CONTEMP ART ‘12
ETERNAL SUNRISE: (OR HOW I TURNED THE WORLD AROUND WITHOUT EVER LEAVING AN AIRPORT) GUZMÁN DE YARZA BLACHE USJ SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE ZARAGOZA-SPAIN Email: GDEYARZA@USJ.ES 1. Backround For the last ten years I have been developing a series of performatic video works that basically deal with the construction of identity, from the individual/intimate point of view to the national or transnational scale and approach, with constant references to architecture and urbanism and the way the both dramatically affect our lives. The video works function somehow as truth verifications, in the sense that the camera is there only to register factuality in the most aseptic and neutral way. The questioning of reality through the art work is probably one of the most interesting and meaningful issues that visual arts can bring to light nowadays, considering that “reality” can be understood through art in a different way than regular sciences do normally. As german film maker Werner Herzog preaches in most of his interviews; “I am not interested in the truth of facts nor in a countable truth; I am interested in a poetic, extatic and transcendental truth” The role of the art work, especially from the second avant-gardes onwards, can be understood as the creation of a tension between the artist and his environment, so that the tension can provoke new relations between the stakeholders involved in the act of inhabitating a space. Hard core performers from Viennese actionism knew that and created situations within galleries and museums that involved blood and dead animals so that the spectators had to participate in a terrible ritual by tearing apart flesh and meat, necessarily establishing a new relation with matter and life and death issues. In other occasions the own performer acted in a way that his own body was taken to extreme situations so that another kind of questioning arouse ,this time related to the religious concept of sacrifice and punishment. Balcanic performers Marina and Ulay Abramovic represented love and romanticism through actions that involved physical risk for themselves, like pointing at their heart with an arrow or colliding their naked bodies with increasingly strength until one of them fainted. It could be said that they were sacrificing themselves for the sake of art, for the sake of love. American performer and conceptual artist Chris Burden achieved one of the highlights of the art of the XXth century with his performance “Shoot” in which 123
CONTEMP ART ‘12
he asked a friend to shoot him with a 22 millimeter shotgun. The bullet hit his arm with a clean way in and out through his flesh. Burden recorded the shooting in an eight second video that solidly refers to classical fusillade paintings like Goya´s “Third of may shootings” or Robert Capa´s “Falling Soldier” picture taken at the Spanish Civil War. Burden´s action cannot be understood in any other way than a post modern macabre parody of the representation of life and death through art, a rethorical way of converting sacrifice into a self referential process that can only be considered within the ambiguous limits and concerns of conceptual art. Any other meaning of deepness, seriousness or commitment had been erased for the sake of becoming a famous artist at no matter what price. In my previous own artistic production I had pointed out a series of topics that somehow relate to the positioning of these classic performers, in the sense of putting the artist into situations that imply sacrifice and the questioning of assumed issues and concerns. My work “Trans Balkan Express” (2004) is a 24 minute documentary film that depicts all the frontiers that divided the balcanic countries, every moment in which the identity is questioned and that travelers form part of the ritual of crossing from one country to another, understanding frontiers as scars of history. A sequence of uniforms, suspicious regards incomprehensible languages and unnecessary registrations in the middle of such non places as frontiers. The act of passing through a frontier is, indeed, a mutation of your own identity, since the cultural and anthropological background that supports your oneness is completely displaced once you have crossed the frontier and therefore has meanings and implications that no longer can be identical to your prior, a few meters away. Your identity is put into question every time an angry policeman checks your passport, becoming a crisis situation that makes the traveler understand the fragility and weakness of his own condition.
“Trans Balkan Express” becomes eventually a thriller in which time elapses circularly in a loop without beginning nor ending, jumping from crisis to crisis in an altered state of perpetual questioning of your own identity. Two years later I did the “Don´t ask them about Lenin” (2006) portrait project that consisted in a series of four hundred photographs that I took along the Transmongolian route. The pictures where of two types, portraits of night life in major Siberian cities and pictures of architecture both soviet and contemporary Russian style. I was amazed by the energy and attitude that young Russians had when going out at night in clubs and after hours that apparently had no closing 124
CONTEMP ART ‘12
time whatsoever. In every city that we stepped by along the train route, we could find incredible people partying in clubs and raves until the sun was up in the sky. Youngsters seemed to have acquired the rituals, codes and attitudes of western youth extremely quickly, probably through global TV networks and musical broadcast companies. The energy and passion that we found in that entire people made me think about the title of the photographic series as if all that people were somehow trying to regain the time that had been stolen to prior generations. Maybe all those kids were just trying to party for themselves and for their parents, who had had to suffer almost a century of dictatorship. The generation I was depicting has had to build its own identity in only a decade and without substantial sediment from their previous generations that are still somehow represented through the magnificent yet decadent soviet architecture and urbanism ubiquitously present across the country. I tried to depict that architecture, too, and eventually I constructed a series of diptychs that showed individuals and architecture side by side, trying to pose questions on how much of architectonical can you find in a face, and how much of anthropological can be found in a building. The dyptichs were screened in diaporama with a techno session recorded live by Novosibirsk-based DJ Technics, eventually bringing to light the changes, challenges and thrills that the Russian identity is going through nowadays, having to face with its past and with the uncertainties of the future.
Another of my video works called “Spanish Tryphtic� (2003) was a multiple channel projection that was indeed a contemporary knowledge tool consisting of an exhaustive compilation of all the advertisements of FA shower soaps, Spanish Tax Agency and the promotional campaigns of tourism in Spain. The three products determined certain coordinates that can define the processes through which a nation defines its own identity, attending to sexual, economic and regional concerns. The process makes clear that advertising is indeed a mirror in which society reflects, a mirror that shows not only how we are but what image do we want to construct and project to foreign cultures. This work tried to question issues related to concerns that have to do with global positioning of countries and nationalities in the contemporary context, assuming how public institutions regularly use capitalist rules and techniques of marketing to transmit their messages to citizens.
125
CONTEMP ART ‘12
2. Processes In the fall of 2009 I decided to talk about airports, but I wanted to talk about airports from a situation of perpetual transit, not being a simple spectator of the events that happen around airports but being part of their conceptual essence and transforming myself into a low-cost Phileas Fogg that could somehow adapt to the XXI century the magnificent XIX century novel. The previous research I did on airports took me to four outstanding essays on architecture and anthropology that were extremely influential to me and that eventually shaped the whole project. These texts were; -“The Non Places” by Professor Marc Augé -“Junkspace” and “Generic City” by Rem Koolhas -“The Tourist” by Professor Dean MacCannel -“Of Other Spaces” by Professor Michel Foucault This theoretical background led me to propose the idea of ETERNAL SUNRISE; an action consisting of literally travelling around the world without leaving the airports of the different cities on the itinerary. It was conceived to mirror conventional urban tourism yet with self-imposed limitations of rigor and discipline. The project intended to be an absurd, poetic tour de force charged with meaning that manages to recompile images from around the world without leaving the airports, observing reality through the homogeneous and global glass urn of the international air space that materializes in airports. Airports are true ex novo cities and visiting them can be viewed in tourist terms or making use of leisure time, because at the current moment they are totally prepared for the enjoyment and comfort of the contemporary traveler. Could airports be the heterotopias Foucault spoke of, those other places, removed from convention and the established, with their own laws and rules? The route planned for Eternal Sunrise participates in the research spirit of the 19th century travelers in their enlightened mission to collect elements that would represent the exotic places they visited; the postmodern flâneur is now a global flâneur who leaps from one country to another like we once used to move from one district or neighborhood to another, to bring back evidence of the journey on his laptop. Travelling to international airports nowadays is, over and above anything else, a state of mood, which has to do with the passing of time, the lack of identity and the beauty of the banal; and it is precisely this mood that we wanted to capture by means of a construction of a document that represents it and to cast light on 126
CONTEMP ART ‘12
phenomena that characterize the contemporary moment. It is all about documenting “the shrinking of the planet, the acceleration of history and the individualization of destinies” that Marc Augé spoke about, besides proportioning a sensible knowledge and an aesthetic understanding of the world that surrounds us. The project obtained the Comunidad de Madrid Fine Arts Grant in Spain that made it possible for the two travelers to perform their trip. We did the trip in to customized working suits that presented us not as tourists neither businessmen but as real artists at work. The final route was Madrid- Rio de Janeiro-Santiago de Chile-Miami- Mexico DF-Miami-Las Vegas-Los Angeles-Honolulu-Sydney-Singapore-Tokyo-BeijingHongKong-Johannesburg-London and Madrid. 16 airports in 25 days The direction of the journey followed the rotation of the Earth, in such a way that the airplane somehow managed to halt time, allowing us to imagine the possibility of a beautiful eternal sunrise, with a traveler who chases the sun in order never to age and who observes reality permanently under the warm orange light of dawn all over the planet. 3. Conceptual Coordinates
Before the trip we had to establish some conceptual coordinates that could be guiding us through the airports. What were we looking for, exactly? What would we be filming in the airports? We determined these six major issues that had to be taken in account; 1_Safety:
Mechanisms of Control Questioning of Identity Proof of Innocence Access-Denial Use of Strength/Violence 2_Tourism: Quest for Paradise Construction of Spectacle Exotism-Otherness Vacational Industry Simulation 127
CONTEMP ART ‘12
3_Time:
Perpetual Present Shrinking of the planet The Ephemeral Space Absence of History 4_Loneliness: Individualization of Destinations Proliferation of the Ego Search of Pleasure Verification of the Non Place Democratization of the Experience 5_Consumption: Instrumentalization of Leisure Limbic Exemption of Taxes Alteration of ritual domestic roles Acquisition of the fetish Management of Detritus 6_Space: Public Space´s Users Guide Public vs intimate Absence of Identity Transnational Mimesis Beauty of the Banal 4. Social Research The intention of the documentary is, too, an anthropological research on how users relate to those massive leviathans called airports. We pre-produced the trip contacting all the airports of the route and trying to have access and permission to film in our destinations. That point, unfortunately, was not possible. Some of the airports let us film and even arranged interviews with the managers
128
CONTEMP ART ‘12
and the technical staff, but some other didn´t. The airports that gently let us film and treated us fantastically were: Rio de Janeiro/ Galeao Santiago de Chile (Arturo Moreno Benítez International) México DF (Benito Juárez International) Honolulu International Sydney (Kingsford Smith International) Singapore (Changi Airport) Or Tambo Johannesburg International In the rest of the trip we had to hide our cameras and film at our own risk. We really didn´t have major incidents, except at the end of the trip, in London Heathrow, where we were warned by policemen after five minutes of recording, and we had to abandon the filming. We were feared the most in Europe, not elsewhere, which is a significant fact We prepared a battery of questions addressed to the people we were to find in our adventure. The intention was to bring to light many of the conceptual coordinates that were already ruling the project. The top questions were; 1/ French anthropologist Marc Augé defines what he calls the non-places as non identity, neither historic nor relational places. Would you say an airport is a place without identity, history or relations? 2/ We think that space in airports is created by the conflict between two opposites, in one hand the fear to terror and terrorism, on the other hand the quest of pleasures and relax during holidays. Would you agree with that? 3/ Do you have the feeling that time stops in an airport, that somehow you are living in a perpetuate present, with no past, with no future? 4/ In the last century modern societies are getting less and less religious, therefore losing the faith in a heavenly paradise. Nevertheless, we are still looking for paradise on earth, for our lost Garden of Eden, leading tourism as the second largest industry in the planet. Do you feel part of that quest for paradise on earth, being a tourist? 5/ In that sense, would you agree that tourists are the new pilgrims that travel worldwide to worship the new saints of modernity, pointed out by the vacational industry? 6/ The quest for paradise is indeed a quest for the exotic; we want to travel as far as possible looking for exotic places that haven´t been spoiled by western civilization. 129
CONTEMP ART ‘12
Do you think locals reconstruct their touristic spots in order to make them look as “authentic as possible”? 7/ Do you think we westerns have a feeling of guilt in the destruction of native cultures so we want to verify they still exist? 8/ We have observed the size of the souvenir industry. We understand the souvenir as a way of reducing the native culture to the fetish, to an object we can put on top of our fireplace. Do you think souvenirs represent their cultures? 5. Results The result of the trip is a 110 minute documentary film, a series of more than 500 hundreds of “tourist pics” and a series of 25 medium size portraits of the people we met along the trip. We did all the filming with regular tourist gear, it was extremely important to us to underline that beauty is accessible even with small cameras; beauty does not rely within the camera of the film maker, but in his regard. The objective of the film is that travelers are able to look at airports form a different perspective than the one they are used to, understanding the deepness and complexity that relies in those spaces, a complexity that indeed defines the condition of human kind at the beginning of the third millennium, a moment in which as Professor Augé defines; …we have arrived to a point in which we are going to have vertigo of our own existence.
6.Bio Professor Guzmán de Yarza Blache got his Bachelor in Architecture from Universidad de Navarra (ES) in 2002 and after he started working at the Andres Perea Office of Architecture in Madrid. He founded J1 Architects with three other partners, a Madrid based office of architecture that currently does the projects and directs works in several parts of Spain. He develops simultaneously a career as 130
CONTEMP ART ‘12
a visual artist in a disciplinary mixture that enriches both practises and allows an exchange of sensitivity that eventually aims to somehow illuminate our perception of human condition. His work has been recently seen at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía within Les Rencontres Internationales de Video Paris/Madrid/ Berlin, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (MARCO), the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo in Móstoles, the Centro de Arte Recoleta de Buenos Aires, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, the International Triennial of Prague and several national and international film festivals and exhibitions. Contact If you would like to request a copy of the film to screen it with educational or curatorial purposes don´t hesitate on contacting me. guzmandeyarza@hotmail.com
131