Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The starting point for the Notorious performance (2002) is a scene from a Hitchcock film. How do you bring references from the audiovisual realm into your performances? Is there an exchange between these two manifestations in your creative process?

Generally I use references from the cinema tradition as a point of access into a work, to create an image which the viewer feels easily familiar with in the first place, and relates to quickly from a personal point of view. Most of the people who saw that performance just happened to be there at that time and were not officially informed or invited. The performance gradually assumed a presence in their banal experience, giving rise to feelings of déjà vu or nostalgia for a forgotten experience. Some people recognized it as a scene from a film from a particular period, but weren't sure which. As the performance continued its subtle absurdity began to expand into the space surrounding, so that it became difficult to distinguish which elements were part of the performance and which were more incidental. I am interested in the way that performances like this can place spectators at a peculiar angle to their own everyday experience, adding a texture and density which acknowledges something internal and I have begun to work with this idea in the making of films as well.

In Background to a Seduction (2004) and Should We Never Meet Again (2005), you alter the time-space of videos, using compressions and cuts that make narratives nonlinear, and you link them to a heterogeneous spatiality-a heterotopia, as Foucault put it. How do you relate to the possibilities that video offers for the creation of these narratives?

One of the main themes of these films is intimacy, though to say this is always misleading, as I am not strictly interested in intimacy in an interpersonal sense. I am interested in intimacy with regard to how the individual navigates space in general, public or private. I would propose intimacy as simply a closeness or sensitivity to what is there in the space which we occupy; the multiple vectors (both internal and external) which come to bear on us as we move through space, and a feeling of being somehow complicit in the conditions of our position. The convenient thing about video is that it permits one to work in a very discreet way in a variety of contexts, public and private; the camera can relatively easily be imbedded in a situation and simply capture what is there without disturbing too much. In this way one is permitted to play out a scene in which the scripted action can be thoroughly integrated in the reality of the place and the narrative becomes the sum of all the parts, everyone is an extra. Working with video also enables one to work with the space which the viewer occupies (video installation), adding elements which might further sensitize the viewers' awareness of their own presence. Finally the story being told is irrelevant, except as a means to bring the viewers closer to the center of their own narrative.

In Should We Never Meet Again, the audience leaves the open space of streets and is thrown into closed spaces, as if they were houses. How did you come up with the idea for these “sceneries,” which allow you to create passages from one spatial context to another?

Like most of my ideas, this one came from a fairly 'idiot' root, the image of a man carrying a screen which had the potential to transport people who are strangers and enable intimate exchanges between them. After that I wrote several versions and was finally satisfied with the one which I could explain the least. With this film I am glad about the unconscious way in which it was formulated, as it remains a surprise to me each time I see it-where do these images come from? In the scenario, the central character has arrived at a desperate stage, where his life seems closed and flat. So it was interesting to create a visual equivalent of this flatness, which has at the same time the potential to give way to depth and density.

You always appear in your own videos. In The Interview (2002), you play a female character (one cannot help but think of Rose Sélavy). Does the possibility of acting stem from your work in the field of performance?

I have always moved between my original formation as a painter and more performative and collaborative activities, working in theater, performance in public space, and finally video. For me the performative aspect and the process of the film-shoot are the most pleasurable aspects of my work. This is because they are the aspects during which I am least in control of all the elements and there is the need for an intuitive approach and also trust in the others involved. In other techniques (painting, editing, writing), I feel much more in control and self-conscious. As I am most interested in the things which are expressed involuntarily, or go beyond what one is consciously trying to say, I am drawn most to performance, for it engages and implicates the artist most fully on both a physical and intuitive level. Your videos are spare in their use of effects and image processing, and focused on narrative and acting. Why this option for simplicity in image, which sometimes resembles the formal schemes of mainstream cinema? In fact some of the films involve a lot of postproduction (the ones that involve 3D or animated elements), but I don't find this aspect of the process very pleasurable. Perhaps I am against reworking the image too much because I am interested to expose more 'what is there' in banal reality. To do this I rely more on a chemistry which potentially exists between the uncontrollable chaos of mundane reality and the things that I script and play out in this reality. I am interested in slowing down the viewers to a state of awareness of their present time and space, and to this end it is often sufficient to work with the performative aspect, the décor, and the pace of the editing.

South Africa has an important artistic production (Jane Alexander, Kendell Geers, William Kentridge, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa, among others). How do you view this production nowadays?

It is hard to generalize about the production in South Africa, as there are so many directions and ways of working. What I think is interesting there is that the social and political issues remain very close to the surface in everyday life, as well as the quest in each individual for a sense of self and identity which is more acceptable than the one imposed during the apartheid time. For this reason it is also a very intense place to live and work.

What are your future projects?

The project that I am in the process of developing takes the form of a dance-musical film or music clip. Excepting that it won't have any music.