ANRI SALA
Missing Landscape & Promises: A video installation February 20 – April 6, 2002
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Inagural exhibition of TRANS> area: First solo exhibition in New York: |
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MISSING LANDSCAPE Imaginary Interview with Anri Sala Nocturnes
“Anri Sala: Unfinished Histories” “Anri Sala: Images Never Sleep,” “Venice Biennale,” “Anri Sala” “Anri Sala,” [PROVIDE LINK]
“Anri Sala: Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris," “Beyond Translation," Guarded Chilhood Geographies MISSING LANDSCAPE
By Anri Sala —Anri Sala IMAGINARY INTERVIEW WITH ANRI SALA By Edi Muka
Edi Muka: It seems that there's a very subtle interconnecting line between your works in video, although they seem so different from each other. If we take into consideration for example some of them, like “Intervista”, “Nocturnes”, “Promises”, “The Missing Landscape”, or even “UomoDuomo”, they all involve something on the fatality and on the irreversibility of the things done. Further more, almost all of them speak about similar situations or common responsibilities, about their long term social impact, or the way in which such actions have inflicted our lives. How do you encounter your subjects? Do you have something in mind when you start working or you live it up to the pure chance to structure your work? Anri Sala: (seems a bit confused by the long introduction)… well, maybe you're right. I don't think I think too much on what you define as “interconnecting hidden line” of my works. Actually this is an interpretation of yours that might stand for it, or might not. It's interesting though to hear it even though I consider it as a twofold phenomena. On one side it gives a general insight to my work, which is useful of course, but on the other hand I can not accept it as an ultimate truth about it, because that would mean to touch the end and exhaust the sources for me. E.M.: Does this mean thus that you like to live it up to the casualty of things to create the basis for your work? A.S.: (no answer, moves his shoulders…) E.M.: Or do you consider it as a natural artistic praxis to be deliberately not fully aware of what your next project shall be. Or further, if this is true to some extent, maybe there's something in this practice which derives from your previous education and way of life in which you were brought up, and that has remained somewhere in your subconscious… A.S.: Maybe, but don't forget that now I function in a totally different system, a system in which one can not survive upon the standards of what you described above, that we both know very well. E.M.: Of course, I'm aware of that fact, but there might be a third way, which fuses the previous standards – non operative in the new system you function with – and the new ones, that are totally exhilarating and exhausting for the pace they impose on you – producing thus a new situation that allows you to be consciously unconscious in detecting the potentials for your work. A.S.: Uh… seems hard to follow but sounds correct. But still, what do you mean by the “interconnecting line” that has to do with fatality and the irreversibility of the things done, how can you relate the works one with the other within this framework? E.M.: Well, let's take for example all the works we mentioned above, that constitute an important part of your carrier. In “Intervista” you elaborate on a fatalistic situation of an entire nation that produced something everybody had to regret afterwards. There seems to be a missing link that caused that fatality, and everybody shares the same responsibility in these regards. Then you try to recreate this missing link by re-interviewing you mother in a different time and context. While in “Nocturnes”, the film is entirely threaded together by the idea of fatality. The smell of death is present all over it, although in a very subtle manner, which makes it more curios of course. Still, at first glance there seems to be a missing link between the two totally different characters, a link which you recreate very delicately by establishing common communicating points between their stories. If we consider “Promises” on the other hand, either in the text or in the script the presence of the ultimate action of fatality – the murdering – is obvious and directly stated, even though it is clear that this is not just for the sake of fatality in itself. In the meanwhile, the inability of the character to vest the features of the gangster and state the sentence, is the recreation (the invention) of the missing link that in this case interrupts the simple narratives of Fatality. This is also very present at the “Missing Landscape”, in which it's the subject itself and its image as well that has suggested what we're talking about so far… A.S.: (interrupts) Ok, ok, I got it, it's enough I guess. Even though I have to say that I don't consider myself as the artist of fatality. I imagine that you'd be commenting my other work “UomoDuomo” on the same terms right? E.M.: Absolutely not. I mean I don't consider you as the artist of fatality. I was just trying to trace a hidden subconscious line in your work, which seems to reflect a very contemporary issue and makes it so powerful and heavy, even when it seems light. But it's by no means that I'd define you as a “fatalistic artist”. But since you started talking about it, let's comment on your work “UomoDuomo”. A.S.: Yeah, what about it? E.M.: Well, first of all I think it does match and reflect the first topic of “the third way” in your creative process, that we touched upon at the beginning. As you've described the situation, you're in Milan to work on another project, and suddenly you encountered this old man at the Duomo. This shows that you allowed the case to propose you the work (previous educational standard), and you go for it, because you constantly need works (new system). A.S.: This is a bit too simplistic, almost banal, don't you think so? E.M.: It might sound so, but it has a good percentage of truth in it as well, doesn't it? A.S.: Ok, let's go on. E.M.: All right then. In my view this man does represent a great depiction of the condition of elderhood, as the quotation of the prize you were awarded with in Venice said, but not only. To go a bit back to our previous topic, (A.S. shakes his head chuckling), this man embodies a condition of fatality contained not only in himself and his age, but in the entire structure of the work. He does represent a fatalistic condition that doesn't have a come back, he can not restart, even if he was given the chance. On the other hand, he is filmed in a fatalistic context as well, which is the Duomo, a church, a cathedral. One might argue on this fact by saying that the cathedral is not a fatalistic space. I'd say that it is not only fatalistic, but it definitely is such in its essence. The whole idea behind it is, the religion itself suggests that only through a cathartic fatality – Death – one can gain what he's missing in this life, the Eternity. A.S.: And… E.M.: And furthermore, to continue the logic of your interview with Obrist, it is the presence of this man that defines the nature of the space. You mention for example the lady that stays at Les Halles and cleans the glass as it was hers, changing thus the belonging relationship of what you describe as “public property”. That's what the sequel of your film does as well: it changes the belonging and the context of the space you depict in your video through tracing just a few minutes from the life of a homeless guy. And you go further in this direction and name the work “UomoDuomo”, wiping thus out the borderline of belonging between the subject and the space; here one can no longer distinguish if it's the man that belongs to the space or it's this latter one that belongs to him. By shooting these frames of images you bring together two completely separate entities, the old man and the church and fuse them in such a way that it resembles a playing card, whichever side you turn it there's always one head up and one down, but the card remains the same. By doing this operation you change the dimension of the space, bringing it to a very human level. Normally Duomo imposes on you quite an impressive and authoritarian feeling, but at “UomoDuomo” you spoil the space of this quality. Strangely enough the reflection of light upon the wooden frame behind him creates the association of a luxury coffin that is waiting for the old man to finish his dream and wake up there where there's no end. While in the mean time, people moving in the background seem as mere walking ghosts or shadows. I guess you were very determined to keep it almost black and white and put no colors in it and as I can see from you previous interview it's crucial to you that the video has no sound. The space thus becomes some sort of shelter for the old man, the only secure place where nobody can disturb his sleep, not because they care about him, but because they care about the space and what it implies in itself. It is here I find that the Beckett like nature of this work that Obrist mentions and that you confirm comes up, in creating a non-defined situation out of two defined entities. A.S.: Well, yes I agree, even though I have to say that I feel a bit strange, because in an interview as far as I know, you're supposed to do the questions and I am supposed to give the answers, while here… E.M.: Oh yes, you're fully right. We can swap though and continue the right way. So… (Suddenly the power is off and the interview can not continue. Both of them stand up and walk out of the place to find another place where the power doesn't go off and continue the interview according to the standard.) Edi Muka
By Edi Muka Manifesta 3, Ljubljar, June 2000. (Revised) Anri Sala is a young Albanian artist of the 1990s generation who has successfully built up an artistic reputation. It is interesting to trace his development, since it is of importance not only for understanding his own work and personality but also for gaining a broader perspective on the general context of this development. Sala belongs to the generation of young Albanian artists who received their education after the system in Albania changed. He had already spent many years under the old regime in his early youth, and it was experiencing both situations from a different point of view that gave Anri Sala the opportunity to create his artistic position and come up with really interesting work. This development began during his student years with his loss of interest in painting and his research in video. A more complete work emerged in 1996 with his final graduate project, ‘The Tongue.' For 26 minutes the screen is invaded by a licking tongue, which spits and obsesses the viewer with its almost endless movement. In 1997, Anri Sala was given the opportunity to study at the Video Department of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Equipped with a rich cultural background from a land as different as Albania, he began to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the use of his medium. Consequently, his work began to take on a new profile. His first production, ‘Déjeuner avec Marubi,' is very shortbut intensely ironic. Continuing his interest and research into the social phenomena of his homeland, Sala selected two pieces of meaningful contextuality, the Marubi photo ‘Women in Shkodra dress' and a detail from Manet's ‘Dejeuner sur l'herbe.' With great irony, the artist addressed the issue of the body and sexuality, a typical taboo for the Albanian mentality. This work was immediately followed by a trilogy that does not contain the same sophistication or subtle irony. To a certain extent this is understandable, considering the dramatic and significant events in Albania in 1997, which explains the very strong political influence inthese pieces. It was only after some time that Anri Sala succeeded in attaining the full dimension of his earlier attempt to compress and describe his cultural reality and background. And this happened in his first film Intervista. It is in this film that exploring socially-oriented problems and addressing social taboos or phenomena becomes an important feature of Anri Sala's work. Beginning with the early video works mentioned above, Sala has shown a growing interest in these subjects and their development through the medium of video. ‘lntervista' tells a personal story but reaches the full dimensions of the Albanian universe. It is the personal story of every individual. To every Albanian, that historical sequence, excellently compressed by the artist, is a mute one, but it bears its heavy burden and casts its shadow into the present Albania. Following the same reflective line is the short film Nocturnes'. Once again, the body of the work is built on a story, but this story is not the defining narrative as in Intervista. The video camera itself works in a new way as part of the story-creation process, testifying to the artist's higher professional maturity. The story is a metaphor of the Balkan situation, but nothing is told directly by any of the characters. This gives the film a universal reflective dimension in which the value and devaluation of human life are shown in a powerful manner that conveys a sense of permanent anxiety to the viewer. It is the kind of film, I believe, that speaks differently to people from different cultural backgrounds. The artist has chosen a rather intriguing way of adding up the emotional weight of the story. Avoiding a simple storyline (which would make it a mere documentation of the events in somebody's life), Sala de-fragments the narrative line of the film by cutting and pasting bits of the story as it passes from one character to another. This is a very refined solution that creates confusion in the viewer. On the other hand, it is this solution that makes you lose the limited notion of a personal story and makes you perceive the story ‘globally.' As in his other works, of course, a slice of irony is present here as well, but it is a very subtle and sad irony. On one side there's somebody speaking about killing people, or people being killed around him. trying to describe the noise and the colours of death. On the other side there's another guy speaking about common, even banal things like the life of his fish and his worries about what might happen to them. Even the opening of the film is really strange: somebody talking about how beautiful his fish are, contrasted with a pair of hands and a voice describing how he killed four people on an exact date and hour. The irony here gets very political but still remains very indirect. It seems as though we have in front of us two completely different worlds: Western and non-Western. Each of them seems to live on its own, without knowing or understanding the other. The artist gives a ‘nonsense' word to Jacques, whose only worry is about his fish, and a shivering story to Denis and his nightmare. Jacques says, “I always felt like a Martian,” which makes the irony sharper, while the play-station views from Denis are even sarcastic. Both stories find a perfect match, however, when they mingle with each other. Watching them tell their stories, we can lose track of where one stops and the other starts. But slowly we are able to trace the common thread that links the two: “humans are not violent, but they are taught how to develop their cruelty. When you've got a gun, you've got to take care of it. There they tell you: you work with your gun, you sleep with it, you have sex with it! A gun is normal. So when you get here and you don't have it, it changes you!” A beautiful attempt to build a bridge of understanding between different cultures and territories, Denis' words point to a crucial moment that indicates differences and similarities at the same time. “And the sound here is really stressful because it's everywhere, and then sometimes it stops and it's awful! And when it stops I say to myself, oh shit, it's a disaster, they're all going to die!” At this point the words are no longer mere irony. It is here that the balance is changed and the phrase makes you feel like rushing out and getting a breath of fresh air. The artist's careful choice of characters and the way they are followed during the film almost pulls you inside them, making you feel the same feelings and experience the same nightmares and anxieties. "If I write about something that happened 15 years ago," says Sala, "it's much easier in Albanian. If I write down an idea that concerns me now or that I've had in the last few years it's probable I will write it in French, but there are no rules." Sala is not deterred by geographic boundaries, having made films all over the world, from Milan and Tirana to Tourcoing (France), North Carolina and now Iceland--although, strangely, never in Paris. But as he moves further into unknown territory, the works seem to become more abstract, and the narratives more obscure. The thoughts and words that cannot easily be translated between disparate languages and cultures turn into mere sounds, especially in Lakkat (2004), which was shot in Senegal. Enveloped in semidarkness, one of two African schoolboys hesitantly repeats unfamiliar words enunciated by his teacher in their native tongue, Wolof, alternating with the occasional stirrings of butterflies and moths on a fluorescent light. Subtitles flashing at the foot of the screen reveal Sala's chosen text: an array of Wolof phrases and words describing varying shades between white and black as approximated in other languages. While the boy chants "Nuul, Bu nuul, Ku nuul kukk, Bu nuul kukk," the English titles read "Dark, a dark thing, a very dark thing, a very dark one." Because the Senegalese language has words akin to some in French, the subtitles in Paris corroborated many of the Senegalese sounds; toubab (meaning "European" or "white person" in Wolof) became toubib in French (slang for "doctor"), whereas the British version exhibited at London's Hauser & Wirth gallery translated toubab as "Whitey," losing the mimicry of sound but giving a more accurate interpretation. Perhaps Sala intended to add this racial dimension to the work, casting himself or the viewer as a white outsider looking toward Africa as alien or "other." Or maybe the connection between "light" and "pale-skinned," for example, merely surfaced in the process of translating a child's recitation into French, English and German. Then again, perhaps Sala engineered this entire "gray" area. After all, the title word, lakkat, which in the French becomes charabia (gibberish) and in English "outlandish," more closely signifies "one whose native tongue is different from the language of the place where he is." In the absence of an absolute meaning, the rhythmic sound and captioning lend to the film a staccato, abstract poetry. Since Intervista, Sala has moved toward using language and words for hypnotic repetition or as an allusive obstruction to clear meaning. However, the problem of words did not lead to an abandonment of narrative. In the 15-minute work titled Dammi i colori (Give Me the Paints), 2003, Sala returns to a semi-documentary style for an interview with his former mentor, the painter Edi Rama, now mayor of Tirana. Rama's utopian vision for the city involves covering the exteriors of many of the run-down apartment buildings with bold, bright shapes, transforming house painters into hard-edge abstractionists. Apart from Dammi i colori, the half of Sala's production routinely described as "documentary" was not represented in the Paris-Hamburg show. The works that were on view brought to mind the self-deprecating Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard by Jorge Luis Borges in 1967-68, the audiotapes of which (much like the footage in Intervista) were thought lost for over 30 years and only recently found, transcribed and published. In a state of semi-blindness--Borges could only appreciate amorphous patches of yellow (a comparison with Sala's Ghostgames seems appropriate here)--the elderly writer described poetry as "word-music (or perhaps word-magic) of sense and sound," an apt description of Lakkat. And Sala could have been thinking of Borges when he said of his search for an apt translator for the passages of Lakkat, "I need to find someone who knows the art of making one word speak several times." In the lectures, Borges discussed the futility of translation and advocated the immediacy of storytelling, though he did so in a groping, meandering style, perhaps because he gave the talks without any notes. Sala shares those preoccupations with the untranslatable and with immediacy, as achieved by digital footage, as well as a seemingly unedited approach, for his camera may dwell on unmoving or unremarkable scenes for long periods of time. Although it appears that the artist leaves in more than he takes out, Gregor Muir, a curator of the current Tate Modern show that includes Sala, argues that he actually is a very skilled editor who "entices our own observations" without imposing his vision. Sala's work represents a separate and specific reality, in which he may suggest the rules of the game or attempt a translation but never reveals the final score or discloses any answers to his riddles. "Entre chien et loup," curated by Laurence Bosse, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Garimorth, was shown at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Arc [Mar. 25-May 16], and traveled to the Deichtorhallen Hamburg [May 14-Aug. 1]. It was accompanied by a 200-page illustrated catalogue with essays by the curators and other contributors. Sala had a solo show in London at Hauser & Wirth [June 3-July 17]. His work is included in "Time Zones: Recent Film and Video," curated by Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir, Tate Modern, London [Oct. 6, 2004-Jan. 2, 2005]. Sala's first 35mm film, Now I see, commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago, is currently on view there [Oct. 21, 2004-Jan. 30, 2005]. His videos and photos were at Marian Goodman, New York [Oct. 12-Nov. 13]. Ossian Ward is a freelance art writer and editor based in London. COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group “Astonishing Disillusionment,” Manifesta 3, June 2000. (Revised) by Nicolaus Schafhausen The crisis of confidence in which both filmic as well as photographic images find themselves – which did not begin with the digital revolution – forms part of the standard topics of contemporary art. The visual has long since stopped serving as a guarantee for a stable referent. Yet with Anri Sala, the thematicization of the now ambiguous visible is considerably more complex. In his 1998 video Intervista, the medium of film as a preserver of the real is presented not as a manipulation, but rather as a semantically open structure, the interpretation of which makes distinctions via the (re)construction of the past. For these reasons I'd like to limit myself in this text on Sala's work primarily to his most well-known piece, Intervista, not least because I consider this work exemplary of his subsequent video work up until now. Pictures don't lie, but they are silent. This makes them susceptible to narrative pocketing and visual indifference. Yet it is precisely in the knowledge surrounding these strategies of uncoding the visually factual – and this is what's special about Intervista – that Anri Sala insists on the testimonial powers of the filmic image, and the historicity writ large upon it. By reconstructing the missing soundtrack, putting language into the image, and trusting in the evidence of the word, the pictures reveal what has essentially always been there. But other works, such as ‘Nocturnes' from 1999 and ‘Byrek' from 2000 (which are also being screened in this exhibition at De Appel, his most comprehensive thus far), are characterized by the fact that, despite a specific spatial interest, as well as the creation of defined environments as such, and particularly by the limiting of past and present, they symbolize the possible future. As his works structurally insist upon space and time, on geography in relation to the past and the present, this raw material reconfigures the spatial-temporal parameters. In the works of Anri Sala, space and time become almost pliably visible and perceptible categories. After objects in cinema had exchanged their visibility for their meaning, and their presence for the dynamics of history, it was only a matter of time before artists who work with the media of film and video would latch onto the dynamics of meaning. In this regard, the work of Anri Sala appears to me as nearly exemplary when it concerns the constitution of new and contemporary developments in the current production of art. When the Albanian native Anri Sala changed apartments, he found a roll of 16-mm film which showed a TV segment from an interview that his mother, the leader of the communist ‘youth alliance' from the 1970s, gave to Albanian state television. Back then, the images and the sound were recorded separately from one another; on this roll, the soundtrack was missing. Intervista (which means ‘interview') is about the search for language that has been lost, and this search for language is at the same time a search for one's own identity. The work of this Albanian links, as biographical investigation, the individual and the collective quests for identity and history. Provoked by this found filmic document, Sala achieves an astonishing work of reconstruction. It is primarily the migrants from the first and second generations who, as artists, have considerably and increasingly influenced the European art world over the past two years. It is the local points of reference, and, in old-fashioned terms, the loss of the homeland, that these artists have successfully implanted into the Western art world. With the fall of communism, and at the latest with the Gulf War, the Europe of today is no longer divided into East and West. The political notion of the third world has also been settled by this point; as George Schoellhammer so, clearly puts it, “the world is now divided into the West and the rest.” Anri Sala's interest in his own transnational biography, in the ‘domestic exoticism' that this represents, is hardly a romantic one. To have what is one's own serve as the occasion for aesthetic artistic production, in an era in which the private is now little more than a fantasy when confronted with the reality of the technical and legalistic possibilities of surveillance, can also be seen as a form of resistance. Especially in the light of the artistic production of the past decade, in which the aesthetic artistic practice has often been displaced by criticism of institutions, of the media or of representation, artists such as Anri Sala can today ask themselves whether their aesthetic work and thus artistic practice possibly contains a repressive relation to itself. Like other artists with comparable biographies, he directly brings into the artistic discourse his cultural capital of the familial and social experiences of break and continuity, life in a historical construction that's different than most others, and the complex network of the transnational's experience. What's special about Intervista is that Sala convincingly manages to place the individual experiences in a collective context. This distinguishes his work from many other productions by younger artists, who also investigate concepts of subjectivity and identity, yet often without reference to their positioning within a social field. The topics don't usually address the social and cultural context, but instead all too narcissistically deal with sleeping, dancing, drinking, youth, and beauty. Anri Sala travels from France (the country he selected to study in during his twenties) to Albania. He visits his mother, and they watch the recovered film fragments together. It remains unclear whether the mother is able or willing to remember the contents of the interview. This scene is a powerful one for the viewer, since everyone has potentially similar experiences and recollections. Sala visits his mother's former party comrades. It becomes more than obvious by this point that no one really wants to remember the past, be it society's or one's own. The contemporization of the past does not fit present-day Albania. A possible future will not present itself from the fall of the old system. From this point onwards, Anri Sala's journey becomes a journey along illusion and disillusion. He has students at a school for the deaf read his mother's lips. With the help of a teacher, the motions of her lips are translated into phonetic language. Translation difficulties become obvious here: the ideological-rhetorical terms that dominate the interview are no longer well-known, almost ten years after the fall of the old political system. In Intervista, a characteristic of every ideological language is hereby clarified; namely, that said language is only valid in the system of which it forms a constituent part. In general, this fact permits the speculation that language contributes to the production of the everyday reality within political systems, here being the communist dictatorship. Sala confronts his mother with the reconstructed text. He overwhelms her with the results: “I don't believe this. It's absurdly... it's just spouting words!” The fifty-year old in denial, shocked by her own ideological stereotypes, eventually retrieves the lost language with her son. Intervista becomes a portrait of the mother. And the portrayed now portrays her son. The investigation gives her the impulse to narrate a part of her biography anew. The film ends with a sincere discussion about the hope of the past, and the future of the young generation. For the artist, the contemporization of the past allows for the artistic product. From the perspective of the audience, Intervista maintains the fragmentary character, consistently seeking out its completion, much like the Europe that does not want to admit to its history. The past is a metaphor. Gioni, Massimiliano and Robecchi, Michele “Anri Sala: Unfinished Histories,” Flash Art International #214, July-Sept. 2001, pp.104-107. Massimiliano Gioni and Michele Robecchi: The first time we saw you work, it was in the Albanian Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, two years ago. It was a video titled Intervista, in which you forced your mother to face today what she had said in the past, by restoring the audio of an old video that portrayed her during a communist rally. A quite direct, straightforward story, built on a simple narrative, with a beginning and an end, and nothing to do with the more flashy video loops that are fashionable in the art world today. Your video was somehow more cinematic, and yet more real… Anri Sala: It was my first video. I learned a lot through filming and editing it. Above all, I experienced and learned how far one could go touching where it could hurt, but still respecting the other while implying one-self. It is not easy to give out your personal history or that of your dearest people, especially when it has been embroidered with disillusion, pain, loss, responsibility and failure. MG&MR: Despite its simplicity, Intervista was reflecting a quite complex, even absurd scenario: historical tragedy as seen through your eyes and the eyes of your mother. It was like writing history infirst person. AS: I'm very often working with problems that are or could be mine; therefore, I deal with them in a personal way. There are times when I'm dealing with somebody else's problem, appropriating it, because I believe that there is a very small step that could bring each of us into everybody else's situation. When this gets in your head, then you understand that when our common past is still fresh, it's unfair to speak about it in the third person. But it would sound like an interrogation if you do it in the second person, without being personally implied. In the Albanian communist society most of the people were accidentally and not consciously implied in the system. Or then again, they were mainly consciously implied in their ideals and accidentally implied in their results. There was no choice; the decisions were taken in the name of the people: reflection meant prison or a death sentence in the name of the people, the same people who had no more choice than you, the same people that were simply happy to survive. What makes the situation complex today is finding personal responsibility in the collective one. I don't have a solution; I just try to scratch things when I feel that I'm succumbing to the immoral collective mentality and passively accepting reality. MG&MR: A year after came another video, ‘Nocturnes,' in which the references to history and biography, narrative, and reality are even more blurred. ‘Nocturnes' is again made up of a series of interviews: a mercenary and an obsessive collector of fish and aquariums take turns in describing their lives and, as the film unravels, the two characters almost seem to exchange roles. The violence recalled by the mercenary is somehow transmitted to the life of the fishes that live trapped in the aquariums: the banality of life becomes a metaphor for borders and ethnic conflicts. AS: At the beginning ‘Nocturnes' wasn't my personal story, but it slowly turned into it. When I met the young mercenary, I never thought of him as a criminal, a serial killer, or somebody insane. I just thought that if we could divide his responsibility into parts, each of us should get one. It's the same with the other guy living with his fishes: if it looks like something could be wrong with him or all those fishes, it's simply because he suffers the consequences of a bad social situation whose origins are probably the neighbors next-door. MG&MR: So, you would say the characters in your movies are accidental products of a dysfunctional situation? Actually they all share a sort of maniacal behaviour: the characters in Nocturnes — just as your mother in Intervista — unconditionally subscribe to some role models, as though they were ready to give up their personal freedom for the sake of an ideology, a hobby or, more simply, for the sake of violence. AS: My mother subscribed to a bigger ideal than personal freedom, things like the “people's struggle against imperialism, working class freedom...” And she ended up being part of a system that took away every single freedom from its own people. The military guy in Nocturnes got involved in a service that was supposed to deliver hope and peace to people in disaster, but he was awarded insomnia and nightmares. The fish man tries to set up a harmonic coexistence between hundreds of fish, which goes beyond a simple hobby. MG&MR: How do you find your characters? AS: I don't know how I find them, trust me, I never know where I'll go looking for the next one. I guess everyday thousands of stories go on around us; what makes me choose one story instead of any other is my sensibility or my predisposition towards that topic or that problem in that specific moment. What plays an important role is the awareness of what's happening around you: you have to drag yourself out of the somnambulism of the everyday. MG&MR: Do you think that as an artist you have the responsibility to face history and engage in a commentary on what's happening in your own country or in your own reality? AS: Ideally, my responsibility should not simply be a commentary on what's happening in my country: it should be about participating in it, first of all because I consider myself part of a community there. Unfortunately, the way things are now, commentaries are tolerated but participation is not yet welcome. Yet the tolerance is growing, and I hope that gradually more people and ideas will find their place in society. MG&MR: In your videos, the absurdity of violence and history comes across through the simple means of juxtaposition. You alternate past and present, like in Intervista, or you present two characters who apparently have nothing to do with each other, like in ‘Nocturnes:' it's as though your work were merely a matter of editing. AS: The juxtaposition of different stories is extremely important: alternating past and present, moving to different places, from here to there, overlapping narratives... This alchemy of images and sounds helps to create a simulacrum of reality, an alternative present time, which is the time of a projection, and which could actually be more real than what we think reality is. MG&MR: There is a strange mistrust towards reality in your work, even though everything you do seems informed by the language of television and documentary films. AS: Maybe, I don't know. I think there are no such direct influences. Television and cinema were never really part of my everyday life. In Albania, the only TV program we had started at 18:00 and ended at 22.00, mainly airing the same news program and fiction film three times a day. Everything was so unreal that I remember the only realistic thing was the weather forecast. At the end of the film Intervista my mother says: “I think we passed to you the ability to doubt, in the sense that you always have to question the truth.” This is part of the mistrust towards reality that we inherited: people had to believe in a reality that didn't exist, and they had to act as if they saw it everyday. It was like The Matrix, the film, have you seen it? You didn't have the choice to believe or not, and lots of the people probably didn't want to have one either. Actually in The Matrix there is this great scene I absolutely love. In this scene they ask Neo, the One, if he wants to go “Our way or the highway?” And Neo opens the door of the car he's sitting in and tries to leave. Trinity stops him and says: “Neo, please, you have to trust me.” Neo answers: “Why?” Trinity: “Because you've already been down there, Neo. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be.” Neo closes the door. When I saw the film, I thought this road could be every street in Tirana and I couldn't stop thinking of all the people there trying to find a way out. MG&MR: So far your work has proven a certain distance from the more spectacular forms of today's video art. Somehow, it seems like you are more attracted to reality, more interested in the characters rather than trying to reach a specific effect. AS: I'm always trying to reach a special result with each work, and I feel this necessity to produce certain specific results every time. That's what drives me from one story to the other. When I turn my head back, these stories are there for me like milestones. Maybe I don't remember every moment of the walk, maybe I didn't mind each step, but I know that I went through that walk consciously. Since my first steps with painting, since the time I was studying in Albania, and later in France, I got in touch with new people and different situations: all that generated new doubts that sometimes proved to be hurtful, because they were triggering my insecurity, creating a feeling of uncertainty. And yet those doubts help me in my work. MG&MR: How do they help you? AS: The sense of beauty changed. The way the world was presented to me changed. What was given to see changed. The flux of the changes and the images they generated were of course important to my evolution, and for awhile it was impossible for me to deal with certain problems through painting, photography, or still images. That's why I started working with video. I found that the ambiguity of moving images was more interesting and meaningful than the ambiguity of still images. Maybe it was just a personal problem, something that was simply related to the social and political changes in the world I was living in. Now I'm also working with photography, it feels as if I could have that gift back again, I mean this possibility of negotiating meanings all through one image. MG&MR: But for your latest participations in the biennials in Berlin and Venice, you still decided to work with videos... AS: In Berlin I showed Byrek, a video and a slide projection. It's a film/recipe, an answer to a letter I received: better, it's more about the necessity to answer rather than about the answer itself. I got this letter from my grandmother: she had sent me the recipe for Byrek, a traditional dish in Albania. We used to eat it very often when I was still there. In the video we see the hands of a woman preparing Byrek, laying out the flour, kneading the dough etc., while from time to time, through the kitchen's window, we see planes taking off. Every time we hear their noise, the camera chases them through the window, following them until they disappear. On the other side, in the slide projection, I wrote the story of my grandma's Byrek: usually the more you lay out the flour of the Byrek the bigger it gets, but my grandma's Byrek actually got smaller and smaller as time went by and my sister and I left. So the piece in Berlin is an interplay of Byrek and planes, nutrition, and absence. The piece I presented in Venice was a video installation called Uomoduomo, a filmed sequence showing a man (uomo) sleeping upright inside a church (duomo). The sleeping man falls in his sleep every now and then, coming back to his first position and falling again and again in a peaceful real time, which looks like a slow motion. His fall and rise seem as much choreographic, religious, blasphemous, or just like the endless sleep of someone who is looking for a shelter or waiting for something to happen. MG&MR: In a couple of years you have found yourself in a couple of biennials. Even implicitly, biennials promote this vision of the art world as a border-less, international community. What is your perception of today's internationalism and global vogue? AS: Some borders are transparent, forgettable. Some others are not. The idea of an intemational, global, borderless world is an invention of the occidental culture, so it becomes its reality. Thus, the white cube becomes a place for global, international, borderless art, which is witness at the same time to a fragmentary world, made of prejudices, intolerance and separatism. Boyer, Charles- Arthur, “Anri Sala: Images Never Sleep,” Art Press, May 2001, #268, pp. 24-28. Aged 26, and with only six videos to his name, Albanian artist Anri Sala is already a noted presence on the French contemporary art scene and is becoming increasingly well-known abroad, too. His stock has risen sharply since his participation in Voilà, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2000) and since he won last year's Gilles Dusein prize. “War doesn't leave us a chance of escaping: you may have killed a man, you still want to live, you still have the strength to live after that, all you have is the strength to live, and it'll never end until the war itself has decided to put an end to us!” Arnaud Cathrine First sequence: night, exterior, a man (Jacques) is bringing home a live fish in a plastic bag full of water. The camera follows him through the glass panes and screens of his shop-cum-apartment. He releases the fish into one of his many aquariums as he explains didacticallythat, since these fish are predators, it takes time before an exogenous specimen is accepted and integrated into the community, even though they all belong to the same species. Second sequence: the camera focuses on the hands of a young man (Denis) as he talks about his life choices and about the moment when, aged 18, he first killed a man. Neither character is named in the film itself, only in the closing credits. Of the first we see no more than his half-hidden face, of the second just his highly expressive hands. Now the monologues begin to alternate, intertwining these two individuals who hardly know each other, even though they both live in the same district of the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing conurbation in northern France, not far from the Studio des Arts Contemporains in Le Fresnoy. This is one possible description of Nocturnes (1999), the third of Anri Sala's videos, which has won his budding career the Prix Gilles Dusein, set up in commemoration of the eponymous gallerist who, with his curiosity and determination not to adopt a certain bourgeois mode of contemporary art-making, shook up the small Parisian art world about a decade ago now. The Real outside the Real
Anyway, Nocturnes, which Sala made at Le Fresnoy when Robert Kramer was visiting teacher there, is very much in the spirit of Dusein. It skips out of reach of categories and cliches by virtue of its dazzling mastery of its medium and its acute awareness of the roles and functions of images and discourse in today's world. If, at first glimpse, Nocturnes may look like a close cousin to the fly on the wall documentary, an echt slice of life cut thick from the body of that contemporary reality that never makes it into the dizzy waltz of mediated (because media-friendly) confessions and assorted freak shows, we soon realize that image and editing are perfectly under control here, that there is real mise-en-scène evident in the use of framing (loose for the first man, tight for the second) and the position of the camera (mobile for the first man, fixed for the second), the succession of sequences, the overlapping or even slight discrepancy between sound and image and the “plasticity” of the nocturnal light. Like Chris Marker's La jetée or Marguerite Duras' Le Camion, Nocturnes attests the desire to insert an overtly professed fictional element into the retranscription of the real, or conversely (but then is it really a process of reversal?), to capture this fictive quality, or “fictionability” that can characterize the real when it gets “beyond itself.” This phenomenon is also evident in another early video, Intervista, albeit in a different mode, one that combines documentary realism and self-fiction (not so far from certain aspects of Raymond Depardon's work). For if the two interlinking confessions that constitute Nocturnes never make any direct demands on our compassion or pander to voyeurist impulses, it is because Sala never just places his camera in front of his subjects, never just films what "happens," or whatever it is that these two individuals may want to tell us. Rather than simply opening a window on the exoticism of their world, or allowing them their 15 minutes of fame, the film follows the very personal ways in which, on one side, an adult who is almost drowning in his passion for his fish and, on the other, a still adolescent former peacekeeper from the Balkans, find ways of coping with the singularity of their experience, with the relation between their solitude (albeit one surrounded with images: real images for the first, virtual images for the second, or nearly), and the social and the political spheres. In other words, it shows how their “I,” although particular and remote, is related to our “we,” which is close and immediate: for this piece is not about everyday life, but about a form of existence that reflects on something that we all have within us. On one side, then, there is “Jacques,” an initially friendly and open figure, who locks himself away in his passion for fish, enacting a primitive gesture of exclusion, rejecting an outside world that no longer seems to absorb either his life choices or his anxieties regarding the social organization manifested by his animals (the search for an absolute harmony or equilibrium as analogy or metaphor of a human ideal?). On the other there is “Denis” the “soldier of peace,” who lightens the terrible burden of the killings that he has on his conscience by his extraordinarily mature perspective on the role he played in the Balkans, by an efficient and lucid organization of his return “home,” back to civilian life, and by the use of video games as an escape from his insomnia and nightmares (the theme of these games being war, combat and car racing: here too, his “reality” is reflected onto a fiction, a virtuality that is not exactly similar or synchronous, as if to better leaven its gravity: face to face with his Playstation, he seems indeed to be weightless, out of his life and his world, unfolded from himself. Eluding the Grip of Images
We are not so far here from the Robert Mitchum figure in The Night of the Hunter, from De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or fr | ||
