Museu do Chiado(Temporary Exhibitions)
30.10.2008-1.2.2009
Western Union closes Julien's trilogy of audiovisual film installations that began with True North (2004) and continued with Fantôme Afrique (2005).
All three works deal with post-colonial condition, newly established global relations and their consequences, tackle philosophical questions, as well as racial and gender issues, and add to all this the frenzy of contemporary dance.
The trilogy delves deep into the cinema culture and suspense, fusing fiction and documentary genres into a dense entity and refusing linear story-telling common to most examples of film production, in order to give space to fragmented, parallel, multi-voiced, non-linear narration.
The simultaneous projections on multiple screens make it impossible to grasp everything at the same time. There is no singular, all-encompassing viewpoint in a Foucauldian sense and therefore no totalizing effect – instead, a single story made up of individual corresponding pieces and consisting of many intertwined stories is created, different every time we watch it. In this case the visitor is not merely a passive receptor, but rather an active editor of the material proposed by the artist.
The videos of Isaac Julien – and the same can be observed in the current production by other artists – are not time-based anymore, but rather local-specific (in this case genus loci is the Mediterranean sea), which is contrary to 'neutral' video works from past decades. Being decidedly spatial in their scope and display, space re-emerges here as a paradigm.
Western Union, named after a company that provides rapid (almost real-time) money transactions between Western Europe and the rest of the world, a system used on a daily basis by immigrants from Africa, Brazil or Eastern Europe, who send money to their families and pay a more or less high tax for this service, depending on the amount and country selected, is a work exploring the notion of journeying from the opposite direction, where the tax to be paid is much higher.
More precisely, it is the story of workers from Sub-Saharan Africa who cross the Mediterranean in small fishing boats heading towards Sicily to escape the wars or famine, looking for a better life. Some (if not most) of these economic immigrants never reach their destination nor return to their native lands.
The work was conceived in collaboration with the contemporary dance choreographer Russell Malliphant and relies on the appearance of an enigmatic woman, who marks her presence throughout the entire trilogy in the manner of ghosts. It seems she is invisible to everyone except to the visitor. A specter of a kind.
There are also some remarking sequences, such as men crawling under the water surface, supported by a powerful soundtrack made of undistinguishable electronic beats in crescendo, which refers to drowning men and their desperate attempt to survive.
The video suddenly cuts into another scene and the pace slows down, we see/hear water dripping and an intruder – a woman who becomes a witness.
The devastation is contrasted by the grandeur of Palazzo Gangi (the famed location from Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard), which is full of rumors and this is where the black magic woman finds herself in, unfocused and invisible in front of the confident and greedy blond beast (a lady) and in the midst of and ambient highlighting the presumed European supremacy of the past centuries.
She walks between the luxury gathered on colonial and religious quests; chandeliers, clocks on which time has frozen, and absurd amounts of gold, while men (somehow out of place in this setting) roll down the staircase or struggle on ceramic tiles that bear a visual testimony of European history, a history of violence. A colonial history and the representations of the Other, half-human, half-beast.
The fishing boats are left to rot in a junkyard in the Sicilian village Agrigento.
For a long time we are left watching the ruby red cloth floating in the water, at the same time beautiful and scary, that turns out to be an immigrant's T-shirt.
A few meters away from the white sandy beaches, where locals and tourists lie undisturbed, are corpses of men covered with shiny silver aluminum foil.
Do we exist only as a mirage of ourselves as is suggested in another sequence?
Or is it that we continuously see and project that which doesn't exist?
These uncanny moments perpetuate thru the entire work and leave the visitor with an ambiguous feeling, despite of the beauty of the imagery, yet unseen.
All three works deal with post-colonial condition, newly established global relations and their consequences, tackle philosophical questions, as well as racial and gender issues, and add to all this the frenzy of contemporary dance.
The trilogy delves deep into the cinema culture and suspense, fusing fiction and documentary genres into a dense entity and refusing linear story-telling common to most examples of film production, in order to give space to fragmented, parallel, multi-voiced, non-linear narration.
The simultaneous projections on multiple screens make it impossible to grasp everything at the same time. There is no singular, all-encompassing viewpoint in a Foucauldian sense and therefore no totalizing effect – instead, a single story made up of individual corresponding pieces and consisting of many intertwined stories is created, different every time we watch it. In this case the visitor is not merely a passive receptor, but rather an active editor of the material proposed by the artist.
The videos of Isaac Julien – and the same can be observed in the current production by other artists – are not time-based anymore, but rather local-specific (in this case genus loci is the Mediterranean sea), which is contrary to 'neutral' video works from past decades. Being decidedly spatial in their scope and display, space re-emerges here as a paradigm.
Western Union, named after a company that provides rapid (almost real-time) money transactions between Western Europe and the rest of the world, a system used on a daily basis by immigrants from Africa, Brazil or Eastern Europe, who send money to their families and pay a more or less high tax for this service, depending on the amount and country selected, is a work exploring the notion of journeying from the opposite direction, where the tax to be paid is much higher.
More precisely, it is the story of workers from Sub-Saharan Africa who cross the Mediterranean in small fishing boats heading towards Sicily to escape the wars or famine, looking for a better life. Some (if not most) of these economic immigrants never reach their destination nor return to their native lands.
The work was conceived in collaboration with the contemporary dance choreographer Russell Malliphant and relies on the appearance of an enigmatic woman, who marks her presence throughout the entire trilogy in the manner of ghosts. It seems she is invisible to everyone except to the visitor. A specter of a kind.
There are also some remarking sequences, such as men crawling under the water surface, supported by a powerful soundtrack made of undistinguishable electronic beats in crescendo, which refers to drowning men and their desperate attempt to survive.
The video suddenly cuts into another scene and the pace slows down, we see/hear water dripping and an intruder – a woman who becomes a witness.
The devastation is contrasted by the grandeur of Palazzo Gangi (the famed location from Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard), which is full of rumors and this is where the black magic woman finds herself in, unfocused and invisible in front of the confident and greedy blond beast (a lady) and in the midst of and ambient highlighting the presumed European supremacy of the past centuries.
She walks between the luxury gathered on colonial and religious quests; chandeliers, clocks on which time has frozen, and absurd amounts of gold, while men (somehow out of place in this setting) roll down the staircase or struggle on ceramic tiles that bear a visual testimony of European history, a history of violence. A colonial history and the representations of the Other, half-human, half-beast.
The fishing boats are left to rot in a junkyard in the Sicilian village Agrigento.
For a long time we are left watching the ruby red cloth floating in the water, at the same time beautiful and scary, that turns out to be an immigrant's T-shirt.
A few meters away from the white sandy beaches, where locals and tourists lie undisturbed, are corpses of men covered with shiny silver aluminum foil.
Do we exist only as a mirage of ourselves as is suggested in another sequence?
Or is it that we continuously see and project that which doesn't exist?
These uncanny moments perpetuate thru the entire work and leave the visitor with an ambiguous feeling, despite of the beauty of the imagery, yet unseen.
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