Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Archive of Time

The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge)

The modes of archiving, the role played by the archive, as well as the powerful relations between archive and image, constitute some starting points for us to approach the work of the Argentine Nicolás Testoni. Initially, our focus was on the video Canto de aves pampeanas (2006), awarded at the latest edition of the International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. Looking at other work by Testoni, however, similar procedures and the same confrontations with the field of documentary and the discourses of memory and their possible fabulations become clear.

That which, being outside ourselves, delimits us, as Foucault would have put it, provides a form to the archive and reveals a complex relation of otherness built with these sparkles of time that were retained and collected. In his videos, Testoni carries out that operation in the timing of memory. He ends up repositioning it in the present time, but leaves a series of blank spaces that gain meaning as the video goes on and which disclose, little by little, this form of organization typical of archives. However, at the same time he reveals its imponderable updating, by the sparkles of the real that affect and reconfigure the meanings of images.

We are surrounded by the present of those images, yet involved in a situation of archiving which both the narration and the intertitles, dividing the parts of each chant, show us. We go from the past of the lost film—of which only the recording of the singing of Pampa birds remain—to the invasion by the petrochemical industry. Testoni associates the images, long open shots with seemingly no events, with sound. We are guided by the singing of the birds.

(Regarding the singing of the birds, I confess that it reminds me of my own memories. My father raises birds as a hobby until this day. I spent a good share of my childhood and adolescence watching as my father sat, listened, and counted the chirps, the so-called “flutes” of each one of them. The sensation that I got, upon watching this video for the first time, was that of revisiting those situations in my memory, not through image, but rather through the sound. Listening to the singing, I remembered everything. An audio-oriented Proustian madeleine.)

The places where the film’s sound recordings were supposedly made are the locations in which Testoni chooses to frame up another time, a temporality typical of that archive that is at once close to us and different from our times. Perhaps that was the time when Pampa birds were able to sing without having to share the landscape with the petrochemical industry.

Testoni’s images are far removed from the Morel’s machine, to which Casares gave shape in his book. The Invention of Morel saved the images as if they were a life form accumulated in the past, distant from possible updates. In the island, far from everything, the fugitive, upon falling in love with the woman who watches the sunset everyday, does not even suspect that hers is an image that comes from the past, of someone who is not there, and will never again be. It is a sort of space-and-time projection, strangely incrusted in that space-time of the island. On the contrary, in Canto de aves pampeanas the archive is comprised not only of images of the past. In one single, ever-oscillating recording, the timing of birds, of the supposedly lost film, coexists with present-day images of those possible places. Everything is strangely real and current, because the proposed motion is a form of updating, paradoxically constructed as an archive, dynamically mixing past and present. Testoni shows us that the stability of the archive is updated by the nature of the images, by what they reveal as they become unstable in our perception.

The device built by Testoni for his video speaks of the archive, but also of its powerlessness. It is structured as a didactic audiovisual, clearly inspired by observation films, catalogs indexed and organized by bird type. However, the singing of birds, which frames up the field with the images at first, ends up casting us out of it when, little by little, in the three divisions that structure the video, we see more and more industries take up the space. At the end, along with the description of the chirp of each bird, the names of the industries appear, everything guided by the voice of the narrator that lists them. That which comes from outside the field, the singing of the birds (which are not shown up front as in didactic documentaries) ends up setting its boundaries, only for them to be disrupted soon thereafter. Failure in the archive. The supposed didactic character of the procedures used by Testoni takes up different shapes, retraces another path between past and present. It guards a time that seems to leak out of the images, especially due to the rigueur with which the director conducts the construction of this “fake” archive.

There is not any text to function as a subtitle to the images. Only at the end of the video is the singing associated with the places and what took place in them. Thus, they acquire the same dimension as that of local inhabitants and their everyday lives. Within that instability, the archive acquires new meanings, and actually ends up setting our limits, creating a certain present existence, a certain time that passes differently between past and present.

We can also perceive in this work a powerful tension surrounding the field of documentary, especially in the sense of expanding it to areas of passing and contamination by other domains. Perhaps that is one of the distinctive features of the experience of more contemporary documentary, which attempts to depart from the spectacle (in the Debordian sense of the term), from the idiosyncrasies of the characters and from preestablished situations. Some of those documentaries, in turn, seek that which is the most ordinary, most common, so that the voice of the “Other” looks different. Less spectacular and more open, these experiments point to places less standardized by the recurring stereotypes, and more prone to the invention of the subjects that see and those that allow themselves to be shown, including the directors themselves, as, for example, in Passaporte húngaro (2003), by Sandra Kogut, and 33 (2004), by Kiko Goifman, among others.

In other of his works, Testoni also lets this affiliation with contemporary documentary show through. It is clear in El puerto (2003-2006), a series of five short episodes. It features local characters, with nearly no “spectacular singularity,” who give accounts of their day-to-day experiences at the port of the city of Bahía Blanca (Argentina), where Testoni lives and works. The steady shots and little illustrative images disclose the unpredictable quality of their lives. According to Testoni, this project is structured as a series, in keeping with a concept from television, however it is designed to be passed from hand to hand, rather than broadcast through the configured channels. It is an open recording of memories, with no final or conclusive format to the images.

The aspects of memory also feature in the video S/T (White Noise, 2007), by Testoni and Ricardo De Armas. With a sophisticated editing of images taken from old super-8 homemade films and elaborate interruptions to the flow of images, the video lays bare the rhythm and frequency of memory. What we view seems to be a materialization of the modes of functioning of memory, of its flaws and constitutional defects, sequenced in fleeting situations of recollection and forgetfulness, similar to oscillations. The possible memories that the video seems to elicit, also within the framework of Bahía Blanca and the port of Ingeniero White, always feature empty spaces and repetitions, and are structured both in image and their absence in order to build meaning.

The work of Nicolás Testoni translates, in a contemporary form, some of the tensions of memory, of the modes of archiving, of the dilutions of audiovisual formats and genres, showing us some of the paths trodden by electronic image in our time, in its confrontations with social life.

The subject matter and setting of your work are life near the port of Bahía Blanca. How did you realize that you were interested in approaching this realm?

I am not certain that the boundaries of that realm are so well defined, but if I were to try and define them, I would have to start by saying that Bahía Blanca is one thing and its port, Ingeniero White, is another. Bahía is a Mediterranean city by the sea. The port belongs to the city, and yet the city finds a way for it to stay out of the imagery and the daily routine of most its inhabitants. Finding the sea in Bahía Blanca is difficult. You might spend your entire life and still not be able to. When I was little, the expression “going to the sea” meant visiting farther beaches. Years later, going past a few blocks to find the port of Ingeniero White ended up being a considerably more complex task, of which these videos are certainly a part. That which the unique relation between Bahía and its port denies, or hides, is not just the possibility of gazing at a landscape, but also that of understanding a history through it. Bahía Blanca is a key component of the mythic image of Argentina as the “world's barn.” Founded in 1828 as a military fort, Bahía developed in a close connection to the genesis, in the country, of what we now know as the “agricultural exporter model.” The process included the driving away and extermination of native people by the State, the installing of railways, ports, and plants owned by European companies (particularly British), and the arrival of a huge mass of impoverished migrants coming from Italy, Spain, or the Balkans. 
Thus, we could say that, through its port, Bahía Blanca becomes connected with the history of the country and of the world, and that this is not a phenomenon typical of the more-or-less recent “globalization,” but rather of a process that has been going on for a long time. My work, just as those of other artists from the city, aims to trace the footprints back to that history. As you see, each item in this small realm seems to possess a secret connection to distant places and remote times.

You studied and worked in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then you returned to Bahía Blanca. In which way did your experience in the capital alter or deepen your views on the reality of your hometown? 

I suppose that living in Buenos Aires was a needed introduction for me to start taking interest in my own place of origin. As you know, the often conflicting relation between Buenos Aires and the other regions of the country—that which natives of Buenos Aires call “the interior”—is at the core of a large share of our history as a nation. Buenos Aires is, or presents itself as if it were, the country's great city and great port. In other words, it is, on the one hand, the obligatory reference to other cities and, on the other hand, it monopolizes our relation with foreign countries. That is why many people from Bahía Blanca feel imaginarily closer to that port (Buenos Aires) than they do to their own. To them, being “a poet,” “a painter,” “an artist” entails leaving Bahía Blanca and going to the “capital.” I attempted the same, but achieved the opposite result. 

Your videos always touch upon the relation between environmental preservation, economic development, and social progress. In one of them, an interviewee says something to the effect of: “I wish that there were both (industrial progress and the beach), but that would be impossible.” Is it possible to preserve natural wealth and tap into its economic possibilities, or are the two incompatible?
 

The person that you mentioned is Atilio Miglianelli, who worked all his life as a diver at the former plant of General San Martín and passed away last year. He bore witness to a time when work and life could walk hand in hand in Ingeniero White. He used to work at the port and, at the same time, he was a “Mr. Blue Coast” type; he would spend hours and hours under the sun at local resorts. As he used to say, those were places you could take a snack or a thermal bottle and your chimarrão [typical Argentine beverage] to, and spend your entire day there. For reasons that would take too long to explain, things have now changed to the point in which it is ridiculous, near impossible to think of a worker at the railway, the port, or the petrochemical hub spending summer with his family a few meters away from the place he works at.
Atilio might have answered your question by saying that wealth is never “natural,” that it always entails the existence of workers like him; and that not only the relation between economic production and the environment has changed, and not for the best, but also the relation between capital and work and, along with it, the resources of a community for inhabiting its place without destroying it. 
Atilio misses the old resorts, but what he misses the most is the free time and the relative economic well-being that used to allow an entire population to spend their day in such places. Each new enterprise that settles in Ingeniero White these days employs less people than the previous one. When faced with a precarious, uncertain labor perspective, people need to work more. 
On the other hand, a major aspect of that impoverishment has to do with the ability of inhabitants to organize their community life, which has been decimated. Atilio used to work at the plant, but at the same time he used to manage, free of charge, the pool at Club Puerto Comercial, which was filled up on a weekly basis with water from the Bahía Blanca river mouth. In other words: the relation between economic production and environmental preservation here is based on the unsolved relation between production and distribution of wealth, or between economic and social development. Despite what the discourse of politicians and businessmen tries to convince us of, those terms are not necessarily synonymous with one another. 

The El puerto series displays in a very dynamic, brief, and blunt manner the reality of different characters linked to industrial activity in Bahía Blanca. How did you approach those people?

El puerto has a lot to do with my work at Ferrowhite, a museum dedicated to recording and disseminating the memory of local workers. The videos are part of a lengthy process; the interview is usually the starting point for a relationship that lasts long, in some cases. People such as Atilio or Pedro Marto went from interviewees to being part of everyday life in our museum. We interviewed Pedro three or four years ago. Now, he is the protagonist of Marto concejal [Councilor Marto], a theater play that tells the story of his life. What started out as a video ended up as theater. Theater to me resulted in a radical mode of collaborative documentary, in which the editing work is done along with the interviewee, on his own memory and body.
Ferrowhite is a very unique space in which history, as a field of knowledge, meets practices and reflections from the field of arts. To that extent, I believe that the El puerto series explores the unlikely connection between museum and television, i.e., between an institution that seeks to expand our experience of time, and a medium that, by means of its instantaneous quality, reduces that experience to the point where it becomes almost null. Each episode of the El puerto series toys with being television—and the television rhetoric is useful, as it enables for a broader, nonspecialist audience to be attracted. This, however, is a slower type of television, one that has no channels or broadcasting, that propagates from hand to hand, and has dozens of hours of recordings behind each minute edited. 

There is a strong documentary character to these works, which focus on people who live in precarious social conditions, yet solve their problems with disposition and, at times, good humor. Documentary, social portrait, and video art: Is this the mixture at the core of your work?

That is true, things do get mixed. And yet I do not think that the mix leads to some type of essence. At least, that is not the intention. If the mix stabilizes, then it gets converted into a recipe, a means for imposing a fair proportion across the heterogeneity of the elements at play. The aim, on the contrary, is to stir up, at least a little, the predictabilities typical of a given genre or field, by transposing them or crossing them with others. A video like Canto de aves pampeanas can be understood as an ecological discourse of sorts, typical of a certain documentary tradition, but it can also be approached from the specificity of video as art, if we pay attention, for example, to the coexistence of distinct temporalities within a single plan. On Canto de aves... each image is comprised of fragments from different scenes, fragments that are spatially adjacent to each other, but far apart in terms of time. To me, these approaches have to do with a seemingly distant genre, landscape painting. It is in the picturesque landscape that the tale of nature’s transformation by capitalism and the quest for new modes of representation for time and space intermingle. Perhaps Canto de aves pampeanas could be thought of as a modest attempt at revisiting, using different means, tasks and concerns that once pertained to painters. 
Those videos are but attempts at making a place inhabitable. Therefore, what they want to learn from the “survivors” that they portray is more than just a plot: it is logic, a way of doing things. It is said that in the older constructions in the port of Ingeniero White, one can still find material brought in by Ferrocarril del Sud. Surplus metal sheets and wood from packaging used for building improvised houses that would last for over a century. This is not as odd as it seems to be. From the perspective of industrial engineers nowadays, Ingeniero White would be a residue that the present stage of development of logistical science is able to suppress. Nevertheless, it is difficult to precise how much of the lives of the port’s inhabitants still depends on that same stealthy ability, the faculty of operating with scraps so as to establish unexpected combinations among them.

At thirty-four years of age, Nicolás Testoni will not stop thinking of a story that took place almost two centuries before his birth: that of the city of Bahía Blanca. A former port and resort, currently a petrochemical hub and one of the main outlets for Argentine production, the municipality was founded in 1828 as a fort and, two decades later, it was crossed by a railway that linked it to the interior, in a hint of the industrial future to which it was destined. Progress forged with iron, oil, and smoke leaves a bittersweet mark in the memories of inhabitants of the vicinities of the port of Ingeniero White, the epicenter of economic activity and the fast-paced changes that took place there. 

Raised amidst stories directly linked to that reality, of people who built their lives to the motion of the tides—in a place where, nowadays, according to the artist, “the expression ‘going to the sea’ means visiting farther beaches”—, Testoni chose, as his matter of investigation, the ability of Bahía Blanca’s natives for reelaborating existence based on the effects of fast, unplanned progress. 

After living in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, where he studied communication at the School of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and worked as a trainee at the Cinema and Audio Department of the General Archive of the Nation, in 1997, and as assistant professor at the Workshop of Expression in video at the UBA, in 1999, he decided to return to his native land in order to create and live. For many artists from his city, “being a poet, a painter, an artist entails leaving Bahía Blanca and going to Buenos Aires,” he says. “I attempted the same, but achieved the opposite result.” 

Once at home, he made videos for the Museo del Puerto de Ingeniero White up until 2004. Arriving at the Ferrowhite museum and studio seemed as natural as it was obligatory: the guidelines of the institution, which aims to retrieve the history of the local population and turn it into art, were similar to what he was seeking in his artwork, upon incorporating elements ranging from documentary film to video art. 

One of Testoni’s first works is a good example of this practice. Rodolfo René Boiardini carga un bidón con agua (1999) shows a middle-aged man in a trivial moment of his daily routine. As he carries a gallon of water, Boiardini comments on episodes, ranging from fantastic to supposedly fantasized, that he witnessed from the post-World War II era to the Argentine dictatorship period; he also describes how he saw a comet cross the sky, survived epidemics, and personally met singers that fascinated him. 

The same living contact, guided by the interviewee’s spontaneity, is featured in the El puerto series, initiated in 2003. This collection of audiovisual portraits reveals the routine of those who comprise the workforce at the port’s companies, a day-to-day ridden with obstacles stemming from generally unsatisfactory working conditions. 

Canto de aves pampeanas, one of Testoni’s most recent pieces, was awarded at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_ Videobrasil last year, and presents a melancholic and critical reflection on human intervention in the rhythm of nature. 

The video combines audio from an old documentary film, comprised of typical Argentine bird sounds, and present-day recordings of the Bahía Blanca landscape, made by Testoni. The award won him an artistic residency from the Videobrasil Residency Programme, at the Instituto Sacatar, in Ilha de Itaparica, Bahia, in 2008.

Ferrowhite in daily life
This blog features an annotated agenda of activities related to the museum and to daily-life events in Bahía Blanca. 

Port onstage
In another blog, members of the Ferrowhite museum provide an in-depth explanation of the documental theater project that the institution developed, and in which railway and port workers talk about their lives onstage, under the guidance of traditional theater directors.

Bahía Blanca
Official Web site of the city, which was founded in 1828, in the south of the Province of Buenos Aires. With approximately 290,000 inhabitants, it has one of Argentina’s main ports and is the 14th-largest municipality in the country. It is located ten kilometers away from the Argentine Sea, and has a territory of one million square kilometers.

University of Buenos Aires
Web site of the university, which was founded in 1821, and in which Testoni studied communication sciences. With over 250,000 students and around 20,000 teachers (according to figures from a census held in 2000) distributed throughout sixty-seven different courses, UBA is one of the foremost graduation and research centers in Argentina.