Associação Cultural Videobrasil

I would like to talk about a set of works in which you explore newspaper texts. Displaced into the body of your work, those texts function as brief narratives of anonymous existences. What alterities are those that hide behind abbreviated names?

Humanity. Those texts belong in Arquivo universal. The idea of eliminating any reference whatsoever to a specific image or person from a text, making it ambiguous enough that you are able to imagine that it is about many different persons, situations, countries, or eras, aims at approximating the effect that photography provokes. A photograph does not have a name and it does not have a date, unless you photograph some data that place you in time and space. The idea was to gamble with the possibility of projecting onto text the character that you wanted to. And that alterity can be your own self. You can project your own self. It is very similar to the way in which I use image, removing its contrast, or creating an intentional opacity in order to make the photo less legible.

Everything seems to contribute to provide legitimacy to a question contained in the Espelho diário [Daily mirror] video installation: “Is it not true that every news story is about our own selves?”

I guess so. But there is another aspect that interests me, and which complements this notion. The official story, as told in books, is often very masculine. It is the story of heroes—despite the fact that the Brazilian history is full of funny, or not-so-heroic moments. But what I really enjoy is telling small stories, which can happen to anyone. The small accounts of the oppressed, of the defeated, of those who have no say. The story of the defeated is more interesting.

Those newspaper texts, manipulated in Espelho diário and other installations, such as In Iblivionem or Hipocampo, seem to loose a lot of their “journalistic objectivity,” and gain an aura of fantasy that brings them closer to the narratives described by Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller. It is as if the original news story had set itself loose, and moved toward other contents.

But manipulation of texts is minimal. They only undergo a few cuts, through which I eliminate the references that do not interest me: geographic, temporal, and related to identity. This feeling of openness that you get, I guess it is due to the fact that the fragment is decontextualized from the full text.

Are those small omissions sufficient to remove the informative character from the text, and turn it into fiction?

I can no longer see the distance between fiction and reality in those texts. I probably have close to ten texts about torture during the dictatorship, but it is much easier to imagine all of them as being fiction than reality. I think this potential is contained in the text. All I do is find a way for it to become even more enigmatic than it already is.

Getting back to Walter Benjamin, who claimed that narrative is “an artisanal approach to communication,” generated synchronously with the manual work of artisans, to what extent is your relation with photo and text archives characterized by “modeling”?

I have always enjoyed this possibility of open images. Of making them sufficiently ambiguous, so you can project yourself and interact with them in a very direct way. Opening the image so that you can identify yourself, rather than trying to associate it with another character.

In Bibliotheca there is another narrator, different from the one in Arquivo universal. He appears in the archive of files that describe the albums locked inside glass panels. Instead of just describing the images, he seems to interpret the story of the character portrayed. What is the feature that distinguishes this narrator from the previous ones?

He deduces the story based on the reading of the albums, but you cannot be certain of the images contained inside. There is no guarantee that what the librarian wrote is true. The narrator is a librarian who might have lied to you. You must believe him, as you must believe the narrators, and as you must believe journalists as well: you must believe that the news story is being told correctly. But here, maybe there is more of a desire for organizing, for keeping. The narratives contained in the albums are not accessible. Thus, it seems to me that a narrator does not exist here. What does exist is a librarian, who is much more concerned with keeping or saving a vestige of something. But it is all incomplete and fragmented, the data are fragile. This is the delirium I created for this librarian. What degree of veracity can you ascribe to a story made out of fragments? If I am speculating about the motivations for the guy to make fifty images and leave only ten, then I am making fiction.

The empty spaces and gaps in the narratives in Bibliotheca reflect the blanks and the discontinuity of memory. You have yet another “blank” work, the Vera Cruz video, in which a historic narrative chases after a blank film. What is the connection between the blank spaces in the portrait albums and this video?

In Vera Cruz, there is a text very well backed up by a document, which is probably the most well known, most important document in Brazil. But all we have are those textual accounts. What I liked was precisely to work with all that could not be documented. When you read the letter, what can you imagine about the relationship of the Portuguese with the Indians? There are very few elements for that. You only have the version of the Portuguese, you do not have the version of the other side. It is the vision of the colonizer.

Does the whiteness in the image symbolize the absence of the other side of the story? Does it indicate the fragility of the colonizer’s account?

Yes, and also an excess of judgment, based on a very fleeting contact. It indicates the lack of the counterpart of a judgment, for instance, that the Indians had no taste, just because they did not like the wine and dried fruits that they were served on the boat. If it were completely judgment-free, perhaps it would be a more interesting text. But I do not know whether it would be possible to have a fully descriptive text.

I see a certain degree of similarity between Vera Cruz and Congo, made by Arthur Omar, in 1972. In the film, action is replaced with phrases and letterings over a white background. The text functions as a script of sorts for an action that has not been recorded. And in Vera Cruz, the blank appears in order to question the text.

I am not acquainted with Congo but, in Vera Cruz, the subtitles exist precisely in order to be questioned. That conversation is fictional, created based on data from the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha. We know that the conversation between Indians and the Portuguese did not take place. Therefore, the work presents several impossibilities, which you call “blanks.” It contains an impossible recording, an impossible conversation. The Portuguese man speaks, but there is no reply, because the reply was not understood. The other is seen and judged from a single point of view.

The blank is the absence of the other. What happens is an antidocumentary of sorts, because the “other,” so often evoked in documentaries, is not present here.

In documentaries, the other has a voice, the other answers. In those days, the only possible account was the textual one, or the drawings. Thus, you must count only on the version of he who is presenting that which you must believe are the facts.

But the absence of the other can also occur in a documentary that contains image, depending on how that information is edited.

You are right. And Bibliotheca also features some of that manipulation of information, as it renders you unable to see the album itself, and presents you with a sort of summary of the content. Everything is incomplete, and I only show that which is interesting to me. And you need to believe it. Whether I am lying or not, you will never know. This comes from the realization I had by visiting museums throughout the world, and seeing how they prepare their monitored visits, the thematic exhibitions, in which you put on a headphone, you shorten your sight, and you are led to look at that object based on previous indications. So that you see exactly what the museum wants you to see. People seek guided visits, believing that they will acquire more information and knowledge. And this is why I wanted to put the photographic image of the album cover in the glass panel, offering the public only a representation of that object.

In Espelho diário you play a stunning variety of women, with a single common feature: their name. Is this a way of eliminating the other, of devouring the other?

I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe the one who disappeared there was me, right? Well, the only reason why I did not disappear altogether, is because I am no actress to play the homeless, the socialite, the dead woman. I do not have that ability, I wish I did, I should have practiced a little more... But after all, I like the fact that I did not become so enmeshed, that I kept a minimum distance. But I do not know if to mirror is the same as to cannibalize.

Does the mirror created there keep the distances between the alterities of those Rosângelas?

That is how I see it. But there are several mirrorings within that work. I tried to not fully take the place of the other, but I cannot position myself as a narrator either. The mirror implies in a duality. And it speaks of two sides that resemble each other. On the one hand, all of my homonymous women; on the other hand, me.