It simply begins to speak; to tell its story and thereby expressing its varied points of view. It is not an enterprising effort aimed at inclusion into other narratives. It may simply intersect with them because of the circumstances or because of the way today's wider and more dispersed curatorial nets are cast.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 257-259, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.