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.