Marie Sester Interview:
Access, Transparency and Visibility in Exposure
By Eduardo Navas
http://gallery.calit2.net
http://gallery.calit2.net/sesterInterview.php
Marie Sester is an artist born in France, currently living in Los Angeles.
She was trained as an architect, but soon after receiving her degree
realized that her real interest was in understanding the role of
architecture as discourse in culture and politics. She found art an ideal
space to develop her interdisciplinary projects. Sester sees her art
practice as an ongoing process partly defined by a person's desire to
visualize certain things, while making others invisible. Throughout the
1990s, Sester explored how surveillance redefined our understanding of
reality. In the following interview Marie Sester generously shares the story
behind her three-channel installation, Exposure, explaining how her role
as an artist allowed her access to information which she could not obtain
today due to the security measures put in place after 9/11.
[Eduardo Navas]: You explain that you are interested in the concepts of
transparency, visibility and access. Can you explain how these came to shape
your project Exposure and your interest in surveillance?
[Marie Sester]: The situation that became a reality in the U.S. after 9/11
had been developing in Europe for some time. Bombing attacks were part of my
reality in France, hijacking planes and taking passengers as hostages was
something we lived with day to day. This was often done to ask for money, or
demand for political prisoners to be released. Such unfortunate events were
not part of U.S. reality.
Terrorism was already present in Europe. Sometimes, when bombs exploded.
There were many individuals from small groups using what today we call
terrorist strategies; it was at this time that surveillance devices were
introduced. I was intrigued by this shift, which was a bit disturbing. As
surveillance technology started to be introduced at the airport, it became
normal to have one's luggage X-ray scanned. It became common to find
scanners at the airport, as well as government buildings like City Hall. The
unexpected beauty of surveillance technology fascinated me.
Suddenly, there was a new form of presence and reality defined by these new
devices. And I wanted to work with the images they produced. I had already
been working with pre-made objects and images for some time. At that time I
forged and assembled the notions of transparency, visibility and access and
they are still the basis of my work.
[EN]: You found this imagery beautiful, but at the same time, this imagery
was very pervasive, were you ambivalent to it?
[MS]: Yes, I found it ambivalent. This is how the notion of access came to
develop eventually in my work. In the Nineties, we began to live with a
whole combination of pre-requisites, especially when computers became
common. All of a sudden one is expected to log in in one way or another, to
get access to information, or to an actual place--but this is nothing new.
The mythic city of Jerusalem, for example, had 12 gates, which were well
guarded, and in ancient cities as long as we can remember, one had to show
or pay a right of entry. So the same thing happens with the digital world,
the cyber world. It's another way of also keeping track of access, in this
case more often to information. This is the function of cookies in the
browser, and in the end it's an issue of knowledge and possibility.
Then I reflected on access as a concept and realized that its opposite would
be exclusion, which also became very present. Exclusion divided the world in
parts. Before we had the wealthy and the poor, and now access divides people
in classes. With all this in mind I looked at the X-rays of luggage at the
airport, and also thought about our bodies in medical progress, and my work
began to take shape.
This is what I call the politics of seeing. For example, in ancient China,
the emperor would have privileged access to the highest mountain close to
his city to prove that he had the power to oversee and rule. So today we
have improved technology to see deeper, to see through objects and bodies.
Seeing is a way to attain information. It gives unquestionable power, and
today computer infiltration plays an important role. With all this in mind I
developed my approach to transparency, which for me comes ultimately from
architecture.
[EN]: When contemplating Exposure one wonders very quickly how you got
access to X-ray imagery of trucks. How did you move from the luggage at the
airport to X-ray of passing trucks?
[MS]: It came by chance. I did not know I would be working with such large
vehicles. The trucks were being scanned at the airport, by a research lab
which was experimenting with the technology at that time in France. During
95 and 96, at some point, I wanted to see the images of scanned luggage, and
I said, how can I get such images? I wrote a letter to the airport
director and asked him if it was
