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| The documentary videos of Filipa César (Oporto, 1975) portray automatic collective social behaviour. Since taking part in Manifesta 2002 in Frankfurt she has been present at numerous international events that have made her a high-profile artist. Now, at Santa Mònica, she presents an installation with three hitherto unshown videos, two of which have been specially made for Barcelona. To mark the occasion, we’re publishing an interview with her by Miguel von Hafe Pérez (curator, Oporto, 1967) about her interests and her work. |
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| MIGUEL VON HAFE PÉREZ |
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This is not
the first time you’ve worked on a commission —that
is, that you’ve been asked to produce a work
for a specific context. Do you like working like
this? How do you tend to react? And how does a
piece produced in these conditions fit into your
overall body of work?
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| My work doesn’t depend on a specific context. It’s nomadic, like me; I’m more interested in the process of observation in itself than in what I’m observing, and I’m more dependent on the chance circumstances in which a situation attracts my attention and awakens my desire to explore. So it’s not really a site-specific work, |
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because although it’s the result of a reaction-reflection in the here and now, it doesn’t depend on the place where it is produced to continue existing.
Producing a piece commissioned for a specific context is always a challenge and one that I particularly like if that context is unknown. This interest in materializing works for spaces that are unfamiliar to me (this is the case of Transmediterraneo) has more to do with the desire to understand how my perception process functions, first in the face of the unknown and then of the familiarity constructed on the basis of recourse to this place or situation, than with the desire to show what we see and express a direct opinion of it. It’s a bit like Wim Wenders’ latest film, Land of Plenty, which portrays a Vietnam vet in the United States looking for clues to discover Islamic terrorists but is obviously more about the character’s paranoia than supposed terrorists. What I mean by that is that when asked to produce a piece for a given context, I try to find situations that attract my attention for a particular reason, be it aesthetic, political, social or a complete mixture, which combine with my prejudices to challenge my perception and my construction-deconstruction of knowledge.
The video Aura, from 2004, which is one of the works you present at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, introduces a very strange effect into the observation of the behaviour of the characters portrayed. This is an element you explored in Berlin Zoo (2001-2003). To what extent do you use this behaviour to portray the image of a society based on disturbing conventionalism? To put it another way, do you think that your work, over and above its evident elements of perceptive perturbation and formal eloquence, can be construed as critical comment on contemporary social behaviour?
Yes, I think it can, but it’s important to specify
that we’re looking at contemporary Western European
social behaviour. We’re living in politically complex
times, which are clearly reflected in our everyday life.
We are becoming increasingly distant from an awareness,
both individual and cultural, of ourselves. Our society
is based on simulacrum and the stimulus of artificial
desires —the achievement of which only leads to emptiness
and depression— and on the confusion of being
and having. I understand and use the documentary, a non-fictional
genre, as a possible alternative to address these themes
in an approximate, individualized way, as opposed to
our alienated global behaviour. I’m also interested
in showing, concisely and factually, how we in the West
can also be or seem strange in our own eyes. One of today’s
big controversies has to do with the strangeness created
by differences, be they religious, cultural, ethnic or
whatever. I’m interested in constructing elements
that generate a gaze from the outside at our everyday
behaviour, without having to stage or construct something
fictional.
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| In
this respect, my usual process is to study
what is going on implicitly behind given
urban situations in the West where there
is an element of reference or reaction. In
the case of Aura, the main element
that is the object of contemplation is the
Reichstag building, home to the German Parliament.
In order to address the non-sense that
this protagonist organizes around it, I invert
the viewpoint —I turn the subject who
is looking at the building into an object.
The best comment made about Berlin Zoo, Part 02 was when someone said: ‘the people in it don’t just look frightened, they really are.’ If we think that the situation was filmed in front of an information panel showing train times at Zoologischegarten station, there is no real reason for suspicion. Yet the expressions shown in the video are apparently of fear, not just urban stress. As Jean Luc Godard said, ‘it is not a reflection of reality, but rather the reality that is produced by a reflection’. As I said before, the important thing is not so much the behaviour as the reflective mechanism that is sometimes triggered off by the presentation of that behaviour.
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| Filipa César, Transmediterraneo, 2004 |
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In the same kind of way, Aura presents a strange situation that raises questions about the veracity of the phenomenon of an apparent group hypnotic state. It’s true that much of this is due to the editing, with its recurrence and repetition, but it also involves something of the phenomenon that is being documented.
Aura is also a comment on the new fetishism created around the major present-day architectural icons. After the symbolic force of cathedrals and buildings related to secular power, modernity seems to need to reaffirm itself by means of buildings in which the space of democratic representation —of political power or leisure as a factor of social harmonization— becomes a determinant factor. How do you view this situation? Are you interested in architecture as an analytical factor in the conditions of development of contemporary societies? The leitmotif of your creative career seems to lie in combining public and private space in a visual narrative continuum that produces a more complex reception than might be represented by a simple ‘visual trap’.
Big buildings and symbols of power —be it political or religious, or both at once— have always been the subject of admiration and veneration; there’s no big change there. Aura is perhaps more of a comment on the way in which this fetishism is explored and on how it is experienced when brought up to date by the technical possibilities of means of reproduction. For me, Aura is a very complex work because it is a mechanism for the creation of associations rather than a ‘visual trap’. To put it another way, this trap exists as the germ of the work whose first victim is me. When I walked by the Reichstag and sat down on its steps, with my back to it, I was taken by surprise by a strange choreographic show. The first few seconds were an absolutely unreal experience, but then the strangeness wore off. Normally we forget this type of experiences as they blend into the edges of the conformist unconscious. Having recourse to these initial impulses and exploring them means having a more immediate, instinctive consciousness of perception. Of course, when I began the capturing process, various types of associations emerged, such as the Jewish rituals beside the Wailing Wall (where people step backwards from it so as not to turn their back on it), or the ideas of Walter Benjamin about distance from the object of contemplation and how the means of reproduction dilute it, or the relation between distance and aura, the veneration of political power embodied in architecture, etc. Aura represents the intensification of recurrence, achieved using rhythm and repetition, that can trigger off (clearly, I hope) these reflections and associations. If I had wanted to find answers to the questions my work sometimes raises, I would have chosen a political or social career.
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The theme of globalized access to technical means of reproduction also brings us onto the way people deal with and redefine their own concept of what is private. I think that there’s a desensitization with regard to what may or may not become public. I particularly notice this when collecting images in the street: pedestrians seem to be increasingly inured and indifferent to the fact that their image can be captured and reproduced. What probably happens when I use images taken in public space is that I present a personified or alternative viewpoint of certain mass phenomena that are usually only presented in statistical form.
The exhibition title, ‘Transmediterraneo’, presents the geographical and cultural space of the Mediterranean as a backdrop to your latest work: are we to interpret this as a kind of nostalgia on the part of someone from the south who has spent the last few years in northern Europe?
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| Filipa César, Tunis, 2004 |
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No, not at all. I don’t
draw a line between northern and southern Europe, perhaps
because I feel at home in various parts of Europe, or
more precisely because I feel just as foreign in all
of them. No, this title evokes a different border, more
related to the issue of East and West —in this
case between the south of Europe and North Africa. Transmediterraneo is
the name of one of the works I include in the exhibition,
suggested by a Spanish line of ferries operating in the
Mediterranean (Transmediterránea). The name had
taken root in my mind some time before I visited Barcelona,
for the number of strange words it contains (transe, mediter, medi, mediterráneo, terra, erra, neo,
etc.). The curiosity I felt as a result of the associations
arising from this name prompted me to make several voyages
by ferry around the Mediterranean (between Spain, Italy
and North Africa). Transmediterraneo could be
described as a dream made of the most physical, real
stuff of dreams: sleep.
What do you put first in your video soundtracks: the general atmosphere of the work or the way it breaks down rhythmically?
Both. By that I mean that a rhythm creates an atmosphere, which is why these two elements function in symbiosis rather than alternately. In Rhythmanalysis Henri Lefebvre writes that the analyst of rhythm cannot take part in the rhythm, that in order to observe the rhythm of a situation he must remain outside it. The analyst of rhythm who becomes involved in the atmosphere created by the rhythm ceases to observe it and becomes part of it (only in one instance is it possible to both participate in the rhythm and observe it, and that’s Zen meditation, when the aim consists in observing your breathing, which is part of you, without changing it). Rhythm is fundamental and it’s present in all of my work. My appropriation of certain sounds (whether the original sounds that accompany the images or snatches of music that I appropriate, combine and repeat) is fundamental to an awareness of the impasse that is produced by a process of analysis. It’s like a cracked record or when you repeat a word so many times that its meaning becomes lost in the strangeness of how it sounds. Rhythm, even if it is apparently repetitive and unvarying, provokes the latent updating and evolution of perception of that which is observed.
I put sound to the work in an attempt to create an atmosphere that traps spectators, guiding them in the situation with which they are confronted. In the case of Transmediterraneo, the atmosphere is not so different from the real situation, since the sound was edited using the original noises of the ship’s engine.
In Aura, the sound is a mix of the original atmospheric sound and a sampling I made of a CD track by Radiohead, OK Computer. In this case, the sound has an enormous influence on the reading of the images: the atmosphere is created practically entirely by sound, leaving spectators no space to construct their own alternative. In general I like the soundtrack to have a more subtle, discreet role, and to emerge from the elements that first give me the material, but in this case the orchestration headed straight for the ‘supernatural’, not just because of the hypnotic withdrawal of the characters, but also because of the title that I’d already decided, almost at the start, to give the piece.
To close, tell us something about Tunis, the video you present here for the first time.
Tunis is the capturing of a Mediterranean
landscape through the window of a ship sailing from
Tunisia to Italy. The salty sediment on the lower
frame and the thin line of water swaying from side
to side create a microcosmic simulacrum of the landscape
seen in the distance (by means of the enlargement
that is only possible using a camera). In this case,
there is no sound editing, the work contains the
original sounds of ship life —the noise of
the engine, the television and people talking. This
atmosphere is interrupted various times by the PA
system, over which the voice of an Italian woman
calls out various Arabic names, with obvious pronunciation
problems. |
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