Diagonal Thoughts

SCULPTING THE LAND
An evening on… Landscapes

Friday 24 April 2009, 20:00 (installations start at 18:30), Vooruit Domzaal, Gent.

Program produced by Courtisane as part of the Courtisane Festival 2009 (Gent, 23 – 26 April 2009)

“Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!”
— Henry David Thoreau

PERFORMANCE
Luke Fowler & Lee Patterson
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When La Monte Young wrote Composition “1960 #10” on a 3×5 filing card, he wrote what might be the most readily citational musical score in the history of Western music: “draw a straight line and follow it.” Filmmaker Luke Fowler and sound artist Lee Patterson interpret the instruction by this influential minimalist composer quite literally. Registering things they meet on their way, they make a ’straight’ journey through Ghent.

Luke Fowler (UK) is a key figure on the Glasgow scene where he works as an artist filmmaker and musician. He runs the SHADAZZ multimedia platform whose activities include, inter alia, the production of LPs in collaboration with other musicians and artists. Fowler challenges the classical conventions of documentary film in his film works. He subverts the structural syntax and collages found, apparently forgotten and own footage with photographs, diagrams and scripts to create a new kind of filmic mesh. Past and forgotten histories, radical and experimental ideas, ideologies and their protagonists are central to Fowler’s films.
Encompassing various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack, sound installation and radio broadcast, Lee Patterson‘s (UK) work is characterised by the revelation of subliminal or barely audible sounds. Utilising commonplace materials and invented methodologies, his practice aims toward a new understanding of his surroundings through altering perceptions of everyday reality. His unorthodox and idiosyncratic approaches to generating sound have led to collaborations with a host of international artists and experimental musicians.

PERFORMANCE
Emily Richardson, Chris Watson & Benedict Drew
Cobra Mist

A special screening of Emily Richardson’s film Cobra Mist, which explores the relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness and the physical traces of its unusual military history. Accompanied by an expanded cinema event with live sound performances by Cobra Mist sound recordist and composer Chris Watson and Benedict Drew.

Having studied Fine Art at Middlesex University and Filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute, Emily Richardson (UK) has gone on to make several films that have been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally. Working with 16mm film and multiple screen video installations, her focus is landscape, spaces, environments and our relationship to them, whether it be a forest, a strip of coastline or a tower block. She uses the photographic nature and temporal qualities of film to create impossible experiences of architectural spaces and natural environments.
Benedict Drew (UK) works in performance, sound and video. He has worked with Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M and with various improvisers including Tom Chant, Angharad Davies, Lee Patterson, Steve Beresford, Seymour Wright, Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell and Matt Davis. Benedict has also composed the soundtracks for five films by Emily Richardson.
Chris Watson (UK) is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, and here he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. The unearthly groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of, in Watson’s words, putting a microphone where you can’t put your ears.

SCREENING
Chris Welsby & William Raban
River Yar
UK, 1971-72, 16mm, sound, colour, double-screen, 36′

“We found our location – a view from an upstairs window in a water mill on the Isle of Wight. From this position a camera recorded one frame every minute (day and night) for two separate three week periods. Making this film was a major pre-occupation for both of us. For most of the second period (February ’72) we were without electricity and had to fire the camera by hand.” – W.R.

Landscape artist and pioneer of the moving-image installation in Britain, Chris Welsby‘s (UK) subtle meditations are exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. “Each of my films is a separate attempt to re-define the interface between ‘mind’ and ‘nature’. In my work, the mechanics of film and video interact with the landscape in such a way that elemental processes – such as changes in light, the rise and fall of tide or changes in wind direction – are given the space and time to participate in the process of representation”
William Raban (UK) is a leading figure in his field, whose work ranges from multi-screen gallery pieces to perfectly-crafted short films. Raban’s particular interests – the City of London and the British landscape – are in the tradition of the romantic landscape painters.

SCREENING
James Benning
13 Lakes
US, 2004, 16mm, sound, colour, 130’

13 Lakes focuses on thirteen great American lakes and their geographical and historical relationship with the landscape. Each lake is presented by a single 10-minute shot, equally framing water and sky. The focus is not on coincidental geography – let alone social geography in any way – but rather on the play of light and reflections.

Since the beginning of the 1970s James Benning (US) has been considered a key figure in the American avant-garde. He elaborates on elements from structural film, but at the same time he is perceived as a protagonist of the ‘new narrative’ movement during the 1980s. His rigorous structures and tightly composed images betray his mathematical background, whereas the often autobiographical subjects reflect his working-class roots and outspoken political activism. His recent explorations of cinematographic duration and decelerated mapping of American landscapes create a spatial experience, resulting in works we don’t seem to be looking at, but are in. To him the landscape is a function of time. His films are enquiries into the relation of time with the perception and understanding of the notion of space; “attempts at seeing (and listening to) rural, urban and savage environments as ‘places’, presenting these places in aesthetical, socialeconomic and political terms”.

PERFORMANCE
Guy Sherwin
Paper Landscape
UK, 1975, 10’, performance using super 8 film, polythene screen, white paint and performer

“Paper Landscape deals with the illusory space within the screen by referring to the material of the screen itself. It makes use of live performance played off against a film record of a past event.”

A key figure in British avant-garde cinema for already more than four decades, Guy Sherwin (UK) pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties : light and time. After studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960’s, Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op during the mid-70s, at the heyday of the British Structural Film Movement. He now teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton, and collaborates on expanded cinema performances with his partner, Singaporean film and sound artist Lynn Loo. Concerned with seriality and live intervention, his work investigates questions such as the physical relationships between sound and image, the digital re-working of film, the mechanisms of projection, the methods of printing and the live interaction between performer and film.

(NOTE : During ‘Filmfeedback’, a screening/talk at Sphinx the next day at the Courtisane festival, Guy Sherwin will elaborate on his artistic choices and on this performance.)

INSTALLATION
Richard T. Walker
What am weyoui waiting for?
UK, 2008, dvd, 9min 26secs

This video work finds artist and singer/songwriter Will Oldham singing to the landscape in a lament devoted to intense Sublime experiences promised in the 18th century by writers such as Emmanuelle Kant and Edmund Burke but yet to be delivered. As in most of Walker’s work there is continual paralleling between an attempt to attain an understanding of (and the consequential unity with) nature and a forever quest for the ‘perfect’ relationship, (be this to ourselves, a lover or a friend), both of which are rarely achieved.

Richard T. Walker’s work is an evolving investigation into the natural landscape and its use as a contextual tool to mobilize thoughts and self-reflection. With strong nods towards the European and American Romantic periods, Walker uses spoken dialogue, music and performance to facilitate engagement and analysis that is both contemplative and active. The work questions how we perceive nature as well as how we imagine nature perceiving us. This creates a continual dialogue that challenges our personal and general perceived notions of Landscape and Nature encouraging us to ask questions about how we belong within the contemporary environment and subsequently within our selves and our society.

PAST IMPERFECT
An evening on… Memory

Thursday 23 April 2009, 20:00 (installations & performance Aki Onda start at 18:30), Vooruit Domzaal, Gent.

Program produced by Courtisane as part of the Courtisane Festival 2009 (Gent, 23 – 26 April 2009)

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.”
— Emily Dickinson

PERFORMANCE
Aki Onda
Cassette Memories

Musician, composer and visual artist Aki Onda (JP) is always on the lookout, camera and sound recorder at hand, ready to document his travels and encounters. He looks for meaning in the accumulation of those memories, when the specific experiences fade out and the architecture and essence of the memory reveals itself. His ongoing project Cassette Memories consists of a series of performances, or rituals, where he lets memories, recorded on soundtape, wander and collide with the sounds of the site-specific memory.

“For the past two decades, I have been using the cassette Walkman for making field recordings which I keep as a sound diary. I consider these recordings to be personal memories, and not just sounds. I compose my music by physically manipulating Walkmans by hand, re-collecting and re-constructing concrete sounds. What emerges from my sound memories is a sonic collage of ritualistic tape music. I call this project “Cassette Memories.” By documenting fragments of sound from my personal life, something is revealed in the accumulation. The meanings of the original events are stripped of their significance, exposing the architecture of memory. There is a strong reference in my work to French electro-acoustic music that originated with Pierre Schaeffer, one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music. There is further reference to filmmaking, as evidenced by the integral role that editing plays in my composing. My high regard for avant-garde films of the 20th century can be felt here. With ‘Cassette Memories,’ I create a sonic landscape where music exists in the relationship between sound and visual art.”

PERFORMANCE
Gill Arnò
MPLD

mpld is Gill Arnò’s mixed media performance project. Its focus is on the relationships that can be established between sound, image, light and space, considered in their phenomenological and conceptual dimensions. Memory, territory, identity and the sense of belonging are recurring themes, approached trough the use of various found materials that are assembled combining analog empiricism with the abstraction of digital hyperreality. The photoacoustic continuum of mpld’s amplified slide projection slowly flows into the performance space carrying fragments from unidentified places and times. Fades and cuts play with memory’s subjective persistence, as light and darkness keep carving out each one from the other. The mechanical sounds of this projection are tapped and processed to become its own soundtrack. Color, density, texture, frequency become simultaneous qualities of the light and the sound, as they are explored in a way somewhat analogue to the distorted enlargement of a magnifying glass.

Gill Arnò (US/IT) was born in Italy, where he studied art and typography before moving to New York in 1997. His current work includes video, photography, print, sound recording and composition, installations and live performance. Arnò often collaborates on- and off-stage with other artists. He publishes books, recordings and other multiples via his own imprint, unframed, and runs Fotofono, a small studio in Brooklyn where sometimes public events are held.

PERFORMANCE
Associazione Home Movies – La camera ottica
Circo Togni
With Andrea Belfi, Stefano Pilia, Benjamin Francart, Xavier Garcia Bardon.

A series of 8mm films shot by the Togni family, the famous dynasty of circus artists, between the 1940s and the 1970s. Darix, a legend, and his family: the men, the women, the children, the animals. Always on the move, because the circus never stops. And when it isn’t in the foreground, it’s in the background. But the movie camera struggles to focus on special moments of a family that should be like so many others: the children growing up, the parties, the games, the seaside.

“The films were found inside a circus wagon in horrible shape. Time and poor conservation had had their effects on them, making it impossible to project them. We found them stuck together, encrusted by humidity, mold, dust, horribly dirty. Thanks to new cleaning techniques we experimented with, we were able to recuperate almost all of them. The images reappeared. This is a first selection we have put to live music. Like Rossellini’s works, they are intimate and, naturally, in progress.”

Associazione Home Movies – Archivio filmico della memoria familiare (IT) is an emerging and innovative organization devoted to collecting and preserving Italian home movies.
Andrea Belfi (IT) and Stefano Pilia (IT) are among the vanguard of a new generation of Italian sound pioneers, exploring the outer limits of the electro-acoustic domain in a wide variety of configurations, moving freely between improvisation and composition. They play solo, together with Giuseppe Ielasi, Dean Roberts or David Grubbs or in bands like 3/4HadBeenEliminated, Black Forest Black Sea, Christa Pfangen, and Rosolina Mar. Their albums have appeared on labels like Time-Lag, Last Visible Dog, Häpna and Die Schachtel.
Xavier Garcia Bardon (BE) and Benjamin Francart (BE) are both members of the Brussels based improv collective Buffle, who have described their music as “Like monkeys trying to play tennis? An experimental playground for snails? Psychedelic pop played by children? We like to play every kind of music: popsy, punki’s, m’n’m’s, bluesy style, reggaes, funx, techno, country & western and typical walloonisch ritornels… but we’re basically just trying to be a rock band.” They released work on labels such as Lal Lal Lal, Ultra Eczema and Breaking World Records. Also check out their solo stuff as Saule and Benjamin Franklin.

PERFORMANCE
Alvin Lucier
(Ghent) Memory Space (1970)
For any number of singers and players of acoustic instruments

“Go to outside environments (urban, rural, hostilc, bcnign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any later time, re-create, solely bv means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of your memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations. When using tape recorders as memory devices, wear headphones to avoid an audible mix of the recorded sounds with the re-created ones.”

Performed by Thomas Smetryns, Heleen Van Haegenborgh, Kristof Roseeuw & Michael Weilacher

PERFORMANCE
Alvin Lucier
Nothing is real (Strawberry Fields Forever) (1990)
for piano & teapot with miniature sound system

“During this work, fragments of the melody are played and sustained as clusters. The performance is recorded on a cassette tape recorder. After the last fragment has been played, the tape is rewound and played back through a small loudspeaker hidden inside a teapot. During the playback, the lid of the pot is raised and lowered, changing the resonance characteristics of the pot. Twice during the performance the pot itself is lifted off the lid of the piano, causing the resonances to disappear completely.”

Performed by Heleen Van Haegenborgh

Alvin Lucier (VS) is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely-tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media. He has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers’ physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes.

INSTALLATION
Jasper Rigole
Paradise Recollected
2008, video, colour, sound, English spoken, 33′

Paradise Recollected is compiled out of archive material from The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other people’s Memories (IICADOM, a fictive institute founded by the artist Jasper Rigole (BE)). This archive consists mainly of found 8mm films, sourced from flea markets and garage sales. These are amateur films, travelogues and family documents whose main purpose is to remember certain occasions. Paradise Recollected takes a Medieval description of ‘the land of Cockaigne’ as a starting point. This anonymous, Middle Dutch text describes a dreamland which is the basis for later descriptions of ‘the land of plenty’. In the film, the internal logic of this fictive country is linked to the typical elements which give the family home movie its own language.

SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Explorations in Memory and History

Courtisane Festival 2009. Gent, 23 – 26 April 2009.
Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and María Palacios Cruz, in cooperation with Courtisane.

“As we know, there are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002.

These were Rumsfeld’s flamboyant words to refer to the unstable situation in Afghanistan following the American intervention in 2001, but they could also be used to situate the relationship between memory and history. One category is lacking : “the things we don’t know we know”, a past that is forgotten, oppressed, silenced, disavowed; a knowledge which has found shelter in the deepest regions of our personal or cultural conscience, hard to be accessed by language and memory. It is there that the polarity between history and memory is most sharply expressed; where fact and fiction, imagination and document, flow into each other; where different possibilities and temporalities coexist and the distinction between the true, the actual and the potential is blurred. It’s an idea of “History” in contradiction with traditional linear narratives, obsessively-driven by an idea of constant progress. Instead it evokes the crisis of the modern historical referent, more fragile and unstable than ever before. In this era of media saturation, in which spatial and temporal distances have been erased and a growing memory industry has made the most distant places and times available for instant replay, the call to rethink the relationships between past, present and future resonates louder and louder. The film and video artists in this programme search for the actual and virtual tensions and interactions between knowing and not knowing, between the public and the private, between history and memory, there where they meet : in the terrain of media.*

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Program 1
Saturday 25.04.2009, 13:00, Cinema Sphinx

Leslie Thornton
Let Me Count the Ways : Minus 10, 9, 8, 7
US, 2004, video, colour, English and Japanese spoken, 22’

Let Me Count the Ways is a series of meditations on violence and fear, and their reverberations on cultural history. The episodes have been built out of a mixture of personal reflections and diverse image material which present the phenomenology of fear with an intensity that breaks abruptly the border between past and present. Just as in earlier work, Thornton explores the social effects of new technologies and media, but here she goes deeper into autobiographical territory, suggesting we are all involved in these developments.

Soon-Mi Yoo
Dangerous Supplement
SKR/US, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14’

In her work, Soon-Mi Yoo investigates the peripheral histories of Korea, as a personal exploration of alienation, loss and the atrocities of war. This video is a compilation of landscape images, filmed by the American troops during the Korea war. These damaged places are flawed and incomplete, many are being lost just as they are seen. She asks herself : “is it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the other’s murderous gaze?”. By juxtaposing these images, Yoo creates a space where connections can be made between personal experience and public memory, historical perspective and private suffering.

Rea Tajiri
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige
US, 1991, video, colour and b&w, English spoken, 30′

“A search for a non-existent image, a desire to create an image where there is none,” culminates in a critical reflection on the relationship between documented history and non-registered memories. Through interviews and diverse archive material, Tajiri goes in search of her family’s story during WWII, as thousands of Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps. She explores the influence of images in the construction of memory and identity, asking herself why certain images grow into historical symbols, whereas others are obstinately suppressed.

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Program 2
Saturday 25.04.2009 14:30, Film-Plateau

Matthew Buckingham
Situation Leading to a Story
US, 1999, 16 mm, b/w, English spoken, 21′

“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past”. This quote by American writer William Faulkner could situate quite accurately the work of Matthew Buckingham. In his installations, he assembles and reinterprets historical documents and representations as a way to question the relationship between past and present. Situation Leading to a Story is based on four amateur films from the 1920’s that Buckingham found on the streets of New York. The search for the origin and context of these private images leads to a criticism on the ways in which images of the past are used as a fantasy of history.

Philip Hoffman
On the Pond
CA, 1978, 16mm, b/w, English spoken, 9’

Hoffman’s first film already presents all the characteristics of his later diary filmmaking: a fascination for family history and the reconstruction of memory, but also a complex temporal structure that dismantles the conventions of documentary filmmaking. A series of photo portraits is the basis for an intimate investigation on the way identity relies on the familiar system of role play, projection and fantasy. Hoffman breaks the thin ice between document and fiction, fact and imagination, past and present, revealing the fissures and rip tides that hide beneath the misleading calm surface.

Rebecca Baron
The Idea of North
US, 1995, 16mm, b/w, sound, English spoken, 14′

In the guise of a historiographical study on an failed expedition to the Arctic in 1897, Baron investigates the limitations of images and other forms of documentation as a historical reference, and the paradoxical relationship between the temporality of the moving image and the stillness of photography, between historical time and “real time”. Or how the image, regarded as a necessary condition for both memory and history, says everything and nothing at the same time .

Hollis Frampton
(nostalgia)
US, 1971, 16mm, b/w, sound, English spoken, 36’

A series of pictures burn one after the other, while a voice comments on the content of the photos. What begins as an ironic look upon a personal past evolves into a Borgesian game with cinematographic time, in which past and future are based on the disjunction between sound and image. Smoke and ashes get in our eyes while we are trying to make sense of the image and the narration, in an attempt to remember the story that fits the image, or the image that fits the story. In Frampton’s words : “(nostalgia) is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images. I began probably as a kind of non-poet, as a kid, and my first interest in images probably had something to do with what clouds of words could rise out of them…I think there is kind of a shift between what is now memory and what was once conjecture and prophecy and so forth.”

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Program 3
Saturday 25.04.2009, 16:00, Film-Plateau

James Benning
American Dreams (lost and found)
US, 1983, 16mm, colour, sound, English spoken, 56′

In the 1980’s James Benning – a key figure of American avant-garde cinema – made a series of films in which his rigorously structured explorations of time and space were injected with a fascination for aspects of American memory. American Dreams is constructed as a simultaneous, chronological presentation of the filmmaker’s collection of Hank Aaron memorabilia (who was an idol of the young Benning, a good pitcher himself), written excerpts from the diary of Arthur Bremer (Benning’s neighbour in Milwaukee, who would attempt to assassinate Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972) and a compilation of radio fragments. The result is muti-layered constellation of image, text and sound, which develops into a personal meditation on growing old, race, masculinity, popular culture and political transformations during one of the most turbulent periods of recent American history.

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Program 4
Saturday 25.04.2009, 17:30, Cinema Sphinx

Nora Martirosyan
1937
FR/AM, 2007, video, colour and b&w, English version, 44′

1937 : the year that Nora Dagabian’s father was arrested in Yerevan the capital of Armenia, during the Stalinist ethnic cleansing operations by the Soviet Army. Martirosyan combines interviews with Nora, now 70 years old, with archive images and re-enactments. The different temporalities overlap; stories and words become mixed up; images pass from one to the other; voices are superimposed, dubbed, transferred from one body to the other. A reflection on the process of remembering and the relationship between individual and collective memory.

The Otolith Group
Otolith
UK, 2003, video, colour, English spoken, 22’20

This video essay suggests a post-nuclear future in which humankind has been confined to outer space. The narrator is a fictional descendant of Anjalika Sagar, one of The Otolith Group members. She looks back at several generations of women from her family, linking her own experiences with those of Sagar’s grandmother, an Indian feminist in the 1960’s. Her attempt to understand the multiple dimensions of the historical and the evolutionary generates a number of images, which include the fragmented histories and utopian aspirations of the 20th century. Otolith presents a “past-potential-future”, making possible an alternative perspective on the present.

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Program 5
Sunday 26.04.2009, 14:30, Film-Plateau

Black Audio Film Collective
Handsworth Songs
UK, 1986, 16mm, colour and b&w, English spoken, 61′

BAFC was a British collective of filmmakers active in the 1980’s and 1990’s who expressed their radical views on the post-colonial decline of the imperialistic world order, the disastrous socio-economic effects of Thatcher’s doctrine and the meaning of the diasporic condition in an evenly radical way. Handsworth Songs explores the origins of the riots in the Birmingham district of Handsworth, where the local black community rose against a political policy that they considered as a return to colonialism. In contrast with the didactic panoptic impulse of the documentary film tradition, filmmaker John Akomfrah chose an open, polytonic structure where eye-witness accounts, mediated voice-overs and a mosaic of sound, intersperse with a poetic montage of archive footage. The inherent historical discourses are dismantled, and in result the impressions of the past gain a new place in the constellation of the present, as a promise to the future. “There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”.

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Program 6
Sunday 26.04.2009, 23:00, Cinema Sphinx

Kevin Jerome Everson
According to…
US, 2007, 16mm on video, b/w, English spoken, 9’

In his films, sculptures, photographies, artist books and paintings, Kevin Jerome Everson responds to daily materials, conditions, tasks and gestures of people of African descent in North America, illuminating, as he puts it, the “the relentlessness of everyday life”. In According to…, stories of interracial murders in southern rural America are told twice, offering different versions of the tragic events. Everson combines found footage and newly shot material to reflect on the experience of African-Americans before the rise of the Civil Rights movement.

Walid Ra’ad & The Atlas Group
The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs
LB/US, 1996-1999, video, colour, English and Arabic spoken, 17’

A videotape in three parts exploring the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991). Constructed out of innocent and everyday material, the tapes do not intend to document what really happened, but instead choose to explore what could be imagined. In his works, Walid Ra’ad analyses mass media images and narratives on war, and more precisely the Lebanese civil wars, in order to re-write a history in which notions like ‘experience’, ‘time’, ‘evidence’, ‘testimony’ all intermingle.

Julia Meltzer & David Thorne
It’s not my memory of it: three recollected documents
US, 2003, video, colour, English spoken, 25’

The document – its production, collection, circulation, reception and sociological effects – is at the centre of the work of Julia Metzer and David Thorne (aka The Speculative Archive). In It’s not my memory of it, three recollected documents – the account of a former CIA source in Iran in 1979, the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors conducted in a U.S. Navy ship during the Cold War, and a publicly acknowledged but top-secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 – provoke a reflection on the dynamic of a knowing and not knowing, addressing the question of the expansion and intensification of secrecy practices in the current climate of heightened security.

Vision Machine
Show of Force
UK, 2004-2007, video, colour, sound, 20’

Vision Machine is a collective based in East London that works with communities to recover – and recover from – historic trauma. Show of Force is part of a three-year project with palm-plantation workers in North Sumatra investigating the campaign of anti-Communist terror instigated by British and American intelligence services that waged in the Indonesian archipelago after October 1965, causing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. As Vision Machine members Michael Uwemedimo and Joshua Oppenheimer explain “To excavate the history of the massacres, Vision Machine has developed a method that is best thought of as an archaeological performance. Between a buried historical event, and its re-staging with historical actors, this method opens a process of simultaneous historical excavation and
histrionic reconstruction”.

1. sponsored by suppressed policy sportsmanship – something about the war, 4′
2. DATE: no date, 6′
3. William Egan Colby – 64 days ago, 10′

In 1965, Indonesia president Sukarno was overthrown by military general Suharto. The CIA provided equipment. The MI6 provided black propaganda. The US military provided training. The US State Department provided death lists. Between 500,000 and 2 million people were massacred in less than six months.10,500 people died at Sumatra’s Snake River.

In sponsored by suppressed policy sportsmanship – something about the war, footage of William Colby giving a speech on the progress of the Phoenix Program is taken from the National Archive in Washington, D.C. The Phoenix Program was a civilian extermination programme modelled, in part, after the ‘successful’ massacre of communists in 1965 Indonesia. The sound remains classified, and so Vision Machine employs a lip reader (who is deaf) to read Colby’s lips. It is not easy, because the footage is blurry, and the lip reader requires eight passes to produce even a fragmented sense of what Colby is saying. With each pass, the lip reader picks out more and more phrases – ‘from time to time’, ‘different religions’, ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘64 days ago’. The words from each pass are layered over the others, each at the same moment of utterance. This results in a thick and strangely contoured voice track – some moments become dense with the same words or phrases, a crowd of echoes seeming to issue from Colby’s mouth; at other moments different words are read from the same mouthing, the syllables of each interfering with those of the others to produce a perverse double (or triple) speak; some words are picked up on one pass and not another; different words are picked up on different passes.

As he mimes, he is mimicked – both mocked and mined for what he withholds. Some historical knowledge is yielded, something more is made known of the regional policy that he was instrumental in shaping and administering. But in place of an account of the murders, in place of the murderous directives, and in place of the voices of the murdered, we have footage of a small, bespectacled man in a suit, mouthing banalities in silence. This silence is telling, it speaks at once of the uncertainty of historical knowledge, and of the deliberate attempt to erase it.

In DATE: no date, two former death squad members re-visit the execution site on the banks of the Snake River. Each takes it in turn to play victim and executioner. Though they met for the first time only hours before the re-enactment, they keep up a perpetual banter, inspired at moments, and there’s a macabre hilarity to their madcap double act at others. One searches in vain for signs of authentic and difficult remembrance among the profusion of graphic detail. Instead, one finds a chilling pantomime, a performance that follows a seemingly shared script. This local scene is a perverse rehearsal of the massacre’s official history – a terrifying show of force.

In William Egan Colby (64 days ago), Samsuri, a local woodcutter, Ludruk opera performer and survivor of the massacres, is possessed by the spirit of William Colby during an improvised midnight performance. Here, the piece is also possessed by the sudden spectral intervention, because to accommodate this remarkable and unexpected cameo, the camera keeps filming, recording in real time Samsuri’s crisis, which halts the Ludruk performance, causing its scenery to be deconstructed around him as he lets out sibylline whispers and growls, as the rain falls and falls, as the audience disperses, as the spirit departs and Samsuri looks around bewildered at the now bare stage he is sitting on – the whole process in a single ten-minute take.

* inspired by Thomas Elsaesser, ‘History, Media, and memory – Three Discourses in Dispute?’, in Ulrik Ekman & Frederik Tygstrup (eds.), Witness : Memory, Representation, and the Media in Question, Museum Tusculanum, 2008.