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The Enclave an interview with Richard Mosse by Erik Vroons
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All images Š Richard Mosse
interview
Throughout 2012, Richard Mosse (1980, Ireland) and his collaborators Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost travelled in eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), infiltrating armed rebel groups. The result of this is The Enclave, a major new multimedia installation covering a war zone plagued by ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence. Continuing on the themes (and success) of Mosse’s work Infra, The Enclave is the culmination of his on-going attempt to rethink war photography. richardmosse.com
When and how did your engagement with the Congolese conflict originate? In November 2009, shortly after the opening of a solo show in New York and the finishing of a project, I was looking for a new direction. I was in a strange place in my practice and wanted to break everything I had built. I wanted to do something that would make me feel uncomfortable. Then I learned that Kodak had announced they were discontinuing production of a film called Aerochrome, an old aerial reconnaissance film that sees infrared light. I felt this film had that potential, but knew it had to be taken to a surprising place, to work the medium against the grain. Congo’s wars emerged in my imagination. I knew very little about them, but after a little research, I found that they were perversely appropriate for Aerochrome.
How do you see The Enclave in relation to your project Infra? As a logical continuation or a whole new project? The Enclave is really the culmination of Infra, the final stage of it. The early stages of Infra were a series of anonymous, solitary journeys that I made alone, with a wooden camera, visiting rebel groups deep in the bush. The Enclave is a highly collaborative piece shot on 16mm Arriflex, with a very small team. My knowledge of the place had deepened. The conflict had escalated. The stakes were higher. >>
“The conflict had escalated. The stakes were higher.”
“I feel quite removed from the person I used to be.”
The Enclave immerses the viewer in a challenging and sinister world, exploring aesthetics in a situation of profound human suffering. At least 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes in eastern Congo since 1998. Yet, what makes these images so arresting is the richness of reds where we expect green, as if trees, bushes, savannah grasses were aflame with flowers.
How does a medium that registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light – originally designed for camouflage detection and military aerial-surveillance – help you tell this story? Congo’s conflict is an opaque, cancerous cycle of ‘vicious little wars’, so complex and ramified that they are difficult to comprehend. As a result, the conflict goes relatively unreported worldwide, and this enormous humanitarian disaster goes unseen in the global consciousness. Perhaps, I thought, Aerochrome might reveal this hidden tragedy, and cast it in new light.
The tragedy in Congo seems indeed a narrative so painful that it exists beyond language. In that sense, your approach reminds me of Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project, an exercise of representation which lasted six years and ended up in several pieces. Do you relate to his work? It’s uncanny that you refer to Jaar’s Rwanda Project because, working in Congo, I was reminded of his piece The Eyes of Gutete Emerita in a profoundly disturbing way. I have always been greatly moved by the piece, as it speaks of the failure of representation itself, the failure of words and things to adequately communicate what has been witnessed. Through this failure, however, the piece makes the tragedy visible.
So how were you reminded of Jaar’s work? In North Kivu in early November 2012, we got to a place where a massacre had just occurred. Six had been slaughtered, all women and children. Each of the women had been raped before being killed by spear or stabbed to death with a machete. The look on their dead faces spoke of terrified resistance and fear. It was a glimpse into the absolute. The youngest in the group, a boy of three years old, had been murdered by a spear strike directly through the middle of his face, leaving a deep >> hole. His tiny brain was visible. But his eyes were intact, wide open, staring back at me. I froze. I stood accused by this dead boy’s gaze. Indicted. >>
“The project grew like a bonfire you started from twigs, but can no longer control.”
And then? As I stood over his tiny corpse, staring in silent disbelief, Alfredo Jaar’s piece, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, flashed into my mind. Jaar had made the piece more than fifteen years earlier, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The piece is about a woman who had watched her family being slaughtered by machete. Jaar reproduced a simple close-up photograph of the young woman’s eyes as a slide transparency. He did it over and over again, creating a mountain of thousands and thousands of slides on an enormous light box. The Eyes of Gutete Emerita poured through my memory as the violently mutilated boy’s eyes returned my gaze, bringing two counter-worlds into collision: art’s potential to more adequately represent the absolute—to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language—and photography’s capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world. >>
Do you think that with your aesthetic approach in Congo you somehow succeeded in creating empathy, solidarity and intellectual involvement from the audience? Or was there another aim? I’m not sure if it was successful in the sense of advocacy, especially because the project eschews any specific, concrete narrative in order to construct a more open-ended imaginary space. The approach is non-didactic. So in that sense, it deliberately fails to ‘name the demon’, to take a side, to fight the good fight. But the work is still drawn from the documentary, and is bonded to reportage in certain ways. Over the past couple of years, I have watched these images live an extraordinary life online, getting posted, reposted, and going viral in the blogosphere. Perhaps this is because the unusual colour gamut of the film suits the over-amped saturation of consumer computer screens? In any case, it seems to have trickled down, in its way, and in ways that I doubt it would have, were it shot with a naturalistic palette or black and white. In this way, the work has created a type of empathy for eastern Congo’s situation. But I don’t know about solidarity. Solidarity with who? For what? The conflict there is so hideously convoluted that it’s really quite difficult to feel any solidarity. Everyone is out for himself. So no one should be lulled into facile pathos but do hope that the work has formed solidarity, even the tiniest amount, for the starving, destitute civilians – the victims of this conflict – especially the ones who are constantly forced to flee violence, and who are subject to intolerable humiliation, especially from corruption, abject poverty and injustice.
You’re exploring the relationship between art, fiction and photojournalism, but do you ever worry that the aesthetics that come with using Aerochrome film will be too ‘beautiful’ and lead viewers away from what you intended to establish? Do you feel that burden? This is absolutely the point. ‘The beautiful’ is the sharpest tool in the box. If you want to make someone really feel something, strike their heart with aesthetics. My intention with this work was to create a dilemma in the viewer’s heart. If some viewers were struck by the beauty of war – and sometimes war is beautiful – then, I hoped, those viewers would then be appalled by their response: by taking aesthetic pleasure from someone’s misery, pain or death. And in that moment, perhaps they might stand back from themselves in the act of perceiving—take a moment to think. So, my intention here is non-vicarious. I try to avoid telling you what to think or feel. I think perhaps this is the real disconnect with photojournalism, and the thing that makes people feel most uncomfortable—because the work does not prescribe a set response and remains ambiguous in an unsettling and seemingly irresponsible way. The photojournalist’s ‘moral imperative’ often plays to the viewer’s sense of guilt. This is something I’ve recently been talking about with my collaborators, the idea that many documentaries basically just make you feel good about sitting in a dark room. >>
“The Enclave is really the culmination of Infra, the final stage of it.”
How will you continue from here? Or, have you already found the limits of photography as a medium, and pushed those limits as far as you can? Oh gosh no, I haven’t found the limits of photography and never will. I’m only beginning. I traded my beaten up old Leica MP with a camera dealer, Duncan Meeder, for a brand new Leica M. I’ve never really worked with small format digital cameras before. The project grew like a bonfire you started from twigs, but can no longer control. After spending so much time in Congo, I feel quite removed from the person I used to be. Perhaps in good ways. But I also feel alienated from old friends and old emotions. I have very violent nightmares about it all. That’s on nights when I can actually sleep. I have suffered terrible post-traumatic stress disorder over the last six months. Personally, I know it’s time to move on. So I’m extremely excited to start experimenting with this formidable camera.
Richard Mosse (1980, Ireland) holds an MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art and a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Goldsmiths, London. He also holds a first-class BA in English literature from King’s College London and a master’s in cultural studies from the London Consortium (ICA, AA, Tate, Birkbeck). His work has been exhibited at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Barbican Art Gallery, London; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Kunsthaus Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tate Modern, London; SFMOMA, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro. In 2011, Mosse was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, with a supplemental stipend from the Leon Levy Foundation. Most recently, he represented Ireland at the Venive Biennale with his multi-media presentation of The Enclave. Richard Mosse is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
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