Rodolfo's first draft TOP

FIRST FULL DRAFT

At what distance does life appear or disappear?

Or I could also ask you:

At what distance does art (or an artistic practice) appear or disappear?

The first question was lost in my (never ending) phone notes and travelled from there to this text, which may be, eventually, an (hopefully successful) attempt of trying to answer to the second one. Most likely I will get to the end of this text and I won’t even come close to answering to something, since what I do best is catalog questions and doubts. However, I think that starting by explaining what I’ve been doing (what, how and why), how this relates to my previous practice, what I intend to do next (and why), and how all of this relates to a larger context, can help clarify who I am as an artist - or a maker, I may prefer this word.

“Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolize it” Alan Watts

Probably what I did the most in the last months was overwatching, overreading, overwriting, overshooting and over-overthinking, but at some point, before, during, or after collecting thoughts, ideas, words and visuals about these activities, things started take shape and I started to work in " Your Presence was Cancelled (YPWC). This is my current project and is, in essence, a short movie that I did for the EYE Research Labs, which pretends to explore and scan fragments - and possible meanings - of a still image, more precisely a selfie, that I shot last year.
After writing memories related to the death of my grandparents I decided to go through my (images) personal archive and I realized I had several photos from the day after my grandmother passed away last year, which I had never looked into carefully. During a tutorial with David, we went through all those pictures , but we focused, for a large part of the conversation, on the one that ended up being the center of this work. And that's how the idea for this project emerged.

The goal was to create a moving image based on it and there were, from the outset, three main components that I had to work with: the image - how do I make it move? How do I edit it? How can this work visually? -; the text - what do I wanna tell about this story and how? - and the sound - do I want to have music? Do I want to have a voice over? Do I want other sounds?
In addition to these doubts that highlight predominantly technical issues, there were countless other questions that arose throughout the work process, from which I would like to highlight the following ones: Can I separate me from space? Can I talk about it without talking about myself? How does (temporal/spatial) distance influence the way we deal with processes of disconnection, loss, grief?
The outcome of the project for the EYE is a three minutes and a half short movie that navigates through a picture, supported by a text that narrates the story of the image and accompanied by music and sounds related to the space depicted in the picture.

(Add: more things about the process/method)

“The abstract space that grief generates is often marked by an absence of language. Individuals and communities pass through the unspeakable consequences of loss and can emerge transformed, redefined, reprogrammed. Results are unpredictable; the void opened up by loss can be filled by religion, nihilism, militancy, benevolence—or anything.” Taryn Simon

As Loss, a photography project that I developed before starting this program, YPWC is the result of a personal (grief) experience, which aims to process an emptiness/void created by our capacity of relating/connecting/love. Some months ago I wrote that Loss “made me connect not just with my inner reality with my feelings, but also with the way the world looked like on that day”. This made me realize that I did exactly the same with YPWC and that throughout my recent works, which always ended up arising as a consequence or from a personal experience, I always placed myself, initially, at the center of the action. But during the creation process, this center shifts and allows me to understand the complexity of what and who surrounds me. This visceral relationship between me and the work has to be there since the beginning, otherwise I won't be able to deeply connect with it and to create something out of it.

“You didn’t photograph it, because you didn’t think it was worth it. And now it’s too late, that moment has evaporated. But another one has arrived, instantly. Now. Because life is flowing through and around us, rushing onwards and onwards, in every direction.” Paul Graham

I want to continue to work on YPWC and expand the narrative around it, opening the door to new perspectives and points of view. This way, I am currently working on an extended version of the short film that I did for the EYE Research Labs, in order to create a bigger space for the image and the story to land. I would like to explore an (even more) abstract journey through the image, with the support of visuals, text and different approaches to sound. Ideally I would also like to give more room to the viewers to understand the picture (and probably the story) by themselves, through, above all, a significant reduction of text in the moving piece.

In parallel to this, and since I had written a lot during the process of creating the first video, I want to work on a publication/zine that combines texts that I wrote during the process of realising the first film, and new texts, capable of introducing new perspectives and views about the moment depicted in the image.

By expanding the project in all these directions, it feels like I am adding faces to parallelepiped whose final shape I don’t know, but if I ask myself: why am I actually doing this? and-or where is this taking me? I may not be super sure and clear about the answer, but I think that this way of working, of adding layers to the project, constitutes not just several moments of reflection and questioning, but also, or above all, an attempt to understand a complex and voracious reality, difficult to fit into a fragment that is, in itself, an image.

(Add: shot more-analog-expanded cinema)

References

- First Poem Piece, Bruce Nauman, 1968

- Sections of a Happy Moment, David Claerbout,2007

- Take Care of Yourself, Sophie Calle 2007

- A Shimmer of Possibility, Paul Graham, 2007

- The Solitude of Ravens, Masahisa Fukase, 1991

- Salut les Cubains, Agnès Varda, 1963

- Virxilio Vieitez

- John Hilliard

- Duane Michals

Bibliography
- Watts, A. (1951) The Wisdom of Insecurity

- Barthes, R. (1982) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

- Graham, P. (2009) Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult (2009)

- Claerbout, D. (2016) The Silence of the Lens