Sorry for any crosspostings Digicult presents:
THE LOST CEMETERY OF IMAGES A CONVERSATION WITH CARLOS CASAS by Pia Bolognesi Digimag 60 - January 2011 http://www.digicult.it/digimag_eng/ The use of archive material is a tendency which has established itself in the last few years as a common practice in audiovisual contaminations. It is an ongoing search which paves the road to countless approaches to the work, as well as involving the individuality of the artist in the reprocessing of traces and memories in an imagination which is set on the present. With Cemetery (Archive Works), inaugurated on 28 October and ongoing until 14 January at the Marsèlleria in Milan, Carlos Casas steps onto this path at its edges, balancing between visual anthropology and rethinking images as a form of trans-cultural memory. The work of Casas - filmmaker, video artist and sound experimenter - ranges from documentaries on the furthest reaches of the Earth (Aral, Fishing in an Invisible Sea; Hunters since the Beginning of Time; Solitude at the End of the World) to pure, exploratory research of sounds and images. This materializes in the experience of the Fieldworks and of the Archive Works - projects developed at the same time as the making of the films, which Casas uses to probe field research as he continues to mix different languages. The Fieldworks come into being in 2001, during a journey to Tierra del Fuego for the preparation of Solitude at the End of the World, as a series of free, anti-narrative notes in which the artist takes the time to plunge his gaze into the meaning of the place, of the landscape, without drawing on the need for the definition of a complete story. Abstract fragments with an essential grammar, in which the processed ambient sound goes over the hidden connection with the image and defines it (each acoustic episode is made up of live recorded short and medium AM/FM radio waves). For the Archive Works, on the other hand, the approach is shifted to the opposite front; the discovery of the geography occurs through preexisting film material. Here, too, we have a physical study of the places that Casas has chosen to document occurring through the examination of the modes of analysis with which these places have been represented, used and diegetically manipulated through classic and contemporary films. The Archive Works, created between 2002 and 2010, are dreamlike inspections, maps of shared imagination, memories of the visions which have shaped the author's gaze, preliminary sketchbooks to study language and sound solutions for films which are coming to life from other films, where the visual material is toned through an ongoing iconographic re-absorption. The search for an igniting image, where everything is born and which holds within the tensions and archetypal expressions of the vastness of the material being used, is a constant practice in the Archive Works. It fits in perfectly with the mode of production that Casas defines in a non dissimilar manner in his documentaries. This form of survival and trans-mnemonic reorganization extensively concerns a policy of authorial research, traceable especially where it is made least evident: All my films are an image hunt, a journey to envision again, a path to enlightenment, a quest for that first image that ignites imagination, that lives inside and wants to reach out again throughout the years - for all such images that are part of ourselves and combine to form our inner life. [1] With Cemetery, a project still in progress presented at Netmage last January and now at Marsèlleria in its most recent, previously undisclosed version (which includes a third part undergoing further development), we follow the journey to an elephant cemetery on the border between India and Nepal, on the trace of Maharajah Joodha Shumshere. The installation complex is shaped like the remote journal of a journey which is being continually defined, conceived as a monument to memory and structured through a variety of materials which enter into a dialogue with the architectural dimension of the exhibition space, cheating it of its limiting role and opening up a range of possibilities for enjoyment which is free from environmental constraints. There is a direct link between personal writing and collective reading which, as its reference point, calls forth the perceptive and symptomal model of iconographic survival. [2] This implies analyzing the evolution of the forms as a set of tension processes, features of evidence and features of the unthought-of, that which remains and returns from the iconographic form itself. This indication is not incidental; it defines the composition of the images of Elephant Journey and Elephant Cave, where the stratified use of fades traces a temporal mark constantly working on the reconstruction of the present. ----- Complete article & interview to Carlos Casas: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1964 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
