Associação Cultural Videobrasil

1- Thinking where I live: Could you comment on how the fact of being invited a couple of years ago to produce locally a new piece (Double Voyage) for the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006) worked in your career? What was happening around you by that time?

I remember Lisette Lagnado inviting me to make a new work for the biennale and thinking through the possibilities of work in São Paulo. It was much more interesting to think of a project that would directly relate to its immediate environment rather than for me to simply import a work from elsewhere.

I wanted to develop a project that had links between my hometown of Sydney and São Paulo. The two connections I thought of after visiting São Paulo for research were highly discursive but definitely strong—skateboarding and transsexual culture. I had been interested in the skater Oggy de Souza for a few years before being invited to Brazil by Lisette and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to work with him. I was also very interested in transsexual culture and different forms of erotic dance and performance. There was a great connection to this culture in Brazil with my home city of Sydney, which has a very strong transsexual culture. I thought I would also explore this interest in conjunction with Oggy's unique practice of skateboarding (de Souza does not have use of his legs and has developed a unique way of skateboarding with his upper body).

The piece was forming into a double portrait that investigated individuals that were pushing the limits of their bodies or rather—"forging their bodies in the fire of their will." They were both very extreme, passionate individuals that were becoming other—transforming and, in this sense, the project is rather romantic.

After the research and finding the other performer in Double Voyage, Grace O'Hara, I returned to São Paulo to record the work.

It all happened at a time when I was thinking of the body and its potential to reauthor or transform its environment. It made sense to record Oggy against Niemeyer's imposing and sensual forms at Ibirapuera Park and to then record Grace in a nightclub with poles and bars—recalling the structures and frameworks Francis Bacon would frame his writhing fleshy figures.

2- After your series of videos named Apologies 1-6 (2007–2009) the presence of the Australian outback landscape has became more present and intense in your work. What was the real personal-artistic necessity 'going deep back home'?

From 2005 to 2007, I'd been working quite a lot on projects outside of Australia (such as the one I've just mentioned in São Paulo) and up to that point I had mostly focused on the urban space. However, there was one video work, Storm Sequence, from 2000, that looked at the intersection of the urban and natural environments, and it was this work that motivated my thinking about a distinct Australian landscape. The Storm Sequence work depicted a stereotypical Australian location but under unusual conditions. In similarity to Brazil, we Australians celebrate beach culture but this video describes a heavy storm over the beach. I thought of working with other locations in Australia and in ways that could have quite a lot of free play—works that could potentially reinforce stereotypes but also question them.

Apologies 1-6 was motivated by this interest to explore a well-known (even mythical) Australian interior, by working in the Australian desert or 'outback.' I didn't wish to claim authenticity simply because I was born in Australia. In fact, up until 2007, I had never really been into the desert, only to its outskirts. I was like the majority of Australians—living in a coastal city—and I thought about my relationship to the Australian desert through this project. It was a land shrouded in myth—a mirage of itself! So although I'd never been to the desert, there was a strange sense of connection with the space quite simply through the amount of cinema and television I'd watched. All these images somehow formed my preconception of the outback. So, when I ventured out to the desert, I decided to make a work that acknowledged the influence cinema had on my idea of those spaces. George Miller's Mad Max films had an enormous impact on me as a teenager and so the aesthetics of Mad Max was very clearly and directly referenced in this work.

Albeit a strong one, the Mad Max 'look' was simply a reference in the Apologies 1-6; in fact, I was interested in representing the desert in an entirely different way to the Mad Max films or any popular cinema—my work was presented in slow motion and with long takes as opposed to the fast and furious editing of popular cinema. However, it was important for me to keep that strong reference to specific films. The desert was an incredible experience—when I first went there to make the work, I knew I'd have to make several interconnected projects. The desert is an environment that I will continually return to and not merely for inspiration but the space will directly inform my work as will the media culture surrounding it.

3- Elaborate on the idea of 'moving painting' that your work requires from time to time.

I think the notion of moving painting could be appropriate for some forms of video art, and it could certainly apply to many of my pieces. The whole field seems to be in a free play between cinema, painting, installation, computer-generated imagery, etc. and I love this freedom and range. I could describe my work as moving painting for all the subtle and overt references to art history and painting in particular, but now I think it could also be characterized as slow cinema or "unfrozen" architecture (to play with Goethe's quote).

Like many other video artists, I don't feel the need to compete with the Hollywood model of high-definition imagery. I still use domestic video cameras (which are now of course high definition) but what is more important to me is this access to the means of production. In terms of image quality, I'm interested in the text by Hito Steyerl entitled "In Defense of the Poor Image." Low resolution or poor images are as much a part of our lives (and certainly our online lives) as is high resolution cinematic imagery. It's also an interesting challenge to the Hollywood mode of production. I'm interested in video art within Steyerl's analysis of the 'poor image.' My work is at times both poor and also high definition. Certainly, when it is work recorded on domestic equipment, it feels as though my practice is very close to a more general use of video in the world today. I'm thinking of the writings of Boris Groys here, who does not make a clear distinction between what would have been considered avant-garde activity and the millions of Facebook and YouTube users. When John Ruskin and, later, Joseph Beuys insisted 'we are all artists,' the first media we have decided to take up (evidenced by the web) is photography and video (and one could also argue for performance here).

I am also thinking of a medium like painting and its popularity now being matched with consumer electronics and the thrill of image and video playback plus transmission. This is something that started with painting as it moved from architecture into more mobile supports like canvas stretchers. In this period of historical acceleration, video is a very fast medium indeed and it's not restrained to the critical 'fine art' application of video!

 
4- What would be your dream project to be set up in Brazil?

This is an extremely difficult question! Without any limits or restrictions, I'd love to make a series of works in Brazil. I'd love the work to mostly be video but also involve architectural elements within its installation. I'd love for the work to look at how bodies respond to different environments throughout the country. One environment I'd be very interested in working with would be Brasília. I'd love to record a video involving very high-risk skateboarding in the capital. I think Niemeyer was unwittingly designing a skateboarding park and I'd love to work in Brasília over an extended period of time with a local and international skateboard community—and this would be a development with the work I produced in São Paulo with Oggy de Souza. But of course, my interest would also be in forms of movement like capoeira, street dancing and art, surfing, parkour, free climbing, survival trekking, etc. I would survey the relationship bodies have to a wide range of spaces in Brazil.

It would be an extensive work but due to the size of the country and diversity and volume of activity in these areas, I could only ever focus on fragments—they would be wonderful fragments no doubt!