Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers finding the connections, in the same way that I find them in my short films. I don´t take a position of search. Rather, I´m on the lookout. I usually carry my camera with me and that makes me walk wide awake, so that I suddenly find images that I may not see if I didn’t have the camera there. The temporality of my process of creation dialogues with each person, with everyone’s own time. It’s my world and my life in that moment: the filmic time is my living time. The sensorial aspect of the images gets then intensified, with a heavy pictorial influence that aims to connect the emotions in an almost synesthesic way. Those sensations are also recorded by my hand, my camera. I film the images as if traces of sound. The difference is that, when I play, no one asks me what I wanted to say with the notes I used. In fact it feels a little strange trying to explain or set the basis for what I do. My short films could be considered as visual poetry. They are the folds and creases of the reality that they evoke, of a symbolic and unthinking universe. They show a poetic space where everything is possible: it expands at the moment it is shown, and the connections flow metaphorically, as if writing a poem that springs from a tear that writes itself at the moment it falls on to the paper (we discover the sense in any case only after the ‘writing of it’, since the rhythm is the sense, the rhythm has a meaning itself). You normally won’t see subjects, characters, in my films (there is no narration); not even a body (although in TrAuM it does appear a human image, drawn on a window, that gazes at us, as if trapped in a dream, in the film, in a interview
prelinguistic universe). There is no anthropomorphic point of view. It’s more like a dissolution and a prolongation of the self takes place within the images: it’s a walk without a subject. My body is not looked at, but felt, connected to the body of the person that looks, and the Other takes part in that intimacy that way. Forgetting about the experience as an “I”, and this character of reality or action and non fiction, makes a connection with performance art. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected TrAuM, an extremely interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/214738375. We have particularly appreciated the way your insightful deconstruction of perceptual processes walks the viewers through such a captivating multilayered experience: while walking our readers through the genesis of TrAuM, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?
It consists of fragments recorded in different moments that get freely associated during the edition, creating new relations between the fragments, from which new universes without limits are born. I do not intend to impose anything, I just relate globally the pieces, in spite of the temporary nature of the ensemble, and I connect everything forming a collage. It evokes nature that opposes any kind of rule and whose immensity,trapped inside of a screen, overwhelms. Maybe what this short film makes present is the idea of the fight between nature and culture, idea that I am also interested in developing in the performance art. For example, with the shot of the snow in a cage of geometric forms, or in those shots with tree branches that resemble veins, you can see how their figurative aspect gets transformed. What is truly happening is that they are getting reflected on the surface of a car, as is the building in movement. I wasn’t sure about modifying the colors of the river though, whose transformation is more powerful in the“raw” part, but the artificiality of it shows this idea of dissonance between the natural and the artificial.
Women Cinemakers Then, another world is created, which is an extension of my corporeality. I can see my life through the camera as a dance between splitting and fusion. How I relate to the world and to my body will be transformed into my own world (the world that I show to the world). The camera, as extension of my body (as the violin would be of my arm), acts through its receptivity, with infinite possibilities of movements, collecting objectively my subjectivity. The subjects consist on the subject that watches the artwork TrAuM reveals exquisite eye for the details and breathtaking editing style, to walk the viewers into a visionary adventure. We daresay that this video attempts to unveil the invisible that pervades our reality but that cannot be detected by our sensorial experience. Do you agree with this interpretation? Moreover, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination within your process? I totally agree with your interpretation, it is a journey through time with moments of sleep and wakefulness, in which the outside and the inside appear indistinguishable. You can see a surrealistic dream space which breaks; for example, a car in motion that passes through a neighborhood café, or a drawing of a boy locked inside a window (from the Faculty of Fine Arts, by the way), who is at the same time locked in a dream within a short film. What it’s seen is the image of one's own imagination: a poetic space where everything is possible, and which, when expressed, it materializes. I defined it as 'Experimental rhythmic-nightmare'. A transit over the imagination creating (a link with) another subjective world (my world?). interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers The movements are words that show the unrepresentable, what they can not name. It is a silent discourse that demands accepting the enigma, the mystery, and suggests that the absolute does not allow itself to be captured or contained by the limits of representation. It is not about representation, but about vision: it expresses the idea of confusion, not as it is represented, but felt. It shows the life that flows and escapes any attempt to capture it (maybe that's why there are no bodies, I do not like to capture them, nor be captured myself). What it may be expressed by a close-up of a face, a look (I use the zoom a lot), in this case is the water: the self dissolves into a play of reflections. The landscape -the distorted nature- is the body where sensations take place, where the energies and the impulses flow, materiality that is touched when seeing it. Seeing, as a tactile experience. I try to create my own universes with their own lives, works that exhibit their own universe of affirmation, and impose themselves by showing their world openly. Sound plays a crucial role also in your videos and we have really appreciated the minimal still effective sound tapestry that provides TrAuM with such an ethereal and a bit unsettling atmosphere: how did you conceive the combination between sound and the flow of images? The background sound in my short-videos, which is usually everyday noises -but sometimes it is cut, silenced-, it merges with the viewer's own background noise while interview
Women Cinemakers watching it. The image speaks as it is silent; that silence plays when not interpreted, and the sound clearly shows the confusion between its reality and apparent unreal images. For me, the images are music, they are an improvised composition. Causal links are broken when the material is edited, actions and images are reconstructed turning around their coherence, creating a new composition based on sound. When improvising, I do not interact with them as a representation, but as a dance. One of the improvisations that I enjoyed the most happened while playing live for the public screening of Maya Deren's film “Meshes of the afternoon”. To be able to express the emotions coming from those powerful images with sound without making it look like a simple translation, but instead trying to let them talk or dialogue among themselves was quite an experience. One of the qualities of your works is the fact that they engage the viewers to draw from their memory to elaborate personal interpretations, addressing them to evolve from a condition of mere spectatoship. Are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? It is an open piece of work, it is exposed to mix with any interpretation without that it breaks its sense, because it is already broken. But at the same time it is alive so that others can connect with that vital impulse of creating. I interview
Women Cinemakers
A still from Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers leave traces, open lines to hold on to, loose ends, like in a haiku. I do not expect it to be understood because I do not intend to tell anything. If I compose music nobody asks me what I want to tell, and it would be difficult to talk about its genesis: different elements are created and later they are going to connect. It is ready to be linked to different subjectivities, creating spaces of communication if I´m improvising live over the screenings, being always different, and another set of perspectives emerges. The meaning is the picture itself, the sign itself. Also the sound itself, or the sound patterns. They refer to what is happening in my life the moment I am filming, the rhythm of my life anchored in the moment. Feeling that no meaning is needed can be astonishing: the meaning is the sequence set by intuition while creating. I would say you have to watch it the way you watch a mandala. Over the years you have had the chance to improvise with great musicians: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a performance and the need of spontaneity? How importance does improvisation play in your process? The uncertainty of random marks the guidelines under a horizon of freedom and opening to the unpredictable, which allows imagination to flow. In that horizon there are also necessary connections between the parts, and interview
Women Cinemakers discovering them is a certain way of investigation, of experiment...also a kind of game (in which the only rule is to play). It is a free and active way of letting yourself be, in which the unconscious free activity burst out at any time. I'm not sure to what extent the process of improvisation is similar to shooting and editing (and that goes for music as well): the relationship between free improvisation and free association. A live concert shows the uncertainty of not knowing where that discharge of energy takes me, or takes you. The limits to spontaneity are only respect and to listen to the other person. In my films maybe could be compared more to improvised music the images transforming of the rough cuts than the edited ones (that ones are probably more similar to composed music). Listening and reacting are both enhanced at the same time. Probably a greater amount of decisions are made –in a more or less unconscious waywhen improvising with music or when filming, compared to editing, because of the inmediacy of the moment, but that is a different topic... When you edit, you distance yourself, you have a more global vision that makes it possible to link and understand the possible dialogues between the parts. In both areas it's all about associating the parts in a creative way and making decisions all the time, and each choice implies restructuring. As I said before, that brings a certain flow which is incompatible with the rational order of things. interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers I like to work with what I have in the moment, with what I find; as well as with ancient and heterogeneous materials, and, through the happenings, find their structure, put together the pieces/traces of a personal story and give them a new life. (Sometimes I record pieces that already exist, but only if I find them, I never look for them). Some of my short films, such as Viaje a Vitoria (Trip to Vitoria), have a bit of a documentary or diary aura over them. I have also several unpublished shorts created from what I recorded one trip alone. The spot on my camera shows somehow this way of working: at that moment the lens of my camera had a spot, and I was not going to stop myself from filming from the train just because of that. Moreover, does a birthmark make a face less beautiful? It is what it is. Sometimes the lack of meaning allows for imagination to develop. My film Resumen de un corto (Summary of a Short film) shows my hand playing with the light (in fact, what I am recording is a lamp in my own living room.) I did not change the order of the elements I used, I just moved my hand to record its reflection on the glass. When I recorded it I was not using any editing program, so I found an ending in a single shot. Sometimes endings are found in an improvised way when you are recording or editing, like at the end of a music improvisation. Sometimes you can hear the end coming and you just stop playing and sometimes the music simply decreases little by little. What really interests me is an organic and authentic work. The sense is defined by the here and now of immediacy. Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovi once remarked the importance of not just making work but interview
Women Cinemakers interview ensuring that it’s seen in the right place by the right people at the right time: how is in your opinion online technopshere affecting the consumption of art by the audience? Do you think that today is easier to speak to a particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artists to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? Well, I agree in part with Marina Abramovic's phrase. But the relationship that may or may not have the visibility of the works by the audience, the chance to see them, I think is already another topic. I shoot for me, not to be seen (except some short film also devoted to who comes out in it). The truth is that I have never registered my shorts in a payment platform for contests. In fact, many improvisations have not been recorded, or several shorts I have not brought to light. Of course It's great if people find it inspiring; It would be also great if I could make my living form art and unpaid proposals would stop being the usual ones. I mean, in free improvisation, at least in Madrid, the internet does not influence much in the small audience we have despite the fact that there are very interesting performances. I get a little scared also the lack of privacy of this time, and it is easy that your work isn’t understood properly (which I do not care too much). For example, it changes a lot to watch a video of an improvisation interdisciplinary than to witness it live: the energy can be totally another, in the same way that someone can think that knows you after seeing a picture of you. For example a profile picture of Facebook, which is not you, but an image of you. You see
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
everything without a filter (but with the filters of the cameras). Today, the important thing is to talk about the Today, without even considering that it may be unethical to share certain contents, because everyone does it. It scares. But attracts a lot the immensity of knowledge and connections that also has to do a lot with the contradiction between the need to hide and to expose my self. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? My mother and my grandmother have lived under their own rules and dared to be themselves. This must have had an influence on me. Since I consider crucial to let imagination run wild, it is vital for me to stop being afraid of looking ridiculous, to stop fearing the unknown. It seems to me that we must get rid of those fears, in order to be able to experience. Ultimately, these fears have to be with being judged and criticised, and women have been and are still being judged more than men are. As a matter of fact, women´s aspect is the talking point all too often, while men are not a conversational target in terms of whether their clothes fit them or not. Women Cinemakers interview
I compose weird music, I make weird shorts, I guess… I´m weird. Societies have not made it easy for women when it comes to the subject of letting us be weirdos. That is to say that women have not been allowed to seek our own vision or to display our most particular and unique singularity. Just as images are not adapted to any kind of representation in my shorts, I struggle to adjust myself to any imposed role. There is still such a lack of respect for the difference… In the last decades Western societies are letting women be weirdos, because we are letting ourselves be, in general. I hope that the situation changes for those women who live in societies with less possibilities of expressing themselves. They should have access to creative spaces. In that sense, new technologies can play a significant role regarding art projects. Since new technologies make easier to record, edit and distribute, they can give women great opportunities to make and experience art. Furthermore, I would like to think that the fact that women can show our art through the internet, make us less dependent on those traditional mechanisms of art distribution, which are mostly run in a sexist way. Coming back to the importance of providing a space for the difference, I am quite surprised by people who, in spite of having a long career in performance art, have dogmatic reactions in terms of art innovation. From my point of view, this is totally against the basis of performance art, which is experimentation. Even if a Women Cinemakers interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
piece of art is not exactly “performance art”, who cares? The remarkable fact is not to clasify something as performance art or not, but to make art, to make something good. Of course, women are more criticized when we open new ways, artistically and in other areas. I guess we need to make even more what we feel so as to be more free. This does not mean that we do not need criteria in order to distinguish if something is good or not. However, if there are not some risk in order to discover something different in the action, if this does not happen…then, personally, I am not so interested in that process. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Alba. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you very much for this opportunity to give me a voice. If I'm looking for something, it's my own desire to surprise me (although it is not surprisingly to look for surprising and do it) I like to work as a music therapist with people with language disorders, to help them with their emotional expression. I think that in general I like to connect with a level outside of words. I want to continue exploring the link between everything that interest me, and work and perform abroad more often. In short, I hope to keep surprising myself, trying to do what I want in every moment, discovering new worlds. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant [email protected] Women Cinemakers interview