Non-stop Flight: An Interview With Óscar Muñoz | Artishock y SACO

Artishock and SACO

On a direct and non-stop flight between Cali and Antofagasta, Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz arrived at the SACO1.0 Contemporary Art Biennial to present the exhibition The Line of Destiny and offer a guided tour of his works. This invitation materialized after years of negotiations and was the perfect opportunity for him to give his first and only lecture in Chile.

For Dagmara Wyskiel, director of SACO, the fact that Oscar Muñoz’s work was shown in the north “symbolically builds a bridge between these two cities stigmatized for various reasons within their respective countries.”

The Line of Destiny was installed in a darkened room at the Minera Escondida Foundation, in Antofagasta, as a sort of recreation of a darkroom that immerses visitors in the intimacy of Muñoz’s work. Narciso, Biographies, Sedimentations, and The Line of Destiny were the four works in exhibition, which reminded us of the ephemeral and fragile human condition.

Through audiovisual projections whose images become deformed until disappearing but reappear when the video’s time is reversed, the artist invited us to reconfigure concepts such as presence and absence. Using portraits of anonymous, forgotten beings who briefly return to life, he focuses on death as suspended time. His work moves between the enduring and the perishable, recognition and marginalization, memory and oblivion.

In times of expansion of new technologies in contemporary art, Muñoz uses the analog method as an artistic exercise, creating a space for reflection. Through the image, he invites us to question everyday communication. Since we are more connected and with more information than ever, could it be that in the midst of the saturation of continuous production, we no longer question the value of the moment in an image?

In this interview, the artist talks about these and other questions: his first visit to Chile in the framework of the SACO Biennial, what the return to presentiality in art has meant to him and what are the points of encounter and disagreement between the digital and analog image in an increasingly virtual world. He also talks about the pandemic experience of Lugar a Dudas, the mythical space for residencies that he co-founded in Cali in 2005, together with the current general coordinator Sally Mizrachi, who joined the second part of the conversation.

Your participation in the SACO Biennial is marked by two important events: your first solo exhibition in Chile and the keynote lecture that culminated in an on-site tour through the show. How was the experience of the encounter between the public, you and your work after two years of confinement?

I hadn’t given a talk for a while. I had planned to read a text, but given the opportunity to meet people interested in listening to me, I considered it more important to talk to them and look them in the eyes, that is, to have a more special closeness in these times of so much distance.

I liked talking about things that interest me a lot, such as the processes involved in my work, how I do them, and being able to tell the public what’s there. Then, obviously, going through this small exhibition of only four works, which shows a group that spans from 2004 to 2010 in video works, projections, and installations.

Only four works compound the exhibition that spans from 2004 to 2010 with video works, projections, and installations.

Presence and absence, memory, the ephemeral nature of life and the passage of time in the image are fundamental axes of your work. What is the role of oblivion?

I think it is important to emphasize that we are constantly in a dynamic of remembering and forgetting. We remember because we forget, and vice versa. It is a bit like breathing, a dual-action. If we talk about breathing, we talk about duality: inhaling and exhaling.

My work approaches that crucial instant where the document, the image, the impression or the trace may or may not be consolidated; and that is why there are two possibilities: that of remembering or that of forgetting. A critical moment similar to the instant when we are about to remember something we have forgotten, or in which we are about to forget something we have remembered. It is in that critical gap where I want to situate my work.

Like the problem of the “memorious” who does not forget and does not live new experiences, because every minute of today is remembering yesterday’s: we need to forget in order to have experiences today. It is a vehicle driven by two forces, as if in tandem.

Your work’s approach to the volatility of the image and to its temporality. Its imprint on our perception is very pertinent today in the conversations about the image in the virtual sphere. There are too many images circulating, an excess that we do not manage to process and that because of its speed does not allow us to question or reflect. The vast majority of images have become dispensable, disposable. They are no longer even printed for posterity, they only go viral and float in cyberspace. What is your position on the digital image, and what is its role and value today?

My work has been developed within mechanical and analog processes rather than digital ones. In fact, I applied it by discovering the mechanics of analog photography. However, I have recent works that somehow move a bit in that field of immateriality and reflect on the digital image, on virtuality.

These systems bombard us and overwhelm us every day with an endless amount of images that reach us in different ways and at different times and places. Every day we manage to select what we discard, and what we retain in our brains. This routine process causes yesterday’s images to be maintained or covered by today’s images. That is why I consider images to be fragile and perishable. There is an interest to pick up certain images that are part of the memory, to find again their meaning, or to re-signify them.

In this sense, and taking into account that you have always been interested in “developing” as a concept –as an image is “revealed”–, what should we value, or recognize, from analog photographic methods?

The analog method of fixing the photograph is a critical instant that turns that image into the past once it is frozen and stopped. Once the image is revealed and fixed it becomes past, history.

The digital image is floating and is only saved, as Derrida says in Archive Fever, when the save key is pressed, meaning that it is fixed on a hard disk that retains it. It is basically the same mechanics of chemical fixation in analog photography. If we are writing with ink on paper and it gets wet, it will be erased, but if the ink dries on the paper, the document is consolidated.

Another technique used in your work is the loop, which goes from being a purely technical tool to a method. What is the purpose of its use and how does it relate to the ideas you seek to convey to the viewer?

In many cases the repetition is the same, but in many others it is not, so it is not a repetition. It is interesting to me the act of bringing back an image, because we are not the same when we remember, nor is the image the same each time we remember it. In this sense, the image is not fixed, it is unstable, stammering, changing and altered by many things and memories. For example, we do not see the same thing when we watch a film at two different times, somehow it is not a repeated action.

In several of the pieces I showed at the conference this happens, as in Narciso, where the image is printed. Still, when you see it one day it will be different from when you see it another day. Some micro-movements, events that happen in the evaporation process that makes the image not the same because it is in an imperceptible movement which makes it changeable. It seems to me that something like this would work with memory. Some pieces here propose that the “printed” image is exposed to a transformation in time, so it is affected by time.

What were your motivations for founding the Lugar a Dudas space for residencies and experimentation in Cali, and what has it been like to develop this work from a non-metropolitan city?

Sally Mizrachi: We opened the residencies a few years after the inauguration of Lugar a Dudas´ venue. The residency program was perfectly in line with our idea of establishing a platform for encounters. We wanted to boost the interaction and relationship between the city and the local artistic community with the resident visitors. At the same time, the possibility of circulation of local artists in other areas of Latin America. I believe that these encounters enriched the local scene through the dialog between the artists who arrived, the city, and the community itself.

We are not the same when we remember; the image is not fixed, it is unstable, stammering.

The program began when the director of Triangle Arts in New York came to Cali to visit Lugar a Dudas and suggested creating a network. It was something very important because we created the first network of residencies with similar organizations in South America. We are neighboring countries, but we don’t have much exchange or knowledge of each other. We established a permanent call program with Capacete in Brazil, Kiosco in Bolivia, and Basilisco in Buenos Aires.

These four organizations started the network and exchanges. It was also very significant that after three years another organization, the AECID Foundation, a Spanish agency in Brazil, became interested in this first network that we had formed and wanted to expand it to many other Latin American and Spanish-speaking countries. For four years we worked with the support of AECID, forming a much broader network of 20 organizations. Projects that came from different organizations were hosted by others in the network, which was very important for the contribution to the local residency program. The focus was not to take it to the capital but to create another center decentralized from the capital, to be a center in the province.

In conversations with the founders of ISLA, SACO’s residency program, reflections emerged about how the health crisis affected your respective residencies and how you see the transformations and new challenges. Sally, from your experiences, how indispensable is face-to-face attendance?

S: As I said before, Lugar a Dudas bases its activity on the encounter, on convening and being with others, and the residency is just that. It is the place of experience, the encounter with others within the city, the dialog. That is why it has been very difficult for us to understand what a virtual residency can be like... you feel you are missing out on something. The experience of seeing each other, seeing each other’ s faces, gestures, feeling you there and not just through a screen with a little square at the top and one at the bottom. I think that to reside is to be in a place, and always suggests going out to a new context, and if you are in your own chair and your computer, what is the point of “residing”? Maybe it should be called in a different way, a Zoom or Meet exchange.

Ó: At least from our perspective, based on our experiences, the concept of residing can mutate or be rethought, perhaps, but for us it is still very important to be there, face to face, as they say nowadays.

S: I have met people, artists who have been in online residencies and they say it is another way, but I have also heard other ways of doing research, connecting with people who are in that discipline, making a previous collection of information by Zoom and then arriving to the territory to experience the proposal and carry it out. It is a very different way that can work out and can be complemented. To us in Lugar a Dudas, as a meeting and contact place, attendance has a lot of power to develop a project. Also, because at Lugar a Dudas we never asked for a previously thought-out proposal, but rather that the city itself, the relationship with the other and the artist’s stay allow an idea to germinate or grow.

the role of biennials

What were your experiences and appreciations while touring the SACO Biennial’s museum without museum circuit? According to your opinion, what is the role of biennials in the world and more specifically in Latin America?

Ó: SACO is a very interesting biennial format with a lot of potential... As long as it develops projects that are closely linked to or detached from local life, context, air, temperature, materiality, space, stories, and political life. I feel that it could become very powerful in that sense. The public spaces, the history, or the facts, are the elements that give a special dynamic and a particularity to an event like this.

S: The important thing is the format of what Óscar says: the city and how the journey through different parts of it integrates the artistic proposals, which can take place in any space. A biennial could be a big venue where you enter and all the works are in one place. Still, the beautiful thing here is the invitation to tour the city, which I think is more complex, but addresses several points of “occupying the city” and creating a dialog with the artistic proposals and the people. That relationship is super valuable, allowing the city to create a dialog between artists and inhabitants. The mobility of the routes – library, museum, among others– opens that possibility in the biennial. As Óscar says, each work has its own creativity, but the theme of mobilizing all these in a province and not in a central city is also very inspiring and a powerful achievement.

Ó: I also think the local scale is important. I like the fact that it doesn’t have the magnitude of the big biennials. It is not a meaningless tourist tour either, it is well integrated with the daily life of the city and that is a strong achievement, beyond being a cultural tourism ritual. It seems to me that it is more about the possibility of connecting with the citizens, with their conflicts and their past.

S: To promote these encounters between citizens and artistic proposals may stir up, provoke or raise doubts and reflections among citizens. And it is very valuable to make that possible.

SACO Biennial has a lot of potential as long as it develops projects linked to local life, context, air, temperature, materiality, space, stories, and political issues.

If the mission of a photographer is usually to obtain an image to seal the existence of an instant, in the case of Muñoz we are at the opposite end of the spectrum.