untitled moving frames

UNTITLED MOVING FRAMES (an essay portfolio 2000-2009)

MARIA LUSITANO

The writing of the origin, the writing that retraces the origin, tracking down the signs of its disappearance, the lost writing of the origin. To write is to have the passion of the origin. (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference)

In 1998 I finished Medicine. And started working in a hospital. From one day to the other, just like that, I was thrown into the atmosphere of the daily routine of an hospital ward. Into the smell of food and medicine. Disease. Did you know there is an aseptic smell of disease? That was my daily smell. I can feel it within my nostrils, actually, today, and it comes from that hospital. My first hospital, my original hospital, where I, a seventies baby, had already been delivered. One more human delivered to an institution within the industrial era of engineered human systems. Born in a hospital I was now, smelling again, every day, the original smells of my life : (alcohol, aseptic iodium, gel mixed with turkey stew coming from the canteen.)

“Mrs Maria is stopping...” said a nurse, I am remembering now, as I write this. And that young nurse had sadness on her face. Which was usually not the case. Strange. Dona Maria probably had been a special person there. Because: To stop there, was a daily routine. (And you would come with the electric shock machine, to try to make the heart beat again). Do you know what it means to stop? It’s medical jargon. It meant that the heart had stopped beating. You were having a cardio/respiratory failure.. You could go into pulmonary edema. You could die in 5 seconds.

Sorry if I am bothering you with all this hospital talk. So much like Gray’s Anatomy on TV. Or YouTube.

This is just because I am trying to trace the origin. And the origin is right there. In that medical ward.

Where I was actually born. My first smells, my first visions, my first other one’s skin getting close to me. But I don’t remember that. In December of 1997 I graduated from Med School, through a final exam. Theoretical and authoritarian oral exam of some patriarchal not so warm figure, asking me about this and that. Very old fashioned.

And I graduated on a cold morning in December after answering questions about the best theoretical way to give birth to babies. How to do a salpingectomy or a Caesarian. And 2 weeks later, there I was, thrown into the medical ward of an hospital, in a daily basis. Just the mornings. So, I registered myself at an art school. And started learning how to draw. In the mornings, I would go to the hospital, and in the afternoons, to the art school. And in the mornings, I was taking care of old ladies and gentlemen. I would: Feel their pulse Feel the hydratation of their skin If it made wrinkles or not Listen to their breath, searching for rhonchi or stridor Touch their bellies, trying to feel the size of their organs.

And then, write everything down, in each patient’s file. Like this: M.J - 81 years, female. Skin - hydrated, no wrinkles. Spatially orientated, collaborating.

AP - vesicular murmur mantained. No bronchi. AC - S1, S2 .Pleural Rub mantained Abd Palpation - soft, depressable, with no masses or organomegalies. Liver not palpable. Kidneys not palpable.

I would apply, at last, the clinical methodology I had learned in my school years. I would do the historical anamnesis, through the interview, and then, the physical examination. Through the touching of the body. Looking for patterns of signs and symptoms. I would ask also for exams in order to corroborate my suspicion of the disease. And then, search for a clinical diagnosis that would prove their sickness, the opposite of health.

And in the afternoon, I would go to art school, and learn how to draw naked beautiful young bodies. In charcoal. In ink.

“Don’t look at the paper. Just see and draw. As slow as you can.”

The bodylines. The lines of the matter. And now, the knowledge being developed had to do with the occipital lobe, responsible for visual language. I moved in a fluid sea of languages that were all supposed to give me, and produce, knowledge. And that, between meal breaks.

In the afternoon: to observe the bodies: to transform the bodies into lines that would give form to some kind of aesthetic display of a line shape that symbolized a body. Within a paper. But not allowed to touch them though. In the mornings: to touch the bodies: touch and observe with or without medical instruments, the sick, mostly elderly bodies.

In the beginning, there was yet the skin, to protect me. The skin of the paper, the skin of epidermis, as a barrier. A protection. A shelter. But also a border. Not for long. As soon as I started my next internship period, which was surgery.

Drawing young bodies in the afternoon, literally putting my hands within the interior of those bodies, in the early mornings. With an intermediate break for tea and bread with some cheese, or marmalade. So you wouldn’t have a vagal reaction, looking at and touching that bloodied matter. Not living. Stopped through our own hands, for the sake of the extension of life. A few months more, a few weeks more. “ Hey, you!” the nice older surgeon would tell me. “Put your hand under the costal box and search for the liver”. “Here!” he would tell me, holding my hand in an awkwardly intimate moment inside another one’s body. He would guide me to the right spot within the liver, and it was hot there. It was humid also. “Can you feel it?” “That is the tumor.”

God! I would get out of the all-green surgery ward, and jump into the noisy street of that dirty and lively southern city. Where the smell of gas and the noise of people would strike me so much. Breathing the smell of gasoline and mixing it with iodide. Trying to avoid thoughts about my grandfather. Who had died of the same disease. “ If I have to die, I will die!” I remembered him saying, some 10 years before, when I was in my teens.

He who so died in the hospital ward. And the world was this world, where we would be born and die within some hospital, be it white, yellow, blue, green, walled ward hospital.

“ Can I embrace you?” the lady in her sixties had asked me, a young powerless doctor. “ Were you next to my mother, when she died?” No. I had not been next to her mother.

I was off duty. I was drawing. I was trying to find and starting to forge some kind of other language fiction that would later on shape my next world. World to become. The world I wanted to become. Devir.

“A devir it’s not a correspondance of relationships. [...] Devir it’s not a progression or a regression under a series. [...] Devir it’s not certainly to imitate or nor to identify oneself; not even to regress progress; (...) Devir is a verb with all its consistency; [...] Devir is, from the shapes one has, from the subject that one has, from the organs one possesses, or the functions that occupies, extract particles, from which we instaure relationships of movement and velocity and slowness. Ones closer to what we are in the process of coming to, through which we become.

Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. Mille Plateaus Vol. IV.

Because all this had to do with the focus of attention, and my attention was focused on the wrong kind of patterns there. I was going around searching for patterns, but not the patterns of clinical methodology: historical anamnesis and objective exam. Instead I was making reflections about power and dignity and body-touch and ageing. Within an industrial institution that would rule the attribution of health I was focusing on the counterproductivity of the same institution that was producing iatrogenic disease, reinforcement of power, perpetuation of body politics, and the taking away of agency to the ones who could possess it. Through various strategies. Like language, for example. A language we, the doctor’s guild, had coded to maintain knowledge power.

I had to go, and find another road, I thought at that time. Only now I understand, that I could have gone that road, could have done the same thing. Within one or another institutionalized knowledge machine, the differences were not that many, more at the speed of change, the possibility of more or less change, more or less quickly moving forward, or turning to the left or right. Or maybe no. Because everything was at the surface of the skin. All this had to do with skin. And the breaking of that same skin. The changing of a skin. But that would not be fast. It would take a long time.

And Reality-based Art practice was not what I was doing, in those days. I was doing: ink drawings with soft black pens, or colorful beautiful little watercolors revisiting the twenties. Very much Taschen editions-based. In the intervals of a night-long shift of sewing heads, looking at the breaks within the skin. Describing them. Sharp, zigzagging. Establishing an aseptic green field with soft tissues. And learning how to sew. Skin sewing, like line drawing was not that different. And the shape of the incisive scar within the skin, would be painted with little dots of dried blood through both margins. A blonde-haired, blue eyed human being in our hands. Us putting our latex gloved hands onto the head of a heroin addicted HIV positive patient, that the two youngest and powerless doctors would sew. Because no one else would take that risk.

(A lonely old woman lost in the middle of the hospital, worried about her cat).

Working at the most noble profession of all, was what fiction had reinforced in me. Not for long, as soon we realize that fictions, would actually hold down to theory. Words. Films. Not reality. Present reality was very much tainted with praxis. And the medical praxis dealt a lot with the empowered ones looking to the other as a bloodied machine, in our post-industrial contemporary life moment. Who would dare or care to, one day, survey the history of the education of the powerful ones? How were you educated to be powerful? Through what kind of repressive strategies of reinforcement of your uniqueness, of your messianic over-capacities, your narcissistic investment in your own self, supposedly for the “sake� of the less abled others?

Would that counterproductively produce also the (dis)ablement of someone else? I was within a guild, and the “others� were dependent upon a verdict: what surgery, what sedative. I was swimming within a field of otherness. Sub-alterness.

And then, reality-based art praxis within my drawing classes started to become my (to be) art.

I had always been very fond of analysis, I wanted and was thinking all the time about concepts. But through a very awkward platform. A very mobile and multi-sensorial platform. Medicine gave me respect for a sensorial knowledge that could be developed, could be described, could be transparent.

It was by that time that I did my first video. With an old lady friend. About to move to a new home.

Old people’s home. Just about to give away her things to someone. Being yet a human while she had things. Until she had nothing but her body. I visited her in her beautiful house filled with things and I took photographs of her. I took photographs of an image of the backyard, which was of a ruined building that was falling apart. And my eighty year old friend picked up my camera: “what metaphor are you looking for here? I want to make pictures of you myself now.“ And so she did, my first feminist friend, who would refuse “feminist talk”, and who was about to get rid of her things in order to start her last descending flight. I used to go and meet her. Have tea and speak about life and death. Masculinity and patriarchy, never using those tainted words, in our post-Catholic southern country. Where all of us were called Mary. Maria Judite, she, Maria Lusitano, me. And she wanted so much to speak about death actually. Me too. I was dealing with it on a daily basis.I did a video where her picture of us having tea was projected onto my own naked body. It was my first video.

And some seven years later I did another video, called Modern Woman (17 min, color, sound, 2005) where I was telling her story, through newspapers and magazines that she would read to entertain herself. A woman-made text, that had dared to break a little bit with the standards of her own time. Just a little bit though. So I told her story, and the story of a generation of women, trapped in their man-made condition of absence, emptiness. Vacuum. Always waiting. (‘Waiting’ A poem by Faith Wilding, 1972) waiting, waiting, waiting.

A Modern Woman Technical description DVD, colour, sound, 18 min May of 2005 Synopsis By means of different images from current affairs and fashion magazines (ELLE, LIFE, VOGUE) this project recounts the story of an emancipated woman in the mid-20th century, who tries to deal with her monotonous life by “travelling” through the images that appear in these magazines, which punctuate and illustrate her monotonous life, week after week: from historical events such as the capture of Shanghai by the Chinese communists, to a devastated Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and its reconstruction, side by side with the small news items that influence her daily life: prêt a porter fashions year after year, a recipe, an advertisement for a washing machine…

videostills of Modern Woman

“Moreover, because they were unique and thus excluded all other women, both the Lady and the Virgin embodied an absolute authority the more attractive as it appeared removed from paternal sternness. This feminine power must have been experienced as denied power, more pleasant to seize because it was both archaic and secondary, a kind of substitute for effective power in the family and the city but no less authoritarian, the underhand double of explicit phallic power.� Stabat Mater Julie Kristeva.

Yes. That feminine (anti) power was very much present in my Catholic country of mothers and queens, so dispossessed of real agency though. I knew very well, what Kristeva was talking about.

That twistedness of empowering and disempowering the other (w)ones at the same time. Also exerted by the queens that surrounded us, existing just to confirm the power men had. But things were not black and white. They had instead a variety of tones of gray. Through the times. Moving forward and rewind. So I that had, bodily and geographically, come to the world to continue this tradition of waiting womanhood, had been able to break it, because of others before me who had unfolded discourse, had unfolded possibilities, including identification possibilities like the identification with malehood.

And one day, I noticed: all the strong characters of in my videos in which I was projecting my selfhood were men. There was a mathematician, there was a philosopher, there was a man with excessive memory. ( And a young interviewer would ask Derrida, I had read, who had been his mother philosopher, and he had answered, that that was an impossible question. He could have a granddaughter philosopher, but not a mother.) And all the troubled characters, waiting characters, were women).

In 2000, I started a new internship. And that was the maternity ward. Still sewing women’s bodies, still delivering bloodied babies. And in that once again industrial house for the delivery of babies, there was this happy atmosphere. Curiously, in Portugal, the maternity ward was a very female place, in the staff of doctors. A bunch of female obstetricians in high heels and hospital clothing, were yet assuming the power of men. But there were differences though. Differances.

When on duty, the team of obstetricians would gather at meal times and order lunch or dinner.

Sardines. And the smell of that house was another. It was the smell of mucus, and colostrum, and babies. The smell of babies. The smell of women. The maternity ward was where I did my first important art piece. A little book with a story and some drawings. Of my aseptic instruments of medical practice: each page had a drawing: a syringe, a bottle of alcohol, a speculum. I did various copies, and distributed them in the maternity ward and in the art school. The text spoke about the hospital being a place of hell and heaven, of suffering and healing... I was quite dichotomatic by then. But with that project I was already introducing in my art the questioning of some experienced reality that I wanted to analyze through art. I was touching the core of my future art practice.

And in the beginning, with my fascination for literature, that had aesthetically constructed me, I would quite often write stories that would later on be transformed into a video. The video, due to its multiplatform possibilities, and the moving picture within a timeline, was for me the best medium to explore or to process the way my mind was working and my art was being produced. I had always been very much interested in history, because history dealt with storytelling within characters that were people. Producing maps or plans of past events, that had been experienced by people and that we could not assess, because time had passed. I had always been quite obsessed with the timeline.

Always wanting to rewind the timeline, trying to understand and “relive� the history, the story.

Or live other(s) stories. Actually, we (the western world) all shared that experience of aestheticizing the life experience through the once upon a time storytelling structure, since early childhood. Our own perception of life experience was also very much structured within a timeline, within a beginning and a end. And in medicine I would have: neonatology, pediatrics, and geriatrics.

“Does the time go less fast for you now?” I would ask my old friend. Now, that nothingness was supposedly the paper you were performing, and that was expected from you? In your Magic Mountain elderly-house moment of pause? Was that pause over there, the same as eternity? Death eternity?

Immortality?

”What would be the formula for eternity” the mathematician would ask in a video I did, called To exist (10 min, colour, sound (2004)

EXISTING Technical information DVD 12 min and 43 seconds Colour, sound/ Sound track - Alessandro Scarlatti, microaudiowaves, Vincent Gallo, Ella Fitzgerald January 2005 16 drawings - black ballpoint pen on paper Description In 2003, a mathematician once again visits the Caramulo´s mountains, where 30 years ago he had lived for about 2 years, seeking, via natural remedies, to cure himself of tuberculosis. While he drives around by car and observes the semi-deserted and run down Caramulo village, which had formerly been the largest sanatorium town in Europe, the mathematician reflects upon life and death and time passing by, establishing metaphors with the notions of geometry and design that are so dear to his heart. By means of the drawings that are executed in real time, the music, and the story that simultaneously takes place in the present and delves back into the past, one is taken on a kind of journey through various times (felt, lived) that interconnect, and this is precisely how one ponders about the notion of timeless time.

videostill of To exist

videostills of To Exist

I had once gone to this phantom city in the mountains in Portugal that had been the biggest sanatorium town in Portugal and even Europe during the sixties. Up there, dozens of beautiful buildings spread through the hills. It was a kind of Magic Mountain itself. But now, it was in ruins. The sanatoriums were empty. The doctors and nurses had left, and so had the sick. Thirty years had passed. There was a hotel there, and that was it. By then, my son had already been born. He was six months old.

(I had been pushed through the corridors of the maternity wing where I had worked, lain down on the litter, with a little package wrapped up at my feet. It was 4 o’clock in the morning, and the nurse would carelessly drive fast that rolling bed where two living beings were resting after an arduous body experience. That little package was a child: my matter that had just left my matter. To start his own space-time trip of reinvention of our cells made flesh.) And after six months, we all went to Caramulo, the sanatorium town. Very much within the working frame of the documentarist.

I had done research about the sanatorium town beforehand. I had read articles and done bibliographical and historical research. And then I looked for people to interview that had lived there, and could tell me the story of that sanatorium town through their own stories. There was a priest, a kiosk owner, an amateur photographer, a café waitress. And a patient, a survivor, my aunt. My aunt who had met my uncle there, 35 years before, while curing themselves. I spent a week in Caramulo, and on the last day I met my aunt. And that’s when something happened that completely changed this project. At a certain point during the interview my aunt was writing down on a paper the names of all the people she had met at the sanatorium, and with a pencil, she scratched each name, telling me the fate of her friends: “this one died, this one also, and this one and this one…”

I came back home with a bunch of photographs and various mini-dv tapes. For a long time I could not do anything with that material. So I just did drawings with the photographs. I was trying to enter a different time span. And after that week of filming and interviews in Caramulo, I started to draw. I was into ink lines drawn on white paper, video interviews and body concepts of health and disease.

And drawing, through its detailed and non-verbal activity was giving me a break, a pause. I needed a pause, to enter into that time frame I had experienced in the mountains that was so different from my own. A more paused time, just like the one in Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a novel set in a sanatorium, where various characters infected with tuberculosis tried to cure themselves through the program of the natural cure, which consisted of going to the mountains where they would rest, breathe pure air, and eat copious meals. In that novel a young man, Hans Castorp, would go up to the mountain to visit his cousin. And while there, he embarks on a theoretical and scientific investigation of the real meaning of life and death, looking in medical books, and in long conversations with his intellectual friends. So, I decided to create a character, a mathematician, that would go back to Caramulo, just as I had done partly reinventing the trip of my relatives. And up there the mathematician, interested in geometry and in line drawing, would reflect on time. He would ask himself the definition of eternity and compare it with a pause, an interval, or he would define line: an indefinite succession of points with no beginning or end; and compare it with family.

And he would speak about circular time, and would look at a picture of his family standing in front of the sanatorium. There would be: the patriarch, his sons, grandsons. In the video, a line of names would appear naming (giving language) to their faces one by one. The picture would fade to black, and all the names of the family through time were written on the screen. Just as in a very circular way, of bodies given origin to speech that would transform the body, and continue the cultural matter experience of a family line. And that figure standing up in the picture, was my grandfather who I never met.

The tyrant patriarch that had made me, was me. Through the fleshed body timeline. Of bodies occupying space over time. As well as over history, and through the story. Trying, maybe due to the verb (and in the beginning of culture there was the verb, but in the beginning of life, as that literary character named Hans Castorp so well knew there was a very active physical principle also) to forget our immanence, our scatological beingness. Would we, through the story, pretend to be heroes, like Achilles and Ulysses, in order to (over) vive? To sail is necessary, to live, is not necessary Pompeii said to his scared sailors. And in this video, I was telling an impressionistic zigzagging and circular story about life and death and time and space. Everything and nothing.

The first time Michel Foucault had read the Chinese Encyclopedia, a tale by Jorge Luis Borges, where it was written that animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies...

Michel Foucault, would just laugh, he would say in the beginning of his book The Order of Things, (And I would silently laugh at the learning of some new disease sometimes being made up by the doctors’ guild, with good intentions, but so suspiciously incongruent, in its assemblage of sign and symptoms, that would make the diagnosis possible.

How to give meaning, and build concrete knowledge, to that same story?

It was when my baby boy was around fourteen months, in 2004, that I suddenly understood that the timeline could indeed be a timeline, but a circular one. Becoming a mother in a delayed moment after fourteen months, had made me understand and physically feel the layered complexity of perceiving the world through the voices and bodies of the others which existed also, within me but now, as memories. We all live in time and body bubbles that would shrink or grow. And our time bubbles could be consonant or dissonant with the time perception of someone else.

Having to cope maybe, with so many different time bubbles had made me by then experience time as just going too fast for me. I was desynchronized with time perception. A week was just like a day for me, and everything ran so fast.

By that time, I worked in an hospital, now in the neurological ward. My daily routine was to attend people who had had strokes. Which is a vascular accident in the brain, that affects you and your cognitive capabilities in different ways, depending on the brain area damaged. Memory was always affected, and sometimes language. People would come there lost. They looked confused and without words to hold on to. They wanted water and couldn’t remember the word for it. And in many cases we couldn’t do much. Just wait until the blood would be reabsorbed, and start rehabilitation therapy. At the same time, I had my little boy that was now fourteen months. And puzzled as I was by my ward experience and its biological and physiological implications in memory, I marveled observing how, day after day, he was acquiring the capabilities of speech through the mechanism of memory, knowing that he wouldn’t remember anything about it in the future. (He was yet an infan(s) – the one who doesn’t speak).

As Kristeva tells it, bodies give birth to language and language to bodies in a pleasurable, utopic force that draws together women, mothers and their children in a moment of unseen recognition. As Kristeva tells it, birth becomes a moment and movement to break into and down and out of a symbolic search for origins. Though, as Judith Butler and Della Pollock (and others) point out , this utopic force might also be an empty space, a “glance from nowhere� that exists and takes place outside of and prior to language

had resumed Stacy Jones in her article (M)othering Losses. So, I now a mother, holding a starting to speak little fourteen month-old in my lap, was again questioning the matter of what kind of power was this power that I had? the power of primal shelter, of primal reference of the first life frames of someone else.

Going back to my little boy, he was already a complete and fully functioning human being: walking, smiling, crying, playing. And I was living through him something I had never experienced. I was reassembling the puzzle of my initial life.

The life that I like all of us, had lived but had no memory to relate to, and like that, construct ourselves. So, would oblivion, or the not-yet-memorized, make humans not yet considered as full human beings, endowed with rights? Or alternatively oblivion could function as a metaphor of the sea taking away particles of mountains, and so shaping them, giving them form? The mountains by the sea. The human being. But my practical daily life kept me holding to the same question: did we need to possess full language and memory to be a human being with full rights? Memory and full citizenship. Memory and the frontiers of what it was to be human. Fascinated and bouncing between these two extreme paradigms that were present in my daily life experience, I decided to make a radical mental exercise: what if one could remember every detail of their own life, all the time? Even those marginal periods of time where you had no power, because so dispossessed of bio-control over your own body? I invented a character that was a man with excessive memory. A person who could remember everything. Even before knowing words. Even before knowing about concepts. I called him Jo達o Maria. He was the main character of the video The man with excessive memory (10m colour, sound, 2005).

THE MAN WITH EXCESSIVE MEMORY Technical information DVD, 9 min 50 sec, colour, sound May 2005 Description Through images captured on journeys, one recounts the story of a man with hypermnesia (an excess of memory) and the stratagems that he uses to deal with his absurd situation. One thus seeks to question the exaggeration of images and information in our current society and the growing sensation of nihilism of contemporary man, who is already exhausted and saturated with everything, floundering in a world of fragmented images where any spare time is filled with projects devoid of sense.

videostills of The man with excessive memory

In it a narrator would ask: “What is the first memory of your life?” that original and foundational memory of our beingness? And the subtitled narrator would answer: “as you all know, we don’t have any memory of our past lifes, until at least we are two and a half years old. More or less structured memories, start when you are around 5”. I had read also a short story by Borges: Funes, el memorioso, and had found a Russian medical book about a young man that had suffered the same condition in the early 1900s. The character in my film would hold to a radical answer to his problem of too much memory: trying to frame his sight, he would spend his days, looking for airplanes in the skyline. So, I walked around the city of Lisbon, filming airplanes.

As my film was being constructed, and my story being told, I understood the other side of the coin of what I was experiencing in my daily practice. Where I was realizing the nature of that moment of life where you were suspended in a limbo of no rights, no voice, no memory, no language. As a mental and artistic exercise, I was trying to understand, question, and reformulate my thoughts about what would be the necessary qualities that would make you eligible to be considered as a human being. Would there be a language, within the silence?

In 2007, I moved to Sweden with my kid. And I remember now that abrupt arrival in a mental heterotopic place of incomprehensible language. That had created sudden invisibility. Silenced blindness. My kid had also lost the capability to understand a language, and in his case, just after starting to speak his first one. But time had passed. And now, today, in the garden where I lived in Malmรถ, I chatted with children that had come from Iraq. And while we all tried to speak I realized we shared something: the struggle to communicate through a common language, Swedish. Not the mother tongue of any of us. Not the one learned in that moment of skin-to-skin dependence.

What kind of alienated/interstitial space were we gaining here, struggling to get out of our “natural� skins? What type of language transmission were we producing?

I looked at the pavement of our garden, covered with beautiful drawings done with colored chalk. And I paid attention to the motifs in the kids’ drawings: a cowboy with a gun, a policeman. I looked at my kid: he was exchanging shots between laughs with another kid with a stick.

Living History (photography installation, 2006) In 2006 I did a research based project that delt with history, that consisted of a photographic installation interviewing twelve people from the Portuguese ex-colonies, who had experienced in their lives a period of war when the decolonization process and the ensuing independence of their countries had happened. I wanted to reflect upon the impact of macro history on micro history, or the personal history, of ordinary people who had witnessed a historical moment for their countries. It was quite interesting to notice how history considered war as the most crucial event for the construction of history itself.

I listened to their stories, and interviewed various members of the same family. I had for example a sixty-year-old engineer that had been living in East Timor when the Indonesian invasion happened, and the testimony of his daughter, ten at that time. And I photographed a place in Portugal called Portugal of the little ones, built during the fifties, under fascism. In that place, built to serve as an illustration of our country to our children, were models of all the typical houses of the various regions/provinces of Portugal. And also models of all the typical houses of the colonies considered at that time to be the “overseas� provinces of Portugal. In this project I was starting to explore the borders of fiction intertwined with history and I was also exploring the possibilities of history as storytelling. I wanted to research also this necessity of war happening, in order to produce events that were considered historical enough to be written down in the historical canon.

And I was exploring and looking for the effects of war events on the private lives of people, as well as the way people remembered the facts, and transmitted them. That was as diverse as it was influenced by age, political positions, gender etc. So, after the interviews, I started to write down the events that they had told me, in a literary way.

Intertwined with this photographic project I imagined the story of F., a very old historian. This aged historian was being interviewed by a journalist. And he would only speak through the words and quotations of others. Never referring the source of the quotations, he would just adopt them as his own. His quotations had been the result of research I had done into historians reflecting upon their own subject.

So, he would say stuff like: “history doesn’t do anything, It’s the man, the real living man, that does everything.” Or: “the most beautiful law of our species is the one that dictates the forgetting of what we cannot appreciate.” Or “But the faculty of apprehension of life, that is in fact, the master quality of the historian. It is known that it is very difficult to reanimate the affective life of a period, but the wise man doesn’t have the right to desert!”.

LIVING HISTORY September 2006 City Museum of Lisbon - White Pavillion

Technical information site specific installation with 66 photographs with text plants sound 8 page A4 newspaper (colour) - 1000 ex.

Description An installation where a narrative is told, that combines fictional elements with elements of a historical nature. The narratives of normal people who were active eyewitnesses to important historical moments in the nations where they were born, nations that share a Lusitanian heritage (Mozambique, India (Goa), East Timor, Angola) and that were used to construct various plots, which take place in different ages (in the past, recent past, present and future), but which all intersect in a single meta-narrative.

In each plot, the historical events experienced by each individual, (macro-history), combines with the small elements/events that link the participants (micro-history), which make them reflect upon their fears, ambitions, projects, along with the challenges that the contemporary world faces.

images of the installation Living History

images of the installation Living History

On the day of the opening, all the participants were invited along. And some, were quite appalled seeing that their words had not been transmitted precisely. That they had been reinterpreted. Just as in the story of the wise old historian who spoke through the words of the others, with this project I was reflecting on what I would be deeply working with the following two years: this notion of the permanent construction of a fiction within the historical telling of events. With what strategies did we represent that past moment, that we could not grasp anymore? Within which documents would we search for the best way to tell that history? What kind of selection would we make, when looking for the testimonies of the witnesses of the events? Would we look amongst the ones that professionally were judged more able to speak up, or the ordinary people? After all, history, was just a story. And as my old fictional character F. would say “history doesn’t do anything, It’s the man, the real living man, that does everything.”

For a long time I had been puzzled by a chapter of a book by Paul Ricoeur where he discussed the possibility of history being told through non-violence. And he would arrive at the conclusion that that was an impossible proposition. Violence had always been considered a positive and propulsive search engine of our world. As we knew, Herodotus and Thucydides, considered to be the original historians, had started history through the narration of famous battles.

Stubbornly, I refused to accept that evident proposition.

“Every document of civilization, is at the same time, a document of barbarism, and just as a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other.� was the opening sentence of a podcast I watched and listened to, by Homi Bhabha about culture and barbarism reflecting on that sentence written by Walter Benjamin, in his essay Thesis on History.

And in that conference, he would say that we were living in a “now, now, Now! (as he would rhetorically say in that lively podcast) moment of recognisability of barbarism. That barbarism was both in civilization, and in its documents. And barbarism, which was a specially interesting proposition, was also present in the transmission of the same documents.

Then one day I bought a book. This book was an big old book. I opened it, and it was a collection of newspapers. French newspapers, Illustracion Universelle. And right away, I was amazed by the drawings. There were beautiful drawings in that book, that smelled of the thick and invisible layered dust of 150 years that had gone by. And then I started reading the articles.

The year was 1856, and was the end of a war, the Crimea War. There were lots of articles about the war, and these were profusely illustrated with beautiful drawings. So there again, illustration as entertainment, beautiful violent entertainment. And I remembered again the phrase of Benjamin about the documents of civilization and barbarism, and the question of the transmission. I started doing research about this war that had triggered me so much, fascinated as I was by the beautiful drawings.

And I discovered really interesting facts, such as that that war had been the first one where a professional war correspondent had been sent to the war scene to cover the events in a very impartial and as authentic way, as possible. There was a vibrant press scene growing up all over the world in the mid1800s, ten years before pictorial journalism had been invented. The first pictorial newspaper was the Illustrated London News, and after that many more had appeared. It was then possible, for the first time, to print wood engravings in the newspapers. With those beautiful illustrations, a growing urban population started buying the newspapers. Mmm‌I thought‌ I could transmit this story, fascinated as I was with stories, fascinated as I was by this interesting one. But precisely that word: transmission, the main focus of this project, to be called The war correspondent (video, colour, sound, 2009).

As it could be called, the war transmitter.

THE WAR CORRESPONDENT May 2008 KHM GALLERY - Malmo-Sweden Technical information 46 min film HDV, colour, sound Description Through the pretext of telling the story of the first war correspondent, during the Crimea War, William Russell, a reflection is made about the media and the beginning of the war spectacle as an intertainment for the masses. In a hybrid way between documentary and film essay, a circular narrative is introduced, always bouncing from present issues and preocupations, to the prespective eye of looking into the past history, trying to find there some answers. In this project it is also shown, how the construction of history relies necessarily on documents, on representation.

videostills od The war correspondent

images of the installation of the War correspondent

That “first� war correspondent had gone to cover a war for to a neutral party, the Times newspaper. So there I had a character holding in their writing the power of transmission, in a quite inaugural moment.

And that war correspondent, would pay attention for the first time to the suffering of the common soldiers and the mismanagement of the army and government. The public community would be outraged, and organize itself to help the soldiers. Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse, would be one of those that would be so touched by the news, that she decided to do something to help. Due to those critical reports, the way history was being produced was about to change. But something was happening also: and that was, the war as a spectacle of mass entertainment. War made spectacle. Ultimate Spectacle.

So, in this project, I started doing extensive historiography research about the event itself, and found some famous side characters such as Lady Duberly, who had stayed through all the siege of Sebastopol (the most important event of the Crimea War) and had published her diary to great success. She had always been a character in popular culture, but only in 2004 had a female historian, rescued her and written about her. I also found Roger Fenton, considered to be the first war photographer. He had been sent by the government to the war scene, to produce photographs in order to soften the criticism raised by articles that had appeared in various newspapers on the government mismanagment.

I found Tolstoy. Tolstoy had been a young officer of the artillery that would go to Sebastopol, to defend the city, and while there would write three sketches, that would be called Sebastopol sketches.

So, through the press, the war reporter Russell and other less famous journalists had been able to do something about the war. Civil society had organized itself to help the soldiers. Tolstoy had written first a book, then a masterpiece, and to the end of his life had evolved as a pacifist. Things had started to change in this war event. But, there was the other side too: and the other side was spectacle, entertainment. First with drawings, then pictures, then theatres then films‌ To please and entertain a growing urban population.

images of the installation of the War correspondent

I looked then for visual elements narrating this event: and I found first of all engravings, specially from the Illustrated London News, two films about the famous charge of the Light Brigade, documentaries about Tolstoy, films for children about Florence Nightingale and Crimea War, and a film inspired by War and Peace, by Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk. I went to London, and visited various museums that connected the thematics. I was investigating various ways of representing a particular historical event, either through written sources, images, moving images, films, animated films. And I looked at the mixed multimedia platforms that were the museums, and the Internet. And then, through the collage and reassembling of all these elements, (I was looking for an interstitial space for the transmission of this story) I planned a video, telling this story not only of the beginning of the independent press, but also of the beginning of the aestheticization of war as entertainment for a large public. I wanted to show how violence had been so mixed with aesthetics, storytelling, history itself. Because war, or violence, was again the search engine of history. And also what sells newspapers, blockbuster movies etc.

I intended to produce a video though, where I would tell this history, in an adventurous way, as a storyteller, and then, try also to dismantle it and show how it was so easy to get trapped in the phenomena of aesthetizing everything, even violence. Where aesthetically regarding the pain of others signified nothing anymore.

In this project I also wanted to show, without having to speak about it, how the construction of history relied necessarily on documents, on representation. We all lived within images of that same past, as the past would necessarily have to rely on some type of representation. So paintings were used to think the scenarios for the films, and those paintings were also based on sketches or illustrations, books were written based on other books, characters were formed based on another character. And I wanted, without speaking about it, to reflect on the Internet also, on that powerful huge platform of sounds, images and words, at our disposal to give meaning.

But again, I was looking for some kind of interstitcial space, as free of barbarism as possible. I would finish the film with a little chess player, thinking with whom to identify, with pawns or the higher pieces. And I would decide that little chess player would be identifying with the pawns, and not the higher pieces. And the game, would be a different one. It would be a game where the pawns would prevent anyone being killed. And in the chessboard, slowly, grass would grow, and there would be no victors.

But there would be history, anyway.

And this would be the story.

Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) Stanford University Press ISBN-10: 0804732175 Arendt, Hanna: The human condition (1958), 1998. The University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226025988 Arendt, Hanna: On violence (1970), Harcourt, Brace & World, ISBN 0156695006 Aries, P. and Duby, G: A history of Private Life, Augé, Marc: Oblvion, 2004. University of Minnesota Press ISBN 0816635668 Bhabha, Homi :The Location of Culture (2004), Routledge ISBN: 978-0-415-33639-0 Borges, J.L.: Ficciones Allianza, ISBN 0156695006, Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix: A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN: 0-826-47694-5.

Derrida, Jacques: Writing and difference,(1978), 2001, Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-25383 Foucault, Michel: The order of Things, 2001, Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-26736-6 Illich, Ivan: Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health 1999. M. Boyars ISBN 0714529931 Jones, Stacy Holman :(M)othering Loss: Telling Adoption Stories, Telling Performativity, Kristeva, Julia: Tales of Love (1941), 1987. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN: 0231-06024-6 Mann, Thomas: Magic Mountain, Nichols, Bill: Introduction to Documentary,(2001), Indiana University Press ISBN 978-0-25321469-0 Ricoeur, Paul: Histoire et verité Sontag,Susan: Regarding the pain of others, 2004, Picador, ISBN 0312422199 Tolstoy, Leo: Sebastopol Sketches, Penguin Books ISBN 0140444688 Viruru, Radhika: Childhood and Postcolonialization, Power Education and Contemporary Practice, 2004. Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-93347-6 Vovelle, Michel: Historians Woolf, Virginia:Three Guineas, Keller, Ulrich: The ultimate spectacle, Benjamin, Walter: The Arcades Project, Harvard edition, ISBN 0-674-04326-X Water Benjamin: Thesis on history, Walter Benjamin: The storyteller Walter Benjamin: About art, thecnique, language and politics,

MARIA LUSITANO 2009