Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Most of your works show images of the Swedish army and war references, always fictionalized: we see soldiers, but there are no enemies. Is this the central point of your work—pointing at the way in which military power has been mythisized, something that exists to feed itself, more than for real need?

In recent years, what has interested me more and more is the media image of war facts and of organized and institutionalized violence: the way the means of communication, and especially TV, currently represent the activities of the Armed Forces. This is what I am mostly interested in studying. Ever since I started studying the images presented by the media, I rapidly established in my head the connection with Swedish romanticism which, in most cases, is greatly related to images of war. In Sweden, specifically, where I studied, the Academy of Art was originally a military academy that taught soldiers how to draw, as this was the only way to graphically document the battles. That is why much of the work I currently do is heavily based on the Swedish national romantic tradition. Nature in this country plays the role of a scenery in which the national imaginary deposits many of its fantasies, fears, wishes, etc.

This curatorship presents Uruguayan artists who discuss a society that is saturated with images and ready discourse. Your videos often point to what Jean Baudrillard defined as the “the era of simulation and simulacra.”

I keep very present, before everything else, Baudrillard’s text on the Kuwait War, in which he says that this war was never how it was shown, that it never existed, but was, in reality, a series of images that the United States generated and conveyed to the world. From this experience and from the criticism that the North American army received, a new strategy was developed for Afghanistan, in which the concept of the embedded journalist was developed. In the same way as information machinery works on hyperrealism, I feel the need to walk the same line to tackle this. More than ever, simulation is an important weapon, which may be very powerful in the hands of an artist. I think that this is a vital concept that artists have to understand today. In a certain way, sometimes my strategy is the same: generating an image that seems real, but is not. A mise-en-scène that does not heavily confront the official image, but is a slight detour into a parallel world. My greatest ambition is to promote doubt and, consequently, reflection. I could say that I work on low-intensity video activism.

Was moving from painting to video also a way of communicating better with the audiences of today?

Television is undoubtedly the tool that teaches people to look nowadays. Also, for this reason, video is the most efficient tool that we, artists, have to communicate beyond the spaces that we traditionally use, like galleries and museums. TV is the space that we still need to penetrate.

In Gilberto’s Place, the soldier—who we generally see in a group, in your creations—appears alone. Another difference is that he shows himself individually, revealing his face. Both his camouflage and his surroundings make the spectator feel he is a fantastic or a mysterious misanthropist. Why this change and what did you plan to investigate in this work?

Gilberto’s Place comes from a specific case in Uruguay: the escape and capture of Colonel Gilberto Vázquez, later ousted. He had been one of the heads of intelligence during the military dictatorship. There are components of spectacle in the episode starred by Vázquez. After he was arrested, and as he was awaiting deportation to Argentina, he escaped to a Military Hospital and was caught again. What really caught my attention was that when he was arrested he was in disguise, “camouflaged,” as a beggar. The event, greatly broadcast by the Uruguayan media, was what triggered this work, in which I investigate my own fantasies regarding the event. It shows an almost ritual moment, a state of reflection of this person, vanished in his solitude, hidden, abandoned by his peers. It is the return to a savage state, and what we observe is the result of this process.

Can the constant presence of camouflage in your work be seen as a symbol of the need the contemporary man has to “make himself seem” so as to be able to comply with the rules of our times? Needing a “second skin” to survive in their medium?

To me, camouflage is a very important symbol, with a very great personal load. Very intimate, I could say, due to the fact that in my life, due to different circumstances, I developed an almost chameleon-like capacity to adapt to different means. But it is only a cover. It is a metaphor of self-reflection: different difficult circumstances of my life helped me develop the capacity to camouflage myself “into the other.” These circumstances are particularly related to exile and to the necessity of living amidst cultures that are very different from mine. Living in Sweden now, the “height” of camouflage is when a Swede thinks that I am native, which is really an involuntary effect, not something I sought.

From a very young age you lived the bitter fruit of dictatorship and exile. While you developed work on camouflage, did you notice these dynamics or did these interpretations arise after the critique?

In the beginning, there was attraction to something that would become the aesthetics of illusion. To me it was fascinating, in the sense of visualizing an imminent albeit hidden danger. That is, in the beginning there was a very strong aesthetic load, but with my own evolution and a little influence of certain critiques I started reflecting about other components that are part of this and relating them to more personal things, like my own life and my personal relations with the organized and institutionalized world of violence.

What project are you working on now?

I am developing a project called Juba. It is going to be an installation based on images I found on the Internet. In Baghdad there is a sniper who operates under the codename Juba and films the exact moment he shoots American soldiers, often killing them. The material itself, the way it is shown on the Internet, accomplishes the function of providing propaganda in favor of the Iraqi insurgence. It is evident that this sniper, in reality, is many snipers, but what the video intends to establish is the illusion that there is a superpatriot who, alone, is in charge of making justice against the enemy invader. In this case, Juba is a metaphor that makes us think of Rambo, the fantasy of the Iraqi supersoldier. What interests me in this material is not what Juba does, but what he sees and what we see too: an American soldier in a street in Baghdad, standing, on guard, doing nothing. And, in this moment of apparent calm, a shot is heard and the soldier falls. I am replaying these videos with the help of puppets, in a very exact way. But, as always, when you are working with this kind of material, there is distortion that has to do with the doubts and fantasies it causes. It is not enough for me to see what Juba sees. I want to see more, and the only way of accomplishing that is taking his place.

You have a work on suicide. What is it about?

It is a project that does not refer precisely to suicide, but to suicide attacks. For the time being, it is on hold. It is based on reports coming from different conflict areas, specially the experiences of young Chechens responsible for attacks in Moscow. The idea is to discuss with Swedish teens what ideas or facts could lead them to commit a suicide attack in their country and, from that discussion, produce a series of videos that show these “attacks.” From the psychological point of view, the work presents a very complicated problem for the youths who are going to participate, which makes the preparation process much longer than I would have thought. At the moment, all the material is in the hands of psychologists, who are going to help me define the way to develop the project without it representing a traumatic experience to those participating.

What sources of information inspire you most: news, the Internet, fiction, history?

At the moment, more than anything, I am interested in two narratives that have been helping to bring me closer to images that are hard to overcome, and that help me in my development as an artist by showing me a work strategy. It is the Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, and Adolf, by Osamu Tezuka. The book by Amis narrates the life of a German doctor in the 1980s, in New York. He has an irrational way of acting, but after reading for a while it becomes clear that the facts take place in the opposite direction of time, from the present to the past. Thus, he breaks up with a woman, seduces her, and ends up meeting her. It all starts making sense when the book arrives at World War II, and the character travels to Germany to work as a doctor in Auschwitz. As the story moves backwards in time, he will not help to kill, but will take people out of common graves to take them to the ovens that will return them to life; the Bank of Germany will make a donation in gold, the doctors will place it back in people’s mouths, and so on until all the families have been reunited and are back in their cities of origin. This narrative led me, for the first time in my life, to think about the workers in a concentration camp as people. Amis is not a revisionist, but he leads us to think about another possible history—instead of the one we are used to hearing and suffering—with just one elegant maneuver, telling the narrative as if it were a film being shown backwards. Adolf, by Osamu Tezuka, is a graphic novel that tells the stories of Adolf Kamil, a Jewish boy who was born in Japan, Adolf Kaufman, a boy with Japanese and German blood who lives in Germany, and Adolf Hitler. In addition to featuring fantastic elements, the story shows a Japanese outlook on World War II and the Nazis.

In an interview to Uruguayan daily La República, you said that you were building a “calligraphy of violence.” How is it being composed?

The “calligraphy of violence” has two levels. At the time of the interview to journalist Nelson Di Maggio, I referred to a work that now belongs to the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It is a work in progress, composed of books. At the moment, there are two volumes: Kalashnikov and M16. The term calligraphy refers to the simple fact that these two books are “written” by weapons. A binder prepared two volumes following my sketch. Each block of sheets was submitted to gunfire from one of these weapons that, when crossing it, generated a specific “calligraphy.” I am preparing the third volume, which will be “written” by the precision rifle of a sniper. Now, speaking about my work in more general terms, “calligraphy of violence” refers more and more to mimicking the gaze of those who express themselves through the most violent means we know today—generally national or transnational armies, in defense of national or transnational interests.