Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In your ongoing Chernobyl Project, by creating a previously unheard of technology to capture radioactivity-generated images in the exclusion zone in Ukraine, you remind me of the inventors of the technological foundations that spawned the beginnings of cinema, in the late 19th century. The invention of a device designed to capture moving images, in their case, was due to technical-scientific motivations. What type of motivation—artistic, political, or scientific—led you to invent an object that is sensitive to radioactivity?

I became interested in Chernobyl because I was impressed with that place, haunted by an evil that is everywhere, yet invisible. I thought it would be interesting to go there and produce images, but then I started to ask myself: what type of specific image could I produce? I was not interested in a traditional mode of documentation, with images illustrating a text, but rather I wanted to deal with the very making of the image. I thought about what would happen if the history and the context of that place were represented in the process of image formation. I had never drawn a direct comparison with the beginnings of cinema. This is an interesting thought because, for one of the branches of the project, I am precisely thinking of building a magic lantern. Narrative cinema as we know it today is just a way of creating meaning in the form of images. If we look at the early history of moving images, there are eight thousand different ways of operating these vision machines, and eight thousand different ways of providing images with meaning. So, I love to make stuff up and play the mad scientist, but my motivation is obviously not just technical.

Had this penchant for invention of yours ever manifested itself before?

I had never invented a device for creating images, but I did invent a way of making images seen in a specific manner. In the project for Cambodia (88 de 14.000), I built a machine that would drop sand, and then I projected the images onto a curtain of sand. The machine worked for two days only, while I was shooting, and then it broke down. It was all very precarious. But the conceptual stances of the two projects (Cambodia and Chernobyl) are very similar in my quest to create a specific image of a place, seeking to expose its particularity. The work in Cambodia is fully documental, because the images are documental: the prisoners of the Khmer Rouge. My question was, how to make those images seen in a specific way, disclosing the context in which they were produced? With Chernobyl, I was interested in the fact that the place was empty, yet filled with something invisible. Then it dawned on me that the key issue was precisely that of visibility. In the beginning I was thinking about physical visibility, because of this energy that is everywhere, yet cannot be seen, but it touches upon other layers of social and political visibility.

Can a photograph of the invisible be considered a documental photograph?

believe that in some way it is documental. I am the first and probably the only artist at the Institute of Radioprotection and Dosimetry (locally IRD), among physicists, engineers. In the beginning, they thought my experiments were funny, but many of them are now interested in reproducing my experiment in a scientific, thoroughly organized fashion. I do what I do to get a visual result, whereas they interpret it as a document.

This seems to me as a quite complex documentation project, because it focuses on two categories of recordings: the recording of the radioactivity emitted by matter, and the “political recording of the ghost city,” as you said in an interview. The recording of the ghost city takes place in video and in writings that are published in the form of a diary, in your blog. Your first-person account seems to me as a contemporary version of the old road movie genre.

At first I had not considered making a blog; it was an invitation of the Jornal do Brasil newspaper. I don’t even like blogs; I was sort of prejudiced against that type of media. But since this project involves a huge amount of research and a whole process that stems from a conceptual decision, I thought it was worthwhile documenting. Therefore, it can be said that those “more traditional” images document the process, whereas the blog is the place for my questions: how do you enter a place called “exclusion zone”—which, by definition, is a place that excludes you? I don’t know, I am just groping, and I have no answers. The entire project builds itself as it develops. It is an empirical experiment. That is why I thought it would be right to keep a diary. The explorers had this tradition of documenting their process, they did it using the book format. I read Darwin’s diary: he lived in a ship for five years, exploring the world, and only afterwards did he finish the Theory of Evolution. It all happened in transit. The process is a leap into the unknown.

The democratization of image technologies took the exclusivity of covering the distant facts of the world away from 19th-century traveling photographers, and even 20th-century photojournalists.

And since it is all a matter of testimony, little does it matter if it is well framed or out of focus.

Nowadays, everybody travels and everybody photographs everything. There are few places left to which few people have access. Your project bears that particularity: you found your way into a territory that no one enters, and brought back a story. And then, after tackling all of these obstacles to entrance, you also invented a documentation model. Are you giving new meaning to activities that had become obsolete?

I am really interested in these unseen places, or inaccessible places, these no man’s lands. Because of this interest, I started thinking of minefields, which are physically inaccessible spaces that no one actually enters. That is why I used the image by Robert Capa in the Dízima periódica [Periodic decimal] project. The last image he produced in his life was that of a minefield, in Asia, moments before he stepped on a mine. In my work, there are many images that allude to the impenetrable.

In 88 de 14.000, when you project the images of Cambodian prisoners onto a sand screen, are you discussing the time contained in the images?

Yes, those are the last images recorded of those persons in life. The S-21 was a prison in which the Khmer Rouge executed people. They tried to be very organized, so they would take pictures of everyone who entered the prison. The pictures bore the person’s name and date of entry. Those are some of those horror images we were talking about. Those are horrible images. Only they are not explicit, such as mothers holding dead children. Therefore, the issue here was how to make those images seen in a significant way, one that would convey the power and meaning of the story. But I did not want to do so in an illustrative fashion, as in a bad documentary film.

The idea of “making seen” is one of the features of classic documentary film, since “docere” (to make seen, to show, to disclose), in Latin, is the root of the word document.

To tell a story in a narrative fashion, as in cinema, is but one of the possible ways of making things seen. Six thousand people had their pictures taken and their entry dates recorded. I thought about finding out the dates in which those people were executed. Therefore, the work also dealt with what separates one point from another, as in Dízima.

Does the projection time for each image vary according to the duration of life?

Yes. First I set an initial parameter, according to which all images should be visible. Then I took all of the original negatives (which are currently in the Genocide Museum, at the site of the old prison, where they are gathering mold, because Cambodia is a mess), I made new enlargements, and did a research on the execution dates at the Documentation Center (maintained in the capital of Cambodia by the University of Yale). Out of six thousand images, I found eighty-eight entry and exit dates. Thus, the sand is a way of keeping time. Duration is the key issue in the video: one day equals one kilogram of sand. So, there is a specific amount of sand for each person. The idea was to really create an implication for images we see in an obscene fashion, in between the toothpaste ad and the primetime soap opera. I hope those images can actually be experienced.

In many of your projects I sense a desire to focus on historical moments. Is history another motivation of yours?

Memory, in particular. My work is also permeated with extreme political issues that end up in tragedies. Once I was asked as to why I did not work with 9/11. I think this is a complicated thing to do: first off, because the event is right here in our faces. Secondly, you see it in all media, all around. There are so many images, they cause indigestion. It is like horror images in photojournalism: a mother holding her dead daughter on the cover of Veja magazine. There is a certain obscenity, because those images only have value in the moment. Soon the toothpaste ad goes on air, you have dinner, and it does not even seem like you just saw something terrible. You are forced into a passive stance. But what is the actual implication of what you just saw?

Is it the artist’s role to think about the actual implication of those images?

Are not we, artists, producing images and looking at the world? There is an issue of presence here: the way in which you look. I became interested in events that are forgotten. The implications of the Khmer Rouge are still very present in Cambodia. To a large extent, these implications shape the social reality in a place that is completely fucked up, but they are not on newspaper covers and no one talks about them. It is roughly the same thing with Chernobyl. The difference is, in Cambodia, I am approaching an event that already took place and left its marks. The contamination in Chernobyl, on the other hand, is still present. So, to answer your question (about a historical motivation): it is more a matter of thinking about how we relate to our past nowadays. It is a matter of responsibility. I cannot stand to look at those images and, out of not having a choice, agreeing with the way in which things are being conducted. No, I don’t want it like that.

But then why not deal with recent facts?

I do not know how to answer that question yet, but I think we must be very careful. I lived in Finland for a while, as an artist-in-residence in a contemporary art center, and some of my colleagues were European artists. All of them, without exception, were doing contemporary artwork with a social conscience, verging on social assistance. I was a bit concerned with that, because it seemed like a stance of guilt-relief: many of them came from very wealthy countries, which spawn this geopolitical situation we find ourselves in today, and they worked with impoverished communities, not wanting to impose a “white form of Western supremacy” on them, believing that contemporary art is an elite thing. Beware: the actual elitists are those who think that way. The elitists are those who think that just because the other person came from the slums and does not have the same access to culture that we do, that he/she cannot connect to a phenomenon taking place right in front of him/her. I hope I can touch upon political issues in a responsible way.

In your choice of subjects, you not only approach past events, but also distant ones. Why not deal with what takes place next to you? Weren’t you interested in rethinking the radioactive accident in Goiânia, for instance?

Yes! Goiânia is always very present in the discussions about the Chernobyl Project at the IRD. Contamination in Goiânia was caused by the same element that is now the most present in Chernobyl, Cesium 137. If efforts are not made in order to “clean up” the place, then it will take years and years, at least three hundred years, until it can be inhabited again. Chernobyl was truly a disaster, and the contamination that takes place when an accident of this magnitude happens is very wide-ranging. The case in Goiânia was a different one, it cannot even begin to be compared, fortunately. To explain it with my very limited knowledge, here is roughly what happened there: people broke the lead safe in a Cs 137 source, which was inside an abandoned radiography device (I am always flabbergasted, how could it be “abandoned??!!”). The Cs 137 inside that source was in the form of a shiny blue powder (glows in the dark). People had no idea what it was, so they rubbed it on their skin, they ate it (!!!), and went walking around with it. They caused inner and outer contamination. Those people had a very high contamination rate and either became really ill, or died. But it was just them. At the time of the accident, the area in which those people lived and the surroundings were isolated and all objects, clothes, etc. were seized and analyzed to check for contamination. The soil there was analyzed as well, but no significant changes were detected. My supervisor and many other people at the IRD worked on cleaning up Goiânia. It rained on the days following contamination as well, so everything got spread out and diluted. Since the amount of Cs 137 was small (it does not even compare to the reactor), in addition to the fact that, to some extent, it had been cleaned at the time, the remainder got sort of diluted into nature. This is why there is not an “exclusion zone” there, as in Chernobyl. I could try to get images in Goiânia, using my lead pinhole, of places where there might still be contamination. I could also try to get an image of the Sugar Loaf, which is a naturally radioactive rock. But since it is radioactive in a very low scale, it would take years for me to get an image, without any guarantee that something would come out, even after a very long time of exposure.

By preserving an interest in how to approach the “other,” the documentary film relates to anthropological strategies. In the Chernobyl Project you confront the absence of this “other.” What is the type of alterity you are working with?

I don’t even know. This alterity should come to being as I look at it. In physics, they say a phenomenon only takes place if there is an observer looking at it. That is the idea.

The Ínterim/auto-retrato video, in which you draw a path from your face to the face of your twin sister, is far from documental. Nevertheless, it shares with documentary films a questioning of the limits between the self and the other.

I also see a connection between this issue and the Dízima periódica project. This is the field, in mathematics, that investigates precisely the extension of the limit between one point and another. It is a black hole, a problem that mathematicians are unable to explain: how does 0.9999 ad infinitum become 1? In Ínterim, I was trying to look into the issue of identity and self-portrait: of course there are endless ways of defining a person’s identity. But in here I tried to analize all of the possibilities of what I could have been, until I became my twin sister. I reached as many possibilities as my computer software was able to create.