Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Unportrayable Light-years

The end in the beginning 

The word chopped 
in the first syllable.
The consonant, gone 
before the tongue reached the cavity.
That which would never be forgotten 
because it did not even begin to be remembered.
The field—was there a field?
helplessly withered in shadow 
before one imagines the figure 
of a field.

Life is less than brief. 

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

What fascinates me the most in Alice’s work is her ability to face the ephemeral, refusing the logic of the instantaneous. Always investing in the image of that which cannot be portrayed, she seems to position her cameras like an astronomer, and not as a documentary filmmaker, witness, or narrator.

Astronomers are scientists who defy our earthly measurings, based in references that are anthropocentric to a greater or lesser extent, such as feet and inches, which clearly have the human body as their parameter, or the meter, based in the dimensions of the Earth.

Their distance unit is the light-year, the distance that light travels in one year on empty space, at the speed of three hundred thousand kilometers per second. The farther an object is, the more light-years are travelled, because the distance that its light travels is greater. This generates a disconcerting phenomenon that was described with rare simplicity and poetry by physicist Marcelo Gleiser: “To look at the cosmos is to travel to the past.”

After all, the light that we see corresponds to the object as it used to be in the past, and not as it is in the present. Just to have a notion of the scales of displacement involved in this relation, it is enough to remember that the light of the Andromeda galaxy, the neighbor of Earth, left there two million years ago, or at roughly the time when the human species was formed. 

In such spatial scales of displacement, an instant does not seem to make any sense. Here, it does not matter which is assumed as “real time,” and which intoxicates the media discourse so much, the virtuality of the intersection of the here and now with the there and then. What matters is to be aware that the present, in many dimensions, is only the past, and that what one sees as real is nothing but cosmic dust. And it is here that Alice forces us to rethink the current strategies for dealing with history and memory, assaulting us, without terror, with traces of human action, in politics and science, that are at times morbid, at others, imponderable, often tragic.

Without making a display, for example, she invites us to contemplate the weight of pain felt by victims of political prisons in Cambodia with her 88 de 14.000, made in 2004. The project, one of the highlights at the transmediale.05, features pictures of eighty-eight out of the fourteen thousand killed in a Khmer Rouge prison, in the 1970s. 

The hours or days that passed from the time of entering prison, when the picture was taken, until execution are represented by the period of time during which images are projected onto a wall of sand. In this suspended time, we are converted from spectators into accomplices of a gut-wrenching silence that seems enmeshed in the ethereal walls of the projection. It is a nearly suffocating silence, because it is incapable of retaining the phantasmagoric images that are projected in the interval between the last picture in life/first instant of death for each of these eighty-eight faces in a crowd of fourteen thousand people.

This elasticity of time, this enigma of interval, of the inefficacy of human measures against the duration of life, including that which separates life from death, is the element that, it seems to me, places Alice’s projects in a single, dense line of research.

In 14 horas, 54 minutos, 59,9…segundos (2006) she proposes a very short long video, which lasts forty seconds, and in which she extends the last moment of photographer Robert Capa, founder of the Magnum agency, manipulating the last photograph taken by one of the greatest artist-documentary makers of all time. 

Alice reminds us that in Vietnam, at fourteen hours and fifty-five minutes of May 25, 1954, photographer Robert Capa stepped on a mine and died, while covering the Indochina War. Nevertheless, the last picture he took, moments before his death, remained in his camera. It shows his travel companions, the soldiers, crossing the field that extends into a horizon that Capa contemplated and captured in his photograph, but which he never crossed. 

In the few seconds of the video, Alice stretches this last second and makes us wonder: what is the duration of the time interval between the click of Capa’s last picture and death? Is it possible to measure the time of pain, of the unstoppable, and imponderable aspects of history? Would it be possible to imagine the unportrayable character of memory?

Those are questionings that the “limit-images” by Alice suggest in a style that, at times, hints at a certain skepticism similar to that of Drummond (TN: Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade). 

Watching Alice’s videos, it is difficult not to hear the verses of the poet who taught us that memory is resistance to what is tangible and the senses of demise. Something that is present with both delicacy and power in the video Little White House (2005), which portrays the trip from the Chelmno-nad-Nerem concentration camp, in Poland, to the nearest village, alongside two survivors of Nazi violence. The path is short, but not the pain and the imponderable aspect of the time that is lodged in that space. 

And Little White House works with this paradox, stretching the trip into a fictional time of forty minutes, as if seeking not the measure of pain, but once again a limit-image that will allow itself to be cut through by the unportrayable aspects of memory and history.

Not only does this unportrayable defy the logic of the instantaneous, but also that of the presumed current technical ability to provide a visible shape to our own genetic code.

In an extreme situation, such as that of monozygotic twins, which have the same DNA, what does the mapping of their genetic code portray? By making herself a target for her own cameras, Alice begins with this question to force us once again to think about the interval and the unportrayable.

In Ínterim/auto-retrato, for twenty minutes she shows her face turning into that of her identical twin sister. The transformation is so slow that the image appears to be still. Alice said:
“Me and her, we are so alike, one has the impression that little or no change takes place. Nevertheless, between the initial and final points, the images run the gamut of all the minimal degrees of difference between us two. These images are neither me, nor her, but rather one and other, that which we have not been. Based on the two only real actualizations of a same genetic heritage—me, the first one to be born, and my sister, who was born twenty minutes later—a series of potential phenotypes was created. This series fulfills the interval between the two of us. In this interim, what takes place is a virtual sequence of unrealized possibilities. They are everything that I have not been until there was her, and everything that she has not been until there was me.”

When projected in a sequence, within intervals that have no scale of parameter in human measures, these nonhappenings announce what is to come in Alice’s award-winning project of invisible images of Chernobyl.

In this new enterprise, she seeks to produce a series of radiographic images of the exclusion zone through the very radiation that haunts the place, using a pinhole lead camera specially built for her project. 

Working only with the radiation present in the exclusion zone, Alice’s proposal is to provide a body to the immeasurable aspect of destruction. In the emptiness that will be imprinted, we might be able to glimpse the invisible light-years within each fleeting moment “unportrayed” by her astronomical lenses.

Giselle Beiguelman is a web artist, graduate professor of communication and semiotics at PUC-SP, and coeditor of electronic magazine Trópico. Her projects have been presented in exhibitions such as the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, Arte/Cidade, Net_Condition and Algorithmic Revolution (ZKM, Germany). She is the author of the book Link-se(arte/mídia/política/cibercultura), among others.