Fantôme Créole

Isaac Julien, "Fantôme Créole", video-still, 2005.

 "Fantôme Créole is a four-screen installation which juxtaposes African and arctic spaces. The two actor-protagonists (Vanessa Myrie, who also appears in Baltimore 2002, and dancer Stephen Galloway) are not characters with dialogue and implied interiority, rather they serve to link scenes together between African city- and desert-scapes, and between the arctic north and the arid south. The lack of narrative connection signals an intellectual proposition concerning issues connecting these spaces, as well as Julien's interest in 'creolised' vision - to create new ideas from the movements and connections between spaces. The 'disjunctive juxtapositions' (in film parlance, 'parallel montage') put the spectator in the position of constructing meaning and, through a positioning of screens which forces the viewer to change position to grasp the totality of the presentation, challenge the fixed position that single-screen work entails." Mark Nash

Isaac Julien: Encore

Check Isaac Julien's film installation Encore II (Radioactive) hERE

Stranger in the City

Isaac Julien, "Paradise Omeros" , 2002.


"Why are we afraid of globalization, that is the dissolving of the state frontiers monitored by armies of adequately equipped specialized police bodies? We are afraid of globalization because strangers will be constantly trespassing into our neighborhoods and lurking on our street-corners!

The next question then is: Why are we afraid of strangers? I am afraid of strangers because they might harm me. I am afraid to be assaulted and killed by strangers. This is why I feel safer with state-monitored frontiers.

And this leads to the third question: Were foreigners always considered dangerous and the well-guarded frontiers always necessary? Here we stumble on an intriguing diversity of attitudes: not all world civilizations consider strangers dangerous creatures. Where the 1930s Hollywood movie-makers put two pistols in the hands of the cowboy to make sure that the treacherous stranger who appeared at the frontier had no chance to escape death, the ninth century Baghdad story-tellers who crafted the Sindbad tales, made the Iraqi crowds love foreigners, because this hero gathered fabulous wealth by taking risky trips to India and China's faraway islands. "

Fatema Mernissi, Why Are We Afraid of Globalization

Western Union: Small Boats by Isaac Julien

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.

Western Union: Small Boats de Isaac Julien

Museu do Chiado, no âmbito do Festival Temps d’images

Western Union encerra a trilogia de instalações audiovisuais da autoria de Isaac Julien que teve início com True North (2004) e prosseguiu com Fantôme d’Afrique (2005). Estas obras lidam com a condição pós-colonial, com o estabelecimento de novas relações globais e com as suas consequências, levantando questões filosóficas e explorando o tema da raça e do género, sendo ainda enriquecidas por uma frenética dança contemporânea.
As obras partem de uma intensa pesquisa na área do cinema e do suspense, fundindo o género ficcional com o género documental, compondo uma entidade densa que se recusa a contar uma história de forma linear, como habitualmente sucede na produção cinematografíca, dando lugar a uma narração fragmentada, paralela, polifónica e não-linear.
As projecções simultâneas em diversas telas tornam impossível captar tudo ao mesmo tempo. Não é possível encontrar aqui um ponto de vista único e panóptico, no sentido foucaultiano. Não estamos aqui perante uma composição totalizante, mas sim diante de várias peças relativas a uma história (feita de diversas histórias entretecidas) que é diferente de cada vez que é vista. Deste modo, o visitante não constitui um mero receptor passivo, mas sim um editor activo do material fornecido pelo artista.
Os vídeos de Isaac Julien não obedecem a uma lógica temporal, o que também se verifica no trabalho de outros artistas contemporâneos, embora possuam um referente espacial específico (neste caso, o mar Mediterrâneo), contrariamente à tendência das últimas décadas para apresentar trabalhos de vídeo “neutrais”. O espaço re-emerge assim como um paradigma nestas obras cujo objectivo e desenvolvimento é deliberadamente situado.
O título da obra remete para a instituição financeira com o mesmo nome, a Western Union, que organiza transferências de dinheiro entre a Europa Ocidental e o resto do mundo, as quais são constantemente efectuadas por imigrantes provenientes de África, do Brasil ou da Europa de Leste que assim enviam dinheiro às suas famílias, pagando por este serviço um preço maior ou menor, consoante a quantia e o país. Esta obra, contudo, debruça-se sobre a viagem que é efectuada em sentido contrário, para a qual o preço a pagar é bem mais elevado.
Assim, conta-se nesta obra a história dos trabalhadores oriundos da África subsaariana que atravessam o Mediterrâneo em pequenos barcos de pesca, em direcção à Sicília, procurando fugir à fome e à guerra, em busca de uma vida melhor. Alguns destes migrantes económicos, se não a maioria, ou não atingem sequer o seu objectivo ou então nunca regressam.
Esta obra foi concebida em parceria com o coreógrafo de dança contemporânea Russel Malliphant e conta com a participação de uma mulher enigmática que assombra toda a trilogia como um fantasma. Essa mulher parece ser invisível para todos, menos para o visitante. Como um espectro.
Assinalem-se ainda algumas sequências notáveis como aquela em que se vêem alguns homens a nadar debaixo de água, que é acompanhada por uma poderosa banda sonora, constituída por batidas electrónicas em crescendo, impossíveis de distinguir, que remetem para o afogamento daqueles homens e para a sua desesperada tentativa de sobreviver.
Esta cena é subitamente cortada, dando lugar a outra na qual o ritmo abranda e se assiste a um fio de água a pingar e ao surgimento de um intruso, uma mulher que se torna numa testemunha.
À visão da devastação é agora confrontada a grandeza do Palazzo Gangi (célebre cenário da obra prima de Visconti, O Leopardo), povoado por sussurros, onde se encontra a 'black magic woman', desfocada e invisível, diante de um monstro confiante e ávido, uma mulher loura, remetendo este ambiente para a suposta superioridade europeia dos últimos séculos. A mulher caminha por um ambiente luxuoso que evoca os tempos coloniais e uma atitude religiosa; os candelabros, os relógios nos quais o tempo parou e quantidades absurdas de ouro. Por outro lado, os homens (de algum modo deslocados neste cenário) descem pela escadaria ou debatem-se em cerâmicas que patenteiam um testemunho visual da história europeia, uma história de violência; uma história colonial, feita de representações do Outro, figurando-o como meio-humano, ou meio-animal.
Os barcos de pesca apodrecem em depósitos de sucata na cidade siciliana de Agrigento. Durante bastante tempo somos levados a observar um pano vermelho-rubi que flutua na água, simultaneamente belo e assustador, que se descobre ser a camisola do imigrante. A alguns metros de distância das praias de areia branca onde habitantes locais e turistas repousam calmamente, encontram-se os cadáveres daqueles homens, cobertos por folhas de alumínio, brilhantes como prata.Existiremos apenas como miragens de nós próprios, como numa outra sequência se sugere?Será que constantemente vemos e projectamos aquilo que não existe?
Estes momentos perturbadores prosseguem ao longo de toda a peça, entregando o visitante a um sentimento ambíguo, apesar da beleza das imagens, até então nunca vista.

Go and Back: Fiction and Reality

Go and Back: Fiction and Reality
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,Lisbon
Curator:Christine Van Asche
Architect:Didier Fiuza Faustino
Artists:Laurent Grasso, Rachel Reupke, David Claerbout, Stan Douglas, Melik Ohanian, Chris Marker, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Jordi Colomer, Isaac Julien, Alexandre Estrela.

This is a story of a woman marked by an image from her past.

The exhibition aims to reflect upon some modes of use of the moving image on the international art scene according to the curator, blurring the frontier between fiction and documentary genre.
It was a commission made by the Gulbenkian foundation to Pompidou's curator for new media Christine Van Asche, whose recent exhibition on new media works from the collection on view at Lisbon's rival institution made a huge success. Not an unimportant fact in a time when institutions, lacking governmental support and facing the disappearance of the bourgeois subject, starve to get more visitors in order to run their programme.
Fiction and Reality, however, was on display for as long as six months.
The reasons for this are ambiguous. If the father of the foundation, an Armenian émigré and art lover, knew what was going on within the walls of the museum's headquarters and exhibition spaces he would begin to turn in his grave.
The strategy of extending the exhibition's time-frame could be perceived as an attempt to position the museum (a private foundation with public interest) as a central institution, giving it (spectral) visibility by displaying the desirable new media works with an emphasis on the new. Apart from that, this is also a remarkable (or not so) business model of how to earn a lot of money in spite of moderate ticket price and ensure the profit even before the exhibition opens.
The exhibition design by Didier Fiuza Faustino follows the logic of separate units, designed according to the attributes of each singular work and installed one after another in a linear fashion, thus resembling the narrative structure of most of the pieces in the show.
The overall view is interrupted by the CCTV, which is, apart from their formal links, the only interconnecting, but also unnecessary element between the individual pieces. At the entrance, the visitors are informed that from there on, they will be a part of the show. This in fact sounds no more comforting than the awareness of close-circuited public spaces from our quotidian environments.
To quote the opinion of the architect, as expressed in roundtable discussion, the intention was to create an experience similar to eating sushi, when we have a bit of gengibre before moving on to another kind of fish, in order to neutralize the taste and get ready for the new one. Unfortunately, the experience was more like going from one store to another in a shopping centre, except that here you face the foundation's collection of modern art on the other side of the hall.
Exhibited works draw on a large number of references, ranging from blockbusters to the suspension of disbelief, in a general movement proceeding from fiction towards documentary, with a film positioned in the centre of the exhibition.
La jettée, the endlessly quoted film consisting of still black and white images and a voice-over narration, often examined in regard to its references to Nazism, is essentially a tale about lost love. A temporal vertigo that marks an end of a certain paradigm.
Destaque goes to Isaac Juliens' Fantôme Afrique, a triple screen cinematic exploration of the phantom notions such as colonial history, set in Ouaga, the capital of both African cinematography and Burkina Faso, with its Place des cinéastes, where the failure of the modernist project is inscribed in architecture. Employing contemporary dance and non-linear narration, it is again a story about love. More precisely, it is about lovers moving through the city like phantoms, marked by an image from the past, destined to never meet, since spectres are invisible (even to each other). Here, a visible shift towards spatial paradigm can be observed.
The so-called international selection of artists is actually quite Eurocentric, and even here one part of Europe seems to be excluded, despite of the many artists who have been employing cinematographic references in their work since the early eighties. Do they need a visa to enter the exhibition? Do they need a visa to become artists?
Far more intriguingthan Go and Back is the current artistic project held at the same institution, the E-flux video rental, which enables the public access to approximately nine hundred artists' videos. In the words of Anton Vidokle: It's about circulation ...
The first video presented at the screening was by no coincidence 'An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist'.

She knew that what she saw was the moment of her death.

*The beginning and the end of this text corresponds to the beginning and end of the film La Jettée, one of the most paradigmatic works in the history of moving images.
Besides providing quite an unusual frame to the art critic,it also introduces another slight shift in perception for those who know the 'original material'. In other words: with the transfer from film to text a first person account of a man got female attributes.