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Music and Ritual in the Work of Camilo Restrepo

In my first case study, I focused on the use of the interview, or testimony, in the work of Bouchra Khalili. For my second, I explored the relationship between the self and the other in the work of Sophie Calle. For this case study, I am returning to an artist who works in film, Camilo Restrepo, but will focus on his use of sound. I got access to all of his works through the Video Data Bank, so I will discuss several of them in this paper.

Camilo Restrepo is a Columbian artist-filmmaker who makes short-form films, primarily working on 16mm. His films are experimental, combining narrative and documentary modes, and are deeply indebted to the history of ethnographic film. Cilaos, Tropic Pocket, and La Bouche are three works that use sound, particularly traditional forms of music, to make connections about places and peoples across time and space.

Restrepo says that sound is particularly important to his practice, as “we all tend to fill an empty space with sound and noise when we have nothing to say or listen to.” In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, film theorist and composer Michel Chion lays out a theory of the way that sound affects our perception when watching films. He argues that sound has the potential to “render the perception of time in the image as exact, detailed, immediate, concrete -- or vague, fluctuating, broad.” In other words, sound can lend chaotic images a sense of linearity, or vice versa. It can also “vectorize or dramatize shots, orienting them toward a future, a goal, and creation of a feeling of imminence and expectation” (Chion, 14). Each of these uses of sound is relevant to different moments in Restrepo’s practice. In his early work, sound and image are editing into dense collage, while in his more recent pieces, more diegetic sound is utilized, making them resemble less of an experimental collage, and more of a music video or concert film.

Tropic Pocket, a 9-minute short film released in 2011, was Restrepo’s first film. The film is a mediation the Darien Gap, a region of western Columbia on the border with Panama. The film combines visual elements from four different sources: excerpts from La Isla de Los Deseos, a fictional documentary from the 1950s about Catholic missionaries evangelizing to the Afro-Caribbean population; videos taken in the region and uploaded to the internet by Colombian army soldiers and revolutionary fighters; and excerpt from a commercial filmed in the region in 1961; “Chevrolet Corvair Daring the Darien”; and images Restrepo shot himself with villagers from San Francisco de Asis. This collage of images conflates time and space, creating a rumination on the way that cultural, economic and political forces have shaped humans’ engagement with this region of Columbia, as well as the ways that humans have documented this region on film over time.

However, the piece would not be successful if not for the way that sound and image interact within this collage. Restrepo was trained as a painter, has said that “image was always going to be the starting point of my filmmaking.” Notably, the first minute of the film is silent. He shot the film on Super 8, a camera that does not record sound onto the film strip. All of the sound that is heard in the film was thus added in post-production, none of it is sync. For example, in the beginning of the video, after a minute of silence, there is suddenly the noise of what sounds like a motor. However, the images are of dancing villagers and missionaries. Eventually, this collage leads to images of a car, ostensibly from the commercial that was shot in the region in 1961. Seeing footage from the missionary film with sounds of a car engine revving, or footage of the car commercial with sounds of tribal music “vectorizes” these images, reinvigorating them and allowing viewers to perceive them in new ways. This blending of sounds from various sources across images reinforces the argument of the piece, that documentation of this place, though often for different reasons, has created a visual history of the Darien that speaks to the ways in which various institutions have interacted with it and used it for their own objectives (usually related to the accumulation of capital and power). 

Restrepo says that in making the transition from painting to filmmaking, using sound in this way was a natural part of his process. Though he initially wanted to eschew sound altogether, he came to understand that it was a necessary element in making collage films that included a variety of archival sources: “I  realized that more than sound, I needed a voice that would tell the stories I overheard, those that I invented, and those that I found...It was a mix of incongruous voices that I needed to bring together in order to create my own voice. This is how I began to explore sounds, texts, onomatopoeia, melodies, and distortions.”

Two more recent works by Restrepo, La Bouche (2017) and Cialos (2016), are more directly indebted to the history of ethnographic film, particularly the work of Jean Rouch. Notably, in these works, Restrepo eschews experimental sound collage, using almost exclusively diegetic sound and voiceover. In both pieces, musicians are featured prominently on screen, their music-making becoming a central part of the soundscape and narrative of the work. Restrepo, now based in Paris, wanted to work with Christine Salem, a singer of the Maloya tradition from Reunion island in the Indian Ocean. Restrepo says that music became a bridge between their cultures, and he wanted it to figure prominently in their film. Maloya has roots in the African slaves and Indian indentured servants of Reunion, and it is closely connected to spiritual practices of both groups. Specifically, the singers can act as mediums, and become possessed by the spirits of the ancestors during their performances. However, the ancestors only appear when they enjoy the music, and will disappear as soon as the musician makes a mistake. This creates an close connection between musicianship and spiritual power. Restrepo argues that Salem is not only “one of the great voices of Reunionese maloya,” but also “one of those mediums.”

In both Cialos and La Bouche, the spiritual power of music figures prominently in the narrative. In Cialos, at the request of her dying mother, a woman goes on a journey in search of her father, “La Bouche.” She learns that he is dead, but is determined to still find him, using a Maloya chant to commune with his spirit. La Bouche also deals with connections between the world of the living and the dead, but with another cultural context, another part of the African diaspora. This time, a Ghanaian man learns that his daughter has been murdered by her husband, and uses music to negotiate his grief and his desire for retribution. Restrepo says that though similar to Cilaos, La Bouche is not a sequel, but “a mirror that explores the same themes.” Both works have the same form “a musical where most of the dialogue is sung with a non-specific spatio-temporality that allows me to create a kind of contemporary mythical narrative.” Notably, in La Bouche, Restrepo cast a man who really had lost his daughter to murder, and the film is loosely based on his story, blurring the lines between documentary and fiction.

Restrepo says that he makes musical films for three reasons. The first is that he is bored by the “current of so-called realism that has overtaken narrative cinema bores and despairs [him],” and that “music gives [his] work power through a distance from reality, and thus gives [him] a critical point of view with which to better understand our world.” The second is that “the words in music mark...an alliance between form and sense,” and the third is that “music holds a force that absorbs [him]...it is a reasonless reason.” Music in Restrepo’s films allow room for the spiritual, the mythic, creating a critical distance from which the world can be seen anew.

To understand the significance of the use of sound in Restrepo’s musicals, it is necessary to situate them in a historical context. Though Cialos more specifically deals with spiritual possession, both films use music to narrativize the communion and communication between the worlds of the living of the dead. Trance films have a long history in the ethnographic film mode. Filmmakers like Jean Rouch were attracted to possession rituals in sub-Saharan Africa, which invariably included music. Not unlike Restrepo’s desire to use music to allow for distance from reality and create space for fantasy and myth, Rouch was attracted to possession rituals because “absorption into the pulsating rhythm of the dance…[was] a threat to ethnographic distance and objectivity,” which was attractive to a filmmaker “in search of a subjective entry into the ethnographic scene” (Russell, 194). Restrepo is not only using music to provide his characters with a link between the worlds of the living and the dead. He is also documenting the very real tradition of mediumship in the music of the Reunion islands and Ghana.

This process of documentation aligns his films with the history of filmmakers like Jean Rouch, Margaret Mead and Maya Deren who used cinema to document ritual and trance practices of tribal groups in Africa and the South Pacific. However, unlike those filmmakers, Restrepo is working in sync sound. This makes his claim to his films as “musicals” more tenable, and distinguishes them from his predecessors, who (largely) did not yet have access to sync-sound technology. Restrepo is less interested in the history of primitivism and modernism, subjectivity and truth, than he is in the formal aspects of music on screen. Through framing, editing, and sound, he turns what could be seen as music videos into liberatory works that form a space of release for both performer and viewer. As Restrepo says, his musicians “bring to life the dramas of their pain, and all the energy contained, accumulated, and eventually released in the films come from them.”

Bibliography:

Camilo Restrepo, Tropic Pocket, 2011

Camilo Restrepo, Cialos, 2016

Camilo Restrepo, La Bouche, 2017

Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography, Duke University Press, 1999.

Interviews with Camilo Restrepo:

https://read.kinoscope.org/2018/07/31/economy-gaze-interview-camilo-restrepo/

https://guidedoc.tv/blog/guidedocs-look-unique-films-camilo-restrepo/

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/camilo-restrepo-s-impressions

http://www.vdb.org/content/vdb-asks-camilo-restrepo

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The Mystery of the Self / The Mystery of the Other: The Encounter in the Work of Sophie Calle

My filmmaking practice has always been rooted in the encounter with the other, and the engagement between myself and the world with my camera as a mediating element. In September, I went to the New York Art Book Fair, where I found a beautiful edition of The Address Book by Siglio Press. I had heard of Sophie Calle, but hadn’t read any of her work. When deciding who to write about for this case study, I remembered that I had been so drawn to that book, and finally read it. I was fascinated by the relational aspect of her work, the construction of the self through encounters with other people, and the blending of the subjectivities of the self and the other, that I decided to explore it this further in this case study.

Sophie Calle is a French artist and writer active since the late 1970s. Her work typically blends writing and photography, and has been exhibited as installations in museums and galleries, as well as published as books. Calle’s works combines artistic disciplines, and can simultaneously be situated within histories of conceptual art, performance art, photography. Using the material of her everyday experience, she constructs games for herself to play that follow a predetermined set of rules. The work consistently explores several tensions -- between reality and fiction, the identities of self and the other, distinctions between the subject and the object, author and protagonist, public and private space, and the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior.

The work manifests as written and photographic documentation of the performance of these rules as applied to her daily life. Importantly, the rules are defined narrowly enough that they give the work a rigorous structure, but broadly enough that they leave ample space for chance. The contingencies of the encounters that she has with others while executing her games therefore become a critical aspect of the work. It never seems that there is a predetermined end to the game that she aims to reach. Since they are drawn from her experience of the world, and involve encounters with real people, in these semi-autobiographical works author is inextricably linked with self, and protagonist/subject with the other. The completion of the work is dependent on encounters with real people in her daily life that she can’t fully control. In the process of executing the rules that she creates, by encountering other people without being able to anticipate how these encounters will shape her path forward through the project, she undermines her claims to authorship, and blurs the boundaries between the author and the protagonist, the self and the other.

The blurriness doesn’t end there -- the “Sophie Calle” within the texts and images is herself both the author and a constructed subject, which blends reality and fiction in ways that further elide clear distinctions between these categories. Discourse around the role of the author and their relation to their subject often return to the contributions of post-structuralist theorist Roland Barthes, specifically The Death of the Author. Barthes argued against the common practice among literary critics of examining the writer’s identity in an attempt to determine their intentionality and therefore get closer to the true meaning of the work. It’s not necessary or even possible to determine the author’s intention, more important is the reception and interpretation of individual readers. By implicating herself in her works, Calle seems to be resisting Barthes calls for the author’s “death.” But in blurring the lines between author and subject, her presence in her work as a constructed version of herself represents as much the authorial voice of the author as it does the author’s absence, or rather, the impossibility of her presence.

Calle encounters others in order to explore the construction of her own subjectivity, that of the other, and the limits of our understanding of each other and ourselves. In Calle’s work the self inextricably tied with the other. “Sophie Calle” the artistic subject has an identity largely created through encounters with (or the pursuit of) other people, suggesting that self cannot exist except through the encounter with the other, and vice versa. This is recalls Emmanual Levinas’ idea that “nonindifference to the other” is a prerequisite for the formation of subjectivity -- “the other is in me and in the midst of my very identification.” (Though Calle is not necessarily arguing for the primacy of a preconceived ethics, rather for the necessity of pushing ethical boundaries). She is a detective not searching for answers, but obsessed with the process of posing and following questions that lead her to encounters with strangers and in turn, herself. The work is not so much about the limits of representation, but about the infinite layers of ambiguity that attempts at representation create. By interrogating the tension between distance and proximity of the self and the other, Calle’s work collapses author and protagonist into one another in surprising ways. This case study will explore the intersubjective aspect of her practice through her works Suite Vénitienne (1981) and The Address Book (1983).

In Suite Vénitienne, Calle collapses the roles of self and other through the act of following a stranger, Henri B., to Venice. She begins by following strangers on the street through Paris “for the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested [her]” (Calle, Suite Vénitienne, 2). She claims that one evening at an opening, “quite by chance,” she was introduced to the man she had been following all day. She learns he is traveling to Venice, and decides that she will disguise herself and follow him there. What ensues is both an account of her attempt at surveillance, and a narrative of her own relationship to this game. We learn little about her motivations for following him, and more about how the pursuit makes her feel. She is determined to find him, and to not get caught, for if that happens then the game is over. In documenting her desire to expose and understand this person, she implicates herself, providing readers with insights into the way this pursuit enlivens her and brings her own anxieties about herself to the fore. Even she isn’t clear about why she’s doing it, only that she knows that she must.

In “Please Follow Me,” an essay that accompanied an early print version of Suite Vénitienne, Jean Baudrillard writes of the “wonderful reciprocity” that exists in the act of Calle’s following. To follow someone is “to give him...a double life...any commonplace existence can be transfigured,” for “the man without a shadow is exposed to the violence of a life without mediation,” and being followed relieves him of “the responsibility of his own life.” Similarly, for Calle, “she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of the other.” For example, Calle photographs Henri B. taking photos. He is a tourist, he will probably place those photos in an album he never looks at. We discover at the end that he is really scouting locations for a film, but it hardly matters -- what matters is that Calle shadows him, attempting to take the same photos that he does. His action is therefore no longer banal, but imbued with an urgency though her mimicry, her desire to know him, her enchantment in the potential of their encounter. But the game is a fragile one, and rests on her not being discovered, for then their subject positions are inverted. As soon as Henri B. turns around, Baudrillard continues, “the system reverses itself immediately, and the follower becomes the followed.” Calle writes of this anxiety in the text -- ‘’I’m afraid that the encounter might be commonplace. I don’t want to be disappointed.” She likens this pursuit to being in love, and even has to remind herself that she is not in love -- he is, after all, a complete stranger. And when she finally does meet him, there is no resolution. The encounter provides no clarity, but rather, and somewhat paradoxically, heightens the sense of distance between them, suggesting the impossibility of ever knowing the other. Gone is the thrill of the chase, the pursuit and the seduction of the following. All that is left is the banality of the realization that you won’t ever really know as much as you would like. The detective work adds up not to a coherent whole, but rather points towards the vastness of the unknowable, both in regards to the other and the self.

In The Address Book, Calle extends her exploration of the encounter between the self and the other by pursuing not an individual, but the traces that they leave behind. Again, the tension between distance and proximity between the self and the other is one of the central dramas of the work. This time, the game starts when she finds an address book on the streets of Paris, photocopies its contents, and sends it back to the owner, Pierre D. She decides to contact each of the names in the book and ask to meet them, on the condition that she’ll only reveal the owner if the address book to them in person. In doing so she hopes to “get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances.” She will “try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.” She once again assumes the role of a detective in her narrative, but this time she has no interest in finding and following her mark. Rather, she builds a narrative of his life through encounters with people that he knows. She once again blurs the lines between herself and her subject by reenacting his previous encounters, meeting the people that he also once met for the first time.

Just as in Suite Vénitienne, she pursues her task methodically and obsessively  -- “I will beg his friends to talk to me.” Though there are some consistencies between the friends’ accounts -- Pierre seems to be eminently kind, attractive, highly intelligent with a quick wit -- what becomes more interesting are the inconsistencies. Is Pierre a lonely, tragic figure, or is he liberated and self-assured? What seems self-evident about Pierre to one person often directly contradicts the details offered by another. Though Pierre is the ostensible subject of the work, Sophie is encountering his friends and acquaintances, and arguably the portrait that emerges is not of Pierre, but of each of these people, as their accounts likely reveal as much of their own perception as they do of any “objective” truth about Pierre (This mirrors the form and some of the philosophical concerns of Roberto Bolano’s novel, The Savage Detectives, as well as Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room). Of course, no such objective truth of a person can exist, only an amalgam of the traces that we leave behind, whether that be an object, or an impression that we made through an encounter with someone else. Calle seems to ask, what really constitutes a person beyond this? (In this way the work points toward the question of the “soul” without addressing it explicitly). The other portrait that emerges is of Sophie Calle. In her dogged pursuit of the details of this man’s life and subjectivity, she begins to feel that she knows him, and even wants to start telling her subjects about what she knows of Pierre, as if she were just another one of his friends, thereby further blurring the lines between herself and her subjects. In collecting all of these accounts she has perhaps put together a portrait of a man that transcends the limitations of an individual encounter between two people, while still falling tragically short of representing the fullness of his personhood. What can anyone know of another person, and how can we disentangle our perceptions of another from our own subjectivities? Maybe each of us to each other in the end is -- as one of Pierre’s friends described him -- “a cloud in trousers.” (What constitutes the cloud is a subject for another paper).

At times Calle’s early work feels like entering a time machine, a window onto anxieties about surveillance and communication before the internet. When reading Calle, it’s difficult not to consider how her concerns have been transformed by the digital age. In the 1991, she experimented with digital video in No Sex Last Night / Double Blind, driving across the country with her boyfriend. This time the encounter was not with strangers, but with an intimate relation of her own. But the work destabilizes the security of the category of “partner,” highlighting the distance and disconnect between them throughout. Through both form and content, they seem more like strangers than most of the the people Calle encounters in both The Address Book and Suite Vénitienne. Indeed, just as Sophie has to remind herself that Henri B. is a stranger and not her lover, in No Sex Last Night she has to remind herself that her boyfriend is her lover, not a stranger. In a more recent work, Take Care of Yourself, Calle tackles digital communication by sending a breakup email from an ex-boyfriend to 107 female professionals and asking them to analyze it according to their specialties. The promise of the communication revolution afforded to us by digital technology has not diminished ambiguity and distance, but greatly amplified them. Now that we all have cameras and GPS locators in our pockets, and we all continuously upload data about ourselves to public platforms owned by tech companies invested in understanding us better than we know ourselves, Calle’s questions seem particularly urgent. How is the self constructed in relation to the other? What are the limits of how much we can know each other and ourselves? How is this mediated by various forms of mechanical and digital technology? But if we learn anything from Calle’s ouvre, it should be that these questions are well worth asking, even if we already know that they can never be answered.

Bibliography

Janet Hand, Sophie Calle’s art of following and seduction. Cultural geographies 2005 12: 463-484.

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essense

Cybelle McFadden Wilkens, Women’s Artistic Expression: Reflexivity, Daily Life, and Self-Representation in Contemporary France. Department of Romance Studies, Duke University, 2005. DPhil Thesis

Ana Sofia Pereira Calderia, Double-Blind // No Sex Last Night: Deconstructing the Documental Ontology, FCSH - UNL, 2013

Samara Kaplan, Conceptual Production in the Work of Sophie Calle, Master’s Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2015.

Anna Khimasia, Authorial Turns: Sophie Calle, Paul Auster and the Quest for Identity, Carelton University, 2007

Sophie Calle, Jean Baudriallard, Suite Venitiene and Please Follow Me.

Sophie Calle, The Address Book

Sophie Calle and Gregory Shepherd, No Sex Last Night

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BOUCHRA KHALILI -- Testimony and Documentary

While in Paris this August, I was lucky enough to see, Blackboard, a retrospective of the work of Bouchra Khalili at Jeu de Paume. I have admired her work since I encountered her Mapping Journey Project at the Sydney Biennale in 2012. Though our approaches and styles are very different, my work is also invested in documenting the stories and testimonies of people on the margins in order to render visible their relations to global power structures. The subjects of my films, like hers, have often been refugees, asylum-seekers, migrants, and/or queer people. In this case study, I will be discussing some of the video works that I watched in Paris.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French filmmaker and visual artist, active for the last 15 years. Her work has been exhibited globally, most recently a retrospective of her work was installed at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Working in video, photography, printmaking and installation, her work is fundamentally concerned with the act of speech. When people speak, from where are they speaking? What is the position of the speaker, and how does that relate to larger systems of power and control? She describes her practice as research-based, which each work maturing over several years, during which time she is collecting images, texts, stories, and audio. She keeps these documents together on a shelf as she is working, and eventually, a small fragment of her collection makes it into a finished film. She often centers her work on critical moments in the postwar history of Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa. The protagonists of her films are often the most marginalized in society – members of the working class, those who cross borders illegally, the displaced, members of racial or cultural minorities, leaders of resistance movements past and present. These themes place her work within discourses of post-colonialism and post-structuralism. Formally, with her documentary aesthetic and use of interviews and archival photos, her work cannot be read outside of the context of film history and theory, particularly makers like Pasolini, Straub and Huillet, Marguriete Duras, Jean Genet, Fassbinder, Glauber Rocha, Chantal Akerman, and Jean-Luc Godard. 

When the protagonists in Khalili’s films speak, they give their testimonies, bearing witness to their experience of the world. She asks them to do this not so much to make an account of what they experienced to augment our understanding of history, but in order to destabilize dominant history, highlight the discontinuities, and open up new space for solidarity between those that hear the testimony. When viewing her works, we don’t simply encounter a restoration of forgotten histories – we encounter the inevitable failure of our dominant historical narratives. For Khalili, testimony and story-telling is not about giving an account of the past, but rather creating space for thinking about what must happen in the future. This is evident in all of her works, including but not limited to the Mapping Journey Project  and Twenty-Two Hours.

The Mapping Journey Project is a series of videos arranged on various screens in a gallery space. The videos are connected to headphones, and viewers are free to navigate the space and spend time listening to the videos. Each video consists of a single, fixed shot of a map. Over the course of each short video, a voice of a person off-screen begins to narrate a migration story. Only their hand is in frame, holding a permanent marker. As they narrate their migration story, they mark the path that they travelled with the marker on the map. Each persons’ story is different, and no one journey is the same as the next. Most begin in the Middle East or Africa and end up in Europe, but no one’s path is linear. They all make several stops along the way, creating a circuitous path of illegal border crossings across the globe. For most of the protagonists, the journey is not yet over – they still have hopes of making it to another, final destination.  Though the journeys are different, the videos are constructed on the same formal terms. Viewers are never given access to the face or body of the speaker, only their voice and their hand. This brings to mind Edouard Glissant’s notion of “the right to opacity.” GIissant writes, “I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him” (Glissant, 193). We don’t have to understand everything about each other in order to stand in solidarity with each other’s experiences. 

Indeed, to reduce this work to one about migration would be missing the larger point. Khalili documents these testimonies of migration not simply to document the fact that they have happened, but to point towards the future of the migrants, and of society. Because they have survived these illegal journeys, the migrants can bear witness to the arbitrary nature of borders and the way that borders are policed. The map itself is a factual image that represents the realities of the borders of nation states. It is an image of the ways that nation-states represent their own power. However, both the testimonies of the migrants, and the ways that the lines that they draw zig-zag across and through these borders, destabilize the power of this image. Their illegal crossing of borders happened in the past, and as they recount their stories, they draw lines that cross through borders that are meant to be impenetrable. Their stories, their individual histories, as they recount them and visualize them onto the image of the map, represent their resilience, their ability to subvert the power and borders of nation-states in order to survive. These testimonies therefore don’t simply build a history of migration, but they destabilize the dominant narrative of the function and power of borders for the modern nation-state. By transgressing these borders and living to tell their stories, Khalili’s protagonists point towards a future in which the struggle for equality will continue – there is no other option.

In Twenty-Two Hours, Khaili uses the interview, or testimony, of her protagonists in order to question what it means to bear witness. Again, she is not interested in contributing to a positivist notion of a complete history that moves inevitably forward, but rather to poke holes in dominant narratives and create space for radical futures. The video is centered around Jean Genet’s visit to the United States in 1970 at the request of the Black Panther Party. They wanted Genet, a noted supporter of revolutionary movements around the globe, to bear witness to the Party’s activities, as well as the efforts of the government to suppress their actions, and spread the word across Europe. Khalili’s two main protagonists are two young African-American women, Quiana and Vanessa, who use photographs and archival video to tell the story of Genet’s visit. Then, they encounter and interview a former Black Panther Party Member who himself met with Genet during his visit to the United States. All of the protagonists on screen are witnesses to some extent. Genet was a witness to the activities of the Black Panther Party. The two African-American women are documentary witnesses, in the sense that they are being filmed and speaking to the camera. Finally, the former BPP member is a living witness of Genet’s visit to the United States. Genet said that “the witness has sworn to tell the truth…he talks, but in order to show the why behind this how, he sheds light on the how, he illuminates it with a light which is sometimes described as artistic” (Blackboard, 25). 

By including all of these different elements, each a different form of testimony, she uses cinema, and specifically the conventions of documentary – interviews and archive – to bridge gaps between past and present. Khalili assembles a series of fragments of an untold history by using the testimonies of people who were there, but no longer living, those who were there and still living, and those who were not living, but can only encounter the history by attempting to assemble and make meaning of the fragments left behind. What does it mean to bear witness? Who is the witness here? If we can’t take these questions for granted, then we can neither take for granted our understanding of history and the way that it is constructed. Like with the Mapping Migration Project, the objective is not to incorporate these testimonies into an established history, but to create an “alternative historiography” that creates new possibilities for connections and spaces that never before existed. 

Bouchra Khalili characterizes her work as “free indirect discourse in which multiple equal voices mingle from their singular standpoint and start to speak for the absentees.” She is interested in creating spaces where “counter-knowledge can be written, nomadic forms of knowledge, the knowledge of those relegated to the periphery” (Blackboard, 26). The protagonists of her films, in speaking about their experiences, don’t just bear witness to the things they have seen, things that have happened, but also point towards what must happen to create a more equal world. She uses the metaphor of a blackboard to describe the encounter that viewers have with her protagonists. For of course the encounter is not just limited to the filmmaker and her subjects. It continues every time a viewer encounters the filmmaker’s representation of these subjects. The way that she utilizes personal stories, or testimonies, doesn’t incorporate her protagonists’ subjectivities into a preconceived totalized vision of the world, or of history. Rather, she presents them to viewers with the hope of creating a possible community that never would have otherwise seemed possible. Each time someone encounters her protagonists, and hears their stories, they encounter this fragmentation, and new possibilities for radical futures come into being.

Bibliography

Bouchra Khalili and Hendrik Folkerts in Conversation, http://www.bouchrakhalili.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Mousse_Mag_Bouchra_Khalili.pdf

Bouchra Khalili, Blackboard, Jeu de Paume, 2018.

Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation.  The University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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Reflections

Lucas Habte, Silent Witness

These images are a series of screenshots from video footage I shot in Ethiopia and France between 2015 and 2017. The camera here becomes a social object that initiates and intensifies relationships, rather than simply aestheticizing what it records. I’m documenting these people to grasp my own identity in addition to communicating their stories to the broader public. The camera is a tool that allows me to see my friends and family differently, and it’s therefore a means of understanding who I am, reflected by people I love. Shared identity between filmmaker and subjects here is critical – we are all Ethiopians with complicated but different relationships to the country. We therefore all have something specific and nuanced to learn about ourselves from each other. 

Betelhem Makonnen, Who is that dark child on the parapets?

The opaque is not obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence. […] I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or build with him to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. For Opacity, The Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing, The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Although darkness is most often depicted as a threat or an unknown source of fear and danger, paraphrasing Audre Lorde from Poetry is not a Luxury, for those of us not afforded the membership and protection of the dominant culture, darkness is a place “of possibility within ourselves,” where one could survive and grown strong.  How many experiences make up a life? How many events make up an experience? How many moments make up in an event? And if these experiences are one of strife and struggle trying to survive in an environment that does not acknowledge your presence, in an environment that is hostile to your existence. Opacity as a means of resistance can delay a potentially dangerous encounter allowing time to  find safety. Opacity can be used as a defence against being grasped or being captured.Psalm 17 is often interpreted as the lament of those betrayed by their trust and love for others. The first line, “Hear the right, O Lord” is other times written as “Hear a just cause, o Lord.”  To some, Psalm 17 echo the cry of the marginalised and oppressed. The works presented by Lucas Habte come from a context of enduring a history of uncertainty and danger.Appearing tangentially linked at first glance, with longer viewing, a number of strong unifying elements emerge connecting the 7 digital stills presented by Lucas. It is necessary to watch these images rather than merely see them.  After all, they are actually arrested moving images. Firstly, there is a dominant figure in on all the images that is hard to clearly see. In two of the images, the figure has its back to us, while in the others, either through the use of shadows or a physical obstruction, the audience’s direct view is intentionally limited. Transparency, as in access of information or ease of understandability is denied.  The foreground in all of the images is patterns of repeated lines and shapes. An opposing clarity in communication to the deliberately obscured central figures.  Another connecting thread that runs through all the images is the feeling that the actions depicted are all in the process of execution—someone appears to be mid-thought, just about to take a drag on a cigarette, a gentleman mid-step, a decision about to be made, a bottle about to fall… All of the images of the polyptych presented by Lucas are digital stills. Again, spending more time with the work, one realises that each image is actually a still of a still. Depicted in each of the 7 images is a fleeting moment of in-betweeness— a mid-action transformed to an eternal now, the pregnant present about to birth the future, or simply suspended potential. Not dispensing of the protection of opacity, yet fully utilising the power of expansion of the punctum, Lucas' images give the viewer a direct view of the labor present in an ephemeral moment.

Rachael Zur, Love as a Verb

Any artist worth their salt is a deep thinker, but those who are unforgettable have heart.  It was last summer at a screening of his film, “Shadow of His Wings,” that I became acquainted with Lucas Habte’s work.  Immediately I found an amazing generosity and candor to it.  The film captures both Lucas navigating how his father fits into his life after years of being absent, and homophobic death threats prompting Lucas’ lover to leave Ethiopia, seeking refuge in France.  In this online art piece, an offering of poetry and film stills, there is much that could be said about Lucas’ sharp intellect; but it’s the strength in his heart that illuminates the work.

The most telling film still is the only one that does not include human figures, it contains two lionesses in what appears to be a zoo, one lovingly grooming the other.  The lioness is a powerful, nocturnal huntress, who not only hunts for her family’s survival but who will fiercely defend them.  Despite this imposition of captivity, one lioness tenderly grooms the other—their spirits unbroken—we must never forget these are fantastically powerful creatures.  When I think of a lioness she reminds me of the fierce love that I feel for my own children, how I would do anything to protect them.  Lucas conjures another powerful protector by using Psalm 17, which references David’s plea to God for protection while being pursued by enemies.  It’s a prayer that illustrates a complete confidence in God delivering those he loves from harm.  By pulling both from the lioness who is an allegory for the primal devotion of mothers, and an ancient scripture of an all-powerful celestial deity, Lucas shows that love is greater than a feeling of attraction or a deep affection.

While it may seem that the film stills are trying to evade being read, (figures are clearly the subjects, but not one of their faces is fully visible) -- this is not work that is trying to hide, rather it is work that is conjuring the feeling of hiding and all the anxiety that comes with it.  It demonstrates what is felt by these young men as they navigate their relationship in a country where same sex relations are illegal.  It illustrates that love is bigger than a feeling, it’s an action, love is the risks and sacrifices that are made for someone else.  Though there are many rich layers to this piece, it’s the simple reminder that love is a verb that I find the most satisfying.   

Jamie Boley, Let There Be Light

Shadowed pathways, through light cast, show me your way O God, Silence, empty, hidden in what is real, warm red, ceiling tiles, the stars beneath his feet, “A life in the way that he who experienced it remembers.” In these paths, between the vanishing points, there was a soldier in Paris, you in blue skies, it is as they say within this light, THIS LIGHT, cast in shadows, upon form, within darkness, HE hears….your cry.  

Lucas Habte’s work is pure and brilliant in essence. The digital stills capture a transitory and ephemeral moment that I find poetic in light and shadow. Theorist Craig Owens believed that as an allegorical art “photography preserves that which threatens to disappear, and this desire becomes the subject of the image.” Habte’s documentary work feels illuminatingly real with cultural and political contexts. I find it pure joy to follow his journey.

Kris Schaedig, The Power of Poetry

Both here and there, but neither here nor there. The liminal space of not belonging, but yet existing in a place.

Calling for protection from oppression, awareness of equality, awareness of justice.

Pleading for justice.

Pointing out pride, unfairness, ugliness, inhumanity, unpredictable oppression.

Leaving familial, ancestral, familiar land, and immigrating in hope of something better.

Seeking refuge.

Being forced to leave ancestral land.

Settling into a new life, but never settled, instead being oppressed.

Being exploited.

Being used for your labor to make someone else wealthy.

Through the personal narrative emerges a universal connection with others oppressed, exiled from both Eastern and Western hemispheres. Not accepting oppression.  Fighting back, but fighting nonviolently, by using prayer and poetry: the power of poetry.

what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt,

but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

From hand to mouth, across the centuries,

the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,

when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,

a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase

whose music will last longer than the leaves,

whose condensation is the marble sweat

of angels’ foreheads, which will never dry

till Borealis shuts the peacock lights

of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,

and memory needs nothing to repeat. 

These are qualities present in Lucas Habte's work. Poetically, peacefully and powerfully exposing oppression.