Discussion

Rosa Barba
From Source to Poem, 2016
35mm film, colour, optical sound, 12’

From Source to Poem shifts focus from artworks (in her previous works on museum storages) into archival storage. Shot at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia, and at an enormous solar power plant in California, it juxtaposes images from the world’s largest media archive with a study of rhythm and images of cultural and industrial production. Like the temporal property of two things happening at the same time, “the interval determining the coincidence gate is adjustable.” The film exposes the preservation of cultural outputs, but also their digitisation for the future. A vast number of the archives’ holdings is sound material (audio recordings, wax discs, vinyl and LPs); a sonic memory that Barba rescues and mixes in the soundtrack as a way of setting in motion otherwise unlikely dialogues.

Rosa Barba is an artist interested in film and the ways in which it articulates space. Composition, physicality of form, and plasticity are important aspects of this articulation, but Barba also interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of mise-en-scène by taking them out of their contexts and restaging them. Her solo exhibitions include: Tate Modern, London (2010); MAXXI, Rome (2014); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2015); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, and Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2017). Group and large-scale exhibitions include: the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2016), and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale (2009 and 2015). From Source to Poem is the latest monograph on her work (Hatje Cantz, HangarBicocca, and Malmö Konsthall, 2017).

 

Filipa César
The Embassy, 2011
HD, colour, sound, 27′

(Directed, produced, photography and editing by Filipa César; written by Armando Lona and Filipa César; performed and narrated by Armando Lona; sound by Nuno da Luz; director’s Assistants: Jorge Biague and Philip Metz; supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)

This film deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial administration in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed landscapes, people, architecture, and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s, with documentary diligence and the implied violence of objectivation. Intersected by gestures of re-animation, this photo display – handled, flipped through, and re-framed by the hands of the Guinean archivist Armando Lona – is the point of departure for a critical, multi-layered narrative on the common past of these two countries.

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in fictional aspects of the documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent in the moving image. Since 2011, she has been looking into the origins of the cinema of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to ruling epistemologies. César premiered her first feature length essay-film Spell Reel at the Forum section of the 67th Berlinale (2017). Selected exhibitions and screenings have taken place at: 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Manifesta 8, Cartagena (2010); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011–2015); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Khiasma, Paris, (2011–2015); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013); SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin (2014–2015); Tensta konsthall, Spånga (2015); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Contour 8 Biennial, Mechelen, Gasworks, London, and MoMA, New York (2017).

Since the 1990s, re-enactment has emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Current re-enactments question the ability of the present to unpack, embody, and disentangle the past. Thus, to re-enact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. To re-enact means not to restore but to challenge the past – to not merely repeat it, but to interpret and translate it – in the present and for the present – or for the future.  History thereby enters a special temporal dimension, that of a possible and perpetual becoming, opening a space for invention and renewal.

The symposium investigates the issue of re-enactment through a discussion at once conceptual and practical. How, and to what extent, does recent history engage in a creative dialogue with a more distant past supposedly reactualized through re-enactment? This process of creative repetition branches out into at least three directions: (1) the return/survival of the past understood as generating meaning and values for both present and potential future/s, in terms of what one could call a symbolic archaeology; (2) an epistemological-axiological challenge to the traditional dichotomy between true and false, original and copy; and (3) a performative bodily practice that physically re-stages events.

Methodologically, the notion of re-enactment will be approached from three directions: the archive, the arts, and curatorial practice.