Although Donald Weber has spent five years since 2005 working in Russia and Ukraine,  his photography does not show us the familiar face of globalization’s mass giddiness. His long-term documentary field project, Interrogations, investigates the stark public and private rituals of an Eastern society that is neither European nor Asian, but always fraught with the spiritual crisis of threatened identity. He says an apotheosis came in 2009, when a Ukrainian street detective told him that there were only two spaces left in this world – the big space of public performance and the small space of personal feeling: “And who is to say which is less cruel?”

Weber’s easy intimacy with members of the Slavic underclass – the tattooed gangsters, prostitutes and victims of ecological disaster – is apparent from his haunting home portraits. In one luminous photograph, Curtain Boy, a child plays hide and seek with the gauzy fabric of his bedroom curtains; they would remind us of fraying bandage dressings even if we did not know the boy is dying from the loose radioactivity permeating his industrial hometown. He seems to be playing idly with his life.

In another portrait, Napping Gravedigger, Weber shows us a shaved-headed Siberian zek, an ex-convict, who might have just stepped out of the pages of a novel by Gogol or Dostoevsky. The zek goes about the serious Slavic business of drinking, brooding, and snoring with the Western photographer snapping away inches from his nose, like a fly that seeks out the warmth of human companionship. The Siberian ignores the fastidious Weber in his bedroom – ie., he ignores us, we the rapt viewers, watching his every move – without a trace of self-consciousness. It is we who are suddenly made immaterial, irrelevant, by the mere act of his Oblomov’s obliviousness.

Is the sleeping gravedigger just dreaming up this world?

Apparently so. For the Eastern Europe landscape that Weber depicts is as insubstantial as the blue smoke of the zeks’ counterfeit Marlboros or the haze of the winter fog that blankets the land for eight months of the year. Buildings, expressions, feelings – all remain suspended like icy mirages. People sit in windows aware that time itself has stopped cold.  In Circus Crowd we see black birds hurtling over the red tent while the mesmerized audience below has been transformed by its childlike innocence into a magical forest. Pictures like these go beyond the merely documentary, they reach for the realm of the visionary, a borderland where the ghosts of history walk freely, and archaic tribal customs persist despite the glass facades of New Capitalist high-rises.

It is not only the underclass that maintains a tenuous connection to the global economy. Weber’s also takes painstaking portraits of the new bosses of this post-Soviet order: they confirm that his true subject is the insubstantiality of Modernity in the face of implacable history and its dark weight. One photographic series, Picnic Boss, follows a barrel-chested Ukrainian at the head of table in the green countryside, addressing a classic an al fresco lunch of smoked fish, vodka, bread, etc., while his minions stand at a respectful distance talking on their cellphones. No one is actually present, enjoying the repast, except the smiling herring and maybe the sparkling vodka. An emotional flatness rules the meal, a kind of Anti-Last Supper in which Judas gorges but no one is there to witness his triumph. Guards, good liquor, a new Mercedes – and the boss is looking over his shoulder at every bite.

Like other artists, Weber has been seduced in the past by early success; in addition to the Lange-Taylor Prize and the photolucida Award, he won a World Press Photo Award in 2006 for his snapshot of a Chernobyl drinker at the apex moment of an afternoon tipple. The international prize juries apparently remain under the influence of Cartier-Bresson and the mystique of his Decisive Moment; this writer, for one, believes that there are other, more fruitful directions for photography to evolve before it loses its audience. One of these new directions might involve the Decisive Mood: Don’t show me something I didn’t know before, show me something I didn’t feel.

Facts have been debased by the new technology, but today we need connection more than ever. Who but artists can provide it?

Recently, Weber spent time in the Republic of Georgia, covering the 2009 August War with Russia, and in Bosnia, during its democratic elections; his avowed goal was to perfect the ten-shot— a crowd scene in which the choreography of the moment crystallizes out of mass chaos.  Such technical exercises may be good for professional discipline; after a certain point in their careers, all artists need to pursue a regimen of deliberate self-instruction, and advanced technique is anything but self-evident today. We are all pioneers now.

On that point let it be said that Weber disavows any special knowledge of his camera’s more esoteric functions, special lenses, etc. – he works without a tripod and in natural light and he doesn’t use an umbrella even when it’s raining. Still, technique has its limitations; I prefer the work where he establishes a deep rapport with his subject – even if it is an inanimate object like an old typewriter.

His Antique Russian Typewriter brings us back into the hard facts of literate culture, and plays with our nostalgia for its fading certainties. We don’t need to read McLuhan to understand that the System has died at the hands of another one; but we need people like Weber to tell us what this new one is doing to us.

Are human emotions and feelings universal? Are they the same from generation to generation? Or are we evolving along with our technical systems?

Does this world have its Other?

In Weber’s best work, it’s our darkest urges that are put on display, offering us compelling evidence from an ongoing archeology of the taboo imagination.

*

In spring of this year, a few weeks before President Obama announced a new American initiative to put men on Mars by 2025, the director of the Large Hadron Collider announced the European project would be shut down again for repairs for “at least a year.”

Once again, Inner Space and Outer Space collided in their paired dance through the frontier of our culture. Ten years earlier, in early 1999, NASA blew another couple of hundred million dollars on its failed Mars Remote Lander, while IBM announced the development of a super computer, a million times faster than its predecessors, engineered for the same amount of burnt-up cash, about two hundred million dollars. Meanwhile the medical journals began reporting that robotic nano-probes would soon travel the human body on search-and-destroy missions against biological invaders.

In the context of mechanical space exploration, a few hundred million bucks is nothing; in the digital world we inhabit, it’s more than enough to create revolutionary technologies and spin off further typhoons of social upheaval. What would have happened if the money spent by NASA since the Eagle landed, had gone to Inner Space R & D instead?

Apart from Tang orange crystals and silver space blankets, what has over 40 years of post-Moon blast-offs done for the Next Generation?

Not much. And perhaps that’s the point of Outer Space.

One of the great problems facing successful economies is what to do with their capital surplus. Spain’s economy was permanently warped by its failure to liquidate the profits and bullion plundered from its New World colonies; the resulting massive inflation created structural imbalances that led to a decline of both Spanish industry and agriculture from which Spain  never recovered. The task of the U.S. economy since the inflation of the 1970’s has been to find markets for cash surpluses that would no longer be contained by Vietnam war-budgets or Panama-style colonization schemes. IMF “loans” to countries like Brazil and Mexico are calculated to go bad. The job of Argentina, Greece and Portugal is to be a designated basket-case and drain off those cash surpluses; and the job of banking officialdom is to hide this truth behind thick wads of loan documentation.

Likewise, Outer Space drains our engineering surpluses. What would those hordes of computer nerds at Mission Control be doing, if they didn’t have their whirligigs crashing over Mars?  Patenting more, devastating hi-tech instability, that’s what. And then…?

Early Digital TV shows like The X-Files made this clear. Scully and her partner Mulder were always on the verge of discovering the bitter truth the government hides from the populace, hides even from itself. The big secret?

We are not going anywhere. Not now, not ever.

Not in the millennium to come as promised by science fiction. With The X-Files, we learned the aliens have landed here instead, because there is no out there. Like Nancy Drew, or the Hardy Boys, Scully and Mulder are on to their elders, on to the big adult secret. They’ve discovered the adult secret of consensual sex, but they have not quite figured out who does what to whom. Every week the two agents desperately rummaged through reports and sightings, to confirm their suspicions as to whether, like Christmas and the Easter Bunny, the promise of Outer Space is merely a trick played on the gullible children of Mission Control. And if so, why?

The X-Files is a drama of doubt, a meditation on the conflict between faith and distrust of our new, and only, secular religion: Science Fiction.

Science fiction itself predicted its own impasse 50 years ago. Robert Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, and others wrote stories about how the “world” is eventually discovered to be a space ship, and the ship’s not going anywhere. In Heinlein’s novel Starship, the interior of ship is overgrown with escaped vegetation: the lab animals have mutated into telepathic beings. They want to know from the humans, their elected gods, what’s the Purpose of it all?

The humans aboard don’t know.

They’re so stunted their ex-human discoverers must leave them in the rotting ship forever, orbiting an evolutionary path to nowhere. 

All high civilizations share the problem of the Cultural Box. Mayans, Etruscans, and Chinese devoted themselves to the problem of escaping their conceptual jails. The Egyptians not only built state pyramids, but employed tens of thousands of specialists on life-after-death technologies, using embalming, occult divination, prophesy, sacred orientation, astrology, and hieroglyphic incantations. The Greeks and Incas, too. A reference to the “Secrets of the Ancients” in pop culture invokes our Big Secret: we, too, are engaged in the job of perpetuating a cargo cult.

David LaChapelle, Lady Gaga: Electric Chair, 2009

The Alien Upgrade

Our cargo cult is called Outer Space and the job of Mission Control is to save us from it. The hard question is, as always, who shall be saved? On what basis shall we be saved?  The priests of Outer Space say we shall be fulfilled on the basis of self-illumination. When we saw the black plinth in 2001, A Space Odyssey, we understood we would be saved by an enlightened baby-Jesus astronaut. We would become enlightened in the process of getting off the planet and into Outer Space. But who gets to go?

The great fear – the paranoia that runs like a red streak through The X-Files and conspiracy theories of Roswell fans and the Unibomber alike – is that perhaps the technical agenda serves only the interests of an elite, not majority.  Will we masses get left behind, abandoned as evolutionary dead-ends? It’s not a matter of taxes, of state subsidies wasted on an elite government nerds who drop their costly toys into the void.

No, the secret public concern is precisely that an astronaut will become enlightened, that she or he will mate with fellow astronauts to produce novel, and genetically-enhanced, beautifully superior extra-human beings!

And leave us ordinary mortals behind in their toxic back-flash.

The X-File aliens are the superior beings who have already landed among us. It is the intimation of a final eugenics that the technical agenda dangles before us, the sweet but deadly elixir of Darwin. Evolution will kill off the Unelected, yes – but it will enable the remaining few big heads to survive and prosper.

How badly do we want to escape our box?

Christianity has spent 20 centuries negotiating the thin edge of this sharp, two-bladed sword called the Grace of the Elect.

Here’s the problem:  If you claim that only the Elect will be saved, then you offer no incentive for the masses to go on living every day, never mind paying the church tithes.

If you say that God’s Grace will determine who gets saved in the big spiritual lottery, then the hard workers might well stop their labours, once they’ve covered the long odds by simply buying a ticket, by joining up.

According to D.H. Lawrence, this ongoing social exegesis was not completed until the late 19th Century, when Nietzsche and Dostoevsky proclaimed Christianity was going extinct:

All that remains is for the elect to take charge of the bread — the property, the money — and then give it back to the masses as if it were the gift of life.  Otherwise, men shall be ‘free’ to get what they can, we are brought to a condition of competitive insanity and ultimate suicide.” — D. H.Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism

Getting off this planet requires an incredible force of faith. Most people are not capable of sustaining it. The crisis of faith in The X-Files is the crisis of people with no other options, and the ubiquitous big-headed Roswell Alien represents our deepest concern in life. He’s the superior being  a few of our fellow earthlings aim on becoming, through applied genetics, nano-technology, cryo-technology, the works. We want the Alien to be a child’s bogeyman, a real-but-imaginary symbol like Santa Claus. We would prefer to pay our taxes and give lip service to the idea of Outer Space, just as we say “Santa does exist, in the spirit of giving,” when we drop five dollars into a Salvation Army box.

Matt Siber, Untitled #25, 2004

We cannot face the horrible prospect that we are contributing to our own demise as a species each time we switch on a computer. Serving the grim Alien we have worked so hard to really create? What a nightmare that would be!

For Marshall McLuhan, whose 1970’s interviews with Tom Wolfe and Mike McManus aired this week in conjunction with the 2010 Contact Photography Festival, the prospect of a new computer that operates a million times faster than its predecessors holds no special terrors in his imagined future.  It was an article of faith for McLuhan that mankind meets all new forms of technology, no matter how revolutionary, with stasis.

What McLuhan meant by this, was that we automatically reconfigure our consciousness to absorb the new effects.  Type moves us one way, film another, radio, a third.  It simply takes us time to catch up to such shifts, to reconfigure our media extensions. Extension, not centres – meaning that no technology can change the fundamental nature of our consciousness itself:

It will be Grace, if anything, that does that – not technology.

Man cannot create a Grace-Machine. (McLuhan was a practicing Catholic.)

But surely that’s what the black monolith in 2001 represents, no? Grace in a box?

Christian media soothes us with its McLuhan-conviction. In a music video played on the Christian Network in 1999, pop performers sang about faith while each member stood on his own little coloured planet. The song says, we are not spaceships, we are not marooned on the dying planet while the Big-Heads sail off to evolutionary heaven without us.

No, we are the planets, each and everyone one of us revolving around all of us.

Christians say we’re already home.

However, the observable truth is that new technology does create social elites. The horse stirrup was a new medium, an extension of a man’s leg, a medium that created the knightly class in Europe, and made feudalism itself. Our fear is we may indeed end as micro-serfs to Baron von Gates and his nerdy hordes. The anxiety is more real given that nerdly technologies do produce fundamental advancements in the transhuman realm: gene manipulation, hormone treatments, organ transplants, cloning, and cryogenics. Despite McLuhan’s salve we are approaching the final frontier, consciousness itself.

So who gets these upgrades? For what purpose?

Who dictates how, when, and where, in our market economy? Western society tries to ally our fears by claiming that technical advances are not significant, that we’re all the same “under the skin” despite the inequities of the political system. Render unto Caesar, etc.

The problem is, this blindingly fast evolutionary process is not about merely extending the human fist or belly or even the mouth, but the human mind itself. The  Roswell Alien has a big head and we want to know what’s inside it.

X marks the final frontier: fundamental changes in consciousness.

What are we going to think, when we get there? Can we buy our own evolution? Who among us has the hundreds of millions? Western philosophy has no real answers except its prohibitive finger-wagging: “All life is sacred.”

And with that, digital culture closes ranks against any understanding of the new media and forces us into strategies of passive accommodation, rather than political mastery, or even permit a critical dialogue. Christian orthodoxy has allied itself with orthodox Scientism, which also claims the discussion is hereby closed.

Yes, President Obama is a Martian. And McLuhan said it doesn’t matter who can afford the new technologies, and who cannot. Type Man is no better than Radio Man or TV Woman or Computer Boy. Just different, while the heart’s the same.

But is it? Is it?

Photo: Sundeep Bali

In rural West Africa, the tree serves as communal gathering place. A baobab or mango tree, say, sometimes flowering there alone, several hundred metres or more from its closest neighbour; and beneath it, sheltered from the Sahelian heat, there will be a school class, or elders debating a development proposal, or men politicking, or women assembling to complain of their men’s politicking. And sometimes a tree is simply something in whose shade you drink, eat and tell stories.

I came back to this image of the tree as nourishing community architecture when I first encountered photographs of Sanjeev Shankar’s public art piece Jugaad (picture above). Commissioned for the 2008 48°C Public.Art.Ecology festival in New Delhi, Jugaad was a 750-sq foot shade canopy fashioned from a thousand oil cans lashed together, installed with halogens, suspended over pulleys and fastened to the ground with steel cables. The skins of the oil cans were punctured with holes, and the lids applied with a locally available pink pigment called gulal.

The piece was produced in collaboration with the residents of Rajokri, an urban village on the outskirts of Delhi. For Shankar it was an opportunity to further his explorations in the recycling and re-purposing of used materials — rendering art out of what was once garbage — while engaging in a deeply personal process with the villagers.

Photo: Adam Roney

A commonplace Hindi term, jugaad describes everyday acts of innovation. As Shankar tells it: “A guy with 10 rupees has a dream to own a tractor or a television. He’ll start thinking in a radically inventive manner to get it, and do so with whatever means or resources he has at hand.” It’s an attitude toward life that is synonymous with the inspired re-purposing of discarded goods, the social art of getting things done (& sometimes bending the rules of officialdom along the way), and more particularly the ubiquitous, low-tech motor vehicles jerry-rigged from a cart and diesel engine that are the primary means for getting around much of rural India. Jugaad is a survival strategy, more about process than outcome — the hustling, resourceful, quasi-spiritual Hindi equivalent of Nike’s “Just Do it.”

Vikas Swarup, author of the novel upon which the film Slumdog Millionaire was based, said in a New York Times article that jugaad provided the central theme for his story, and calls it “the spirit of India.”

My phone recently had water damage and I gave it to the Nokia dealer. He said, “No can do. Can’t be fixed. Just buy a new phone.” If that had happened in India, some local guy in a little shop would have cloned an old Samsung or Motorola or whatever, and five minutes later, “Here you are Mr. Swarup, it works!” They would never say it cannot be done. Jugaad is the spirit of whatever-it-takes.

The 28-year-old Shankar was trained as an architect/designer, but nowadays works mostly on projects that challenge the conventions of his vocation, focusing especially on how art and craft can be used to examine the way humans make decisions about living and consuming. In previous initiatives he explored the unique role of the street food vendors in the social and economic fabric of Indian cities, hypothesized “the design of a green, intelligent, modular and structural ‘brick’ which has specific native plants or seeds integrated with it,” and, while living with tribes on the Indian-Burmese border developed cane and bamboo craft-products inspired by Naga culture. He also developed what he calls “Culture Specific Footwear” — dashingly hybrid modern-traditional shoes.

The far-ranging purview of his work may betray a certain intellectual unruliness, but core themes emerge: sustainability, biomimetics, emergent technologies, the dynamics of social change, ingenuity in the face of limited resources, and the necessary viability of craft cultures. Somehow he manages to eloquently mash many if not all of these interests into singular articulations.

Tell me how the Jugaad project got started.

Sanjeev Shankar: For me it began with the process of simply documenting lives. Taking photographs of people, or using film, I’m always interested how people make decisions about living and consuming, how the planet is evolving…never as part of an agenda. Just as part of my interest in spending time with people.

I’m baffled by the extremes that India in particular brings out most vividly. Drive for two hours and the differences are shocking. The city [as we think of it] is a Western idea. In India you had villages and the city just grew up around them. For example, in Delhi you’ll still come across buffaloes. There’s a sense of time and space that is very different.

So I was simply taking pictures and I ended up with a series related to the oil can. Most things in India tend to get re-used at every single stage, but the oil can was a kind of dirty symbol of waste which should not be touched or tampered with. It was usually discarded as waste, or used as a container to hold waste, filthy stuff.

There was a seed, or a germ, to do something. Find out what happens to the oil can. I kept stalking the oil can! It took me to some really crazy places… So that was my trigger, I felt this may not be the only way it could be used. And while I was playing with this idea, it evolved into something that engaged a lot of people. It went from one extreme, where people in Rajokri] would give the oil can to me for free, to how the whole village became excited and tried charging me more for the oil cans than they were previously worth.

Once the seed for the project was planted, you knew you wanted to involve a community, to make it collaborative. What was your process?

I didn’t know how we would do it, but I trusted the deep instinct and power of crowd behaviour. Where the whole community gets involved, everyone is engaged and stimulating everyone else. This started happening somehow.

That kind of challenge fascinates me. When you have a purpose but have to involve everyone to communicate and manifest something tangible, something that goes beyond yourself, the “I”, and really get people into it.

You had the idea to call the project “Jugaad” only part-way through the collaboration process. What is jugaad?

Jugaad is a Hindi term that means attaining any objective with whatever resources you have at hand. There’s a guy with 10 rupees who has a dream to own a tractor or television. He will go about thinking in a radically innovative manner to get what he wants and to do it only with whatever resources he has. It results in some absolutely insane innovation and inventions. Because money is not an issue. It takes you onto a journey.

It’s a normal and accepted way to go about life, where you say, ‘Bro’, let’s do jugaad.’ A ‘let’s do it’ attitude — no matter what happens we have to get this done. And that also results in camaraderie.

But the title [for the project] came later while brainstorming with a friend. I started with my concerns: recycling; what does it mean to re-purpose; when one thing dies and it becomes something else; and how do you involve people.

The term jugaad is a lovely way to relate to everyone. In these urban villages the language is different. You’re working with people not integrated into city life. I’m an outsider. There had to be a way without language, a way they could understand and appreciate. It’s body language, the way you conduct yourself, create a deeper purpose beyond the economy of it. Once people began to appreciate it, there was a domino effect. The word spread. Suddenly there are 100 people working and brainstorming, and I become just one part of the process.

How difficult was it to get people on-board with the idea?

It wasn’t easy at first. Sometimes there was resistance. No one understood what [the project] would become. They had the mindset the oil can was waste, so it goes to the dump, why touch it!

It’s one thing to talk about recycling in boardrooms, richly dressed, but it’s a totally different challenge to be working in some communities, because no one is going to listen to you, no matter how many articles we write. So my toughest challenge was how to engage people out of this circle of exchanges happening, when their main priority is survival, getting their daily meal, eating their daily bread. And a sizable population on this planet falls in this bracket.

What sort of role did you play? How do you encourage innovation and creativity in this situation?

There was a lot of back and forth, trial and error, and experimentation. We hadn’t even tested the material so we’d know how to work with it. A lot of village politics got into it, which you just had to accept. Sometimes you just have to give it up. You can’t dictate, you become one element in the whole collage. You learn to go with the flow then at very crucial junctures make sure the river takes an important course or reaches its destination.

Toward the end everything started tying together. Aside from issues of recycling, re-purposing, re-use, it also explored issues of human behaviour, as in when does something become beautiful. Our idea of beauty often comes from a deep sense of evolutionary instinct. In architecture or design parlance you want to rationalize it, make sure it’s functional — that’s the way we judge if something is beautiful. I knew this piece would have rustic aesthetics, but [other than that] I had no idea.

I always try to question whether design should be about “less” or should design be about “more”. Indian movies and traditional aesthetics is so much about celebrating through more, maximizing stuff. I love this dichotomy or tension between minimalism and maximalism. It’s boring if you have to insist on one way or the other. Can we fuse them to create a new entity? When do we stop fighting for our ideas and come up with something genuinely powerful and new.

Other projects of yours have been craft-based, and you’ve written about the relationship between designers and craftspeople. Now that you’ve completed this Jugaad project, where’s your thinking on craft now?

The relationship between design/art and craft is very important to our times, especially in India. There are millions of people here who are brilliant craftsmen; we still have to acknowledge and celebrate that. Unlike the West, we have living crafts. They’re not on the way out. You have to accept that and not look down upon it. They don’t need us, we need them.

Once you live in that life, where work is not devoid of play, you realize craft is an extension of life. It is seamlessly intertwined. Where you sing and you eat and make motors and just happen to create extraordinary shoes as an outcome of your daily routine. That’s a different process compared to a modern way of looking at life, work and play as distinct activities. Japan is a unique place that appears to strike a balance between craft and modernity.

In recent years, there’s been an explosion in discourse around the notion of design as an instrument of social change. I’m thinking of people like Bruce Mau and Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity), both their work and things they’ve said, this sensibility, as Sinclair says, you must “Design like you give a damn.” There are many others now talking this way and it almost has the critical mass of a movement. At its best this mindset can be the trigger for some really innovative, sustainable ideas; at its worst it smacks of a kind of simple-minded utopianism that promises lasting change it can’t really deliver on its own. Do you believe your work can be transformative, and that change will be lasting?

I’m glad you asked that question… On one side, I don’t know whether it’s prudent to be decisively judgmental that something or everything has to last! If something has to die it will die, and nature will take its own course.

But the other side of me wants it to survive and grow and so I go out and sow seeds, meeting every single person who I feel could be touched by the project and contribute to something deeper. Sowing seeds is important, whether the seed becomes a tree, a fruit, a small plant, or that seed flies out to another country and gets embedded there is something beyond me. Life takes its own course.

In the West there’s this urge to control, give definite answers. Such trends are now seen elsewhere
too. Through my journeys I’ve realized not every question has an answer. No single initiative can change the world. Remarkable people have triggered movements, but there’s always something deep and beyond that remarkable person at play. We need to acknowledge that we’re always trying to rationalize, post-analyze what’s happening.

I’m born in the East, so I’m used to the Hindu philosophy of letting things happen. You accept death, you don’t fight it. It’s not a full-stop. Such belief is at the core of life itself. Everything which comes has to go; you live life in manner where you leave no trace, or you may leave a trace but it doesn’t look like a trace.

Every input from media tells us we can change things. It’s nice to think that way, but perhaps we also need to give space. Initiate, yes; but include a variable which gives space to the other person and to the other life form, which acknowledges their presence, and which tells us we must not go beyond a certain line.

I’m always playing with these two opposite ideas and somehow it results in something.

There’s an on-going interest in biomorphism, bio-mimicry in your work. Where does that come from?

I was born in a south India hill station called Wellington. Every year my father would take me to the hills and we would lose ourselves in the forest. We’d run up to the top, chase each other and purposefully get lost. It made me learn about being in nature and becoming one with it.

Later, as an adult, this one time I was [sleeping] in a rainforest and I felt like I was losing the edge of my body. It was a phenomenal, magical experience. It makes you realize we create all these distinctions. When I lost the feeling of the extremities of my body I started feeling everything is the same, and everything is nothing, and nothing is everything, which started connecting me with everything else. There’s a level of communication and intelligence going on in the world of plants and animals that we don’t understand. That are so evolved and deep we have few answers for how things work.

As I’ve only experienced the Jugaad installation through images on the internet, I wonder how it actually looked being there.

It was pretty crazy. There were strong winds at one point and the whole thing started moving. There were strange sounds coming out of it. It looked like a spaceship, like an outer-worldly creature. People [looking at it] had this insane look on their face. What is this? Where has it arrived from? It swayed like a ship in the middle of the ocean. I did not expect it to be so cool.

Are you still in touch with the people of Rajokri?

Yes, I still talk with them. But now our conversations go beyond the oil cans or jugaad. I guess it is the making of yet another journey.

*

Some years ago a security video camera recorded an armed robbery taking place inside an midtown Toronto café. A young woman on a date was shot to death in front of a number of terrified witnesses. The newspaper of record subsequently reported how the murder trial quickly became a legal nightmare.

Among the difficulties faced by the Court was the evidentiary problems created by the videotape itself:

Because of the way the camera system is set up, images are laterally reversed – right becomes left.  The times shown on the frames are off by one hour because the VCR has been incorrectly set . . .  the judge criticized the Crown counsel after they called a long series of witnesses to testify about arcane technical details relating to the camera that had recorded a surveillance video during the robbery. …The full surveillance video is available on (our) Web site. (Globe and Mail, December 7, 1999)

International experts were summoned to give their views on the impugned videotape.  For the prosecution, an expert in image processing testified that “the images of the robbers on the video are sufficiently clear for someone to make an identification, although the tape quality is dark and grainy.”

For the defence, a U.S professor who wrote a book about image enhancement said, “the video’s quality is so poor that the court should not rely on the images to recognize facial features.” Concurrently, seven ordinary witnesses swore they recognized the three accused men on the video, namely as “the man wearing the hood” and “the man with the baseball cap,” and “the man with the toque.”

The real problem with this surveillance video was, of course, that it was recording only the people coming and going through the cafe’s front entrance, the non-events.  It was the event that everyone was interested in; and this was the actual murder, which took place left to right, an hour earlier, and in full three-dimensional colour —  and mostly off-camera. The technical dyschezia confused everybody, and the huge effort required to match the event with the taped non-events surrounding it, confounded experts and common witnesses alike, people who were used to comprehending such events in the Documentary Mode.

A simple surveillance tape proved enormously complex, and resistant to other uses. Why? Because perennial locations for surveillance cameras include parking lots, underground garages, ATM machines, cash registers, shopping mall entrances, and traffic lights, and their function is simply to record traffic, not events. With their fixed fields of vision, their digital calendars, and their “dark and grainy” images, they are ideally suited to record entrances and exits and overstayed presences, and to render the time of same to the exact second, (assuming they have been properly set.)

The Cradle Will Fall: view of a baby’s crib.

However, video cannot identify — because identification is a specialized task that was formerly the province of technicians such as fingerprint experts and “eyewitness accounts,” and in digital culture this procedure has now been given over to alphanumerical data-processors, such as barcode readers and personal access-code magnetic strips. Surveillance videos as in the Just Desserts shooting case referenced at the beginning of this essay, serve only to remind us that our identities are no longer functions of visual image, but of encoded protocols such as DNA.

Most commercial video, on the other hand, is consumed in the security of the home or in the privacy of a dark audience, places where the opportunities for individual interpretation are expanded to include deliberate manipulations of the time-modes noted above. Commercial video says little about the uses of public space; surveillance tapes say little about public time.

An event, as we understand it to be, both classically and as Law defines it, is conflict-driven. It requires three essential ingredients:  plot, character, and narrative.  It needs conflict, (the issue); the protagonists’ emotional relationship to the conflict (motive); and the contextual consequences (in Law, res gestae; in film, point of view).

Narrative requires point of view; nothing is arranged beforehand with a surveillance video except its field of vision, which is not the same thing as a point of view. No meaningful narrative can come of it. Video confounds our previous notions of plot-centred film documentaries.

We would expect, however, that these two forms of recording might intersect at some point. And they do.

In 1884 Muybridge’s multiple-flash photography experiments made dupes of the celebrated sporting painters, by proving once and for all that thoroughbreds galloped three feet down at a time, followed by one foot. Wholly illogical, but there it is, in unassailable black-and-white. Given that our expectations are trained by the dominant technology, we have trouble seeing anything it does not show us. In Understanding Media, McLuhan called this culturally conditioned blindness “stasis.”

The question is, how long does it take us to recognize what we are seeing in a new medium? Andy Warhol faced this problem in the 1960’s with his eight-hour, real-time home-movie film of the Empire State Building. Home video does three new things. First, it records ambient sound and non-events.  Secondly, by facilitating immediate fast-forwarding, freeze-frame and rewinds, video creates radical new orders of narrative.

Thirdly, and most importantly, video’s miniaturized sensitivity to low light levels deconditions its subjects, who respond more “informally” to the presence of the unobtrusive lens. The ambulatory video operator, unlike a regular film cameraman or even a still photographer, remains a mobile, semi-participatory and tandem figure; and his or her peripheral presence reveals previously unknown social behaviours, as shown again and again by the amazing videos we have all seen, of spectacular arrests, drunken toddlers and narrow escapes from sudden erasure.

Baghdad Cafe: live video of a Middle Eastern take out restaurant.

Recently I bought a demo camcorder from Future Shop. The salesman had forgotten to remove the sample tape inside, which contained a recording of a suburban Mediterranean immigrant household at Sunday dinner. I was interested to see how they ignored the cameraperson as they went about their business of eating pasta, glowering, serving, criticizing, eating, pouting, sulking, clowning, eating and plate collecting. It was a fascinating social document, to be considered informal only because the social behaviours it revealed are too new to be labelled.

Everything appeared accidental on the forgotten tape; they were surveilling themselves. Here in this Calabrese-Canadian living room was a horse running on three legs, and my immediate reaction to this serendipitous chronicle was to guess the identity of the unseen jockey.

Was the video operator young, male, a nephew or son? Compared to the cameraman of a typical Cousteau doc, the operator was invisible because the camcorder had neatly eliminated his point of view. In fact, these devices keep running and auto-focusing and responding to changing light levels, all without anyone really “operating” them, as people forget to turn them off. They are like the old prank phone joke: Is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it!

This autonomy is its own oddness, and accounts for the popularity of America’s Funniest Home Videos, which showed the pratfalls made in coming to terms with this new way of pointless seeing. There’s no conflict, people just fall on their ass. No magic wand, either, just a Fat New Nothing as they smash into it, heedlessly. Video disconnects both operator, and viewer, from the moral responsibility of the witness. Morally and causally, video is silent. As Chaplin did with his silent movies, slapstick is a levelling device, educating the audience on the confounding of the new medium.

Friluftskino – Carwash screening from Michelle Teran on Vimeo.

The thrill of living in a surveillance society is we all know no one is behind the cameras. Nobody! In Richmond, B.C., a local high school vice-principal proudly shows the TV crew from the investigative news program his new surveillance system, geared at “stopping the students from fighting,” and then he admits that no one watches the TV monitors. There’s no need. The kids are interviewed, and readily admit that they continue to fight, simply by going outside the cameras’ field of vision. They know exactly where the line-of-sight ends, too. Fight Club is what happens behind the lens. What we see is today only more dead school space, a fake show of civility co-opted by the authorities.

Video de-centers events, and dumps us upside-down in a fish bowl. The giddiness comes from witnessing ourselves as legless machines.

Vladimir Arkhipov collects the art of everyday ingenuity: a power charger made from a recycled Polaroid cartridge; a barbell bracketed by elevator counterweights; an abacus repurposed into a back-massager; a short-wave radio receiver constructed from metal scrap; a water boiler jerry-rigged from a pair of razor blades, wire and an A/C plug. All of their component parts previously used.

For more than fifteen years, Arkhipov has been assembling this archive of “post-material folklore”, idiosyncratic DIY tools and toys fashioned mostly by casual inventors in and around the Moscow area. Though he’s reluctant to ascribe the word “art” to these self-made “thingumajigs”, he treasures their accidental poetry in the service of function.

The archive began in 1994, when Arkhipov realized his own conceptual art had little relevance amid the upheaval of the post-Soviet meltdown. As he says, “I still thought of myself as an artist, I just wasn’t making anything.”  Then, while visiting a friend’s dacha, he noticed a coat hook that had been made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. “It was so simple, but it struck me right away. I knew it was important.” For decades, Russians living under communism, cut-off from Western disposable consumer culture, had been fashioning functional objects from such cast-off items as light shades, plastic bottles and onion bags.

Arkhipov remembered his own father’s inventions, among them a TV antenna made from a set of aluminum forks. “Things like these had been around me all my life but were almost invisible to the naked eye.”

In recent years, Arkhipov has been invited to take his enthusiasm for “post-material folklore” on the road. But rather than deliver his Russian objects to galleries in Brazil, Ireland, England and Spain, he spends a few weeks in advance of his exhibitions hunting for local examples of self-made objects. He always discovers something. Like the gas mask a professor in Sao Paolo had created from a coffee canister and funnel—on days the smog was unbearable, the professor filled the canister with essential oils and breathed into it instead of the air soggy with particulates.

Each object tells a local story, in terms of the materials recycled and the uses to which they are put. The Russian pieces, for example, show off the manifold benefits of a Soviet-era technical education. But Arkhipov ultimately holds to a more phenomenological, quasi-mystical appreciation for the ingenuity that post-folk culture represents.

Arkhipov’s collection has been featured in two books: Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (Fuel Publishing) and Born out of Necessity, 105 Thingumajigs and Their Creator’s Voices (Typolygon)

I spoke with Arkhipov at his friend’s suburban Moscow apartment, in November 2008.

What’s your criteria for including pieces in the archive?

The objects must be functional, visually interesting, one-of-a-kind and not for sale. They must also have an author, someone who can talk about their creation. The form must be unique, unlike anything else. I usually believe the author if he says it’s unique. The less the author thinks about what he’s made, the more interesting it is for the art. Because it’s more pure, not aesthetically loaded. I think things that man makes only for himself can have aesthetic qualities that are not in things made for sale.

Any piece’s uniqueness is usually a coincidence of time, place and the creator. I never know which house will yield an interesting discovery, it’s always accidental.

Commode made from a stool by Alexei Tikhonov; Shovel made from a road-sign by Vladimir Antipov.

How did you find the first piece in the collection?

I went to a friend’s dacha outside Moscow to help him build a stove. As he was unpacking things I went into the attic. There were some old coats hanging up and when I took them off I noticed the hook — it was made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. Such a small thing! I guess it was a coincidence, because at that moment I was able to see this hook for what it was. It was something important.

It was the answer to the questions that had been brewing in me about what to do next. I decided to start collecting things like this hook. Because usually I saw these things separately, one here at this house, another there, I never thought about it. These self-made tools, gadgets, had been around me all my life, but were an unexplored part of material culture. We just took them for granted.

I wanted to collect them in one place and have the opportunity to reflect on these objects and what story they told. Within a year I put on the first exhibition.

The pieces you collect are, by necessity, tied into the material reality of where they’re made. When you saw that tooth-brush hook, when you began the archive, what were the conditions like in Russia?

After the USSR collapsed, 1993 was the most difficult year for our country. After that everything changed. The social and economic divisions started becoming more stratified, more extreme.

Some of my friends got very rich, and they lost their interest in art. They were more interested in Ferraris and luxury cars. And others didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford to be interested in anything. The art I was making became irrelevant and unnecessary. I think it was true of all art in this period.

As an artist, the 1990s were the period of looking for an audience, trying to find who is the spectator. Eventually, as some people made money, the art began to develop again, but according to the laws of bourgeois art. It was something shocking and kitschy. It wasn’t interesting to me.

Footbridge made from a bed by an unknown author.

During this time you still thought of yourself as an artist, not yet a curator.

I still thought of myself as an artist, but I wasn’t making anything. I had an apartment in a small town that I rented out for income. Instead, I lived with friends in these condemned houses in Moscow, like a squat. I didn’t need much money to live here. Now where we squatted is the most luxurious part of Moscow, the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

When I had to make some money I did construction work. It was my dream to have enough money to stop working and just make art.

Here’s a classic story from those times: I was owed a lot of money by this construction company. But it was run by criminals. When I finished my work I never got my last, largest sum. My problem is that I didn’t have what Russians call a ‘roof’ — the people who can look out for you, protect you. In short, I didn’t get the money. I wasn’t the only one. A large group of builders got fucked. You need the courage to shoot people. I didn’t have this quality. Russian business has no recourse for people like me!

Summer shower made by Alexander.

Now that your collection is being noticed outside Russia, art critics and curators tend to appreciate it as either a critique of consumer culture, or as a sociological catalogue of the deprivations suffered here in the immediate post-Soviet era. What do you think about that?

I accept that but only up to a point. I think the more specialized your labour, the less ingenious you become. Consumer societies can lose contact with the material world, with tactile things and the process of creating them. Because if you have money, you need something, you can buy it. But the poor man is more attentive to the details of everyday life. For them this attentiveness is the guarantee of survival.

These pieces do say something about where and when they were made. In Soviet times there was a unique material culture. Because the whole cycle of production, from beginning to end, it was done here. Our technologies and products developed in parallel, but differently than the West. There are certain things that are Soviet-standard that you would never find in the West.

But when I look at these things together, there’s no big difference between the communist and the post-communist times. Yes, they can say a little about when and where they were made, but we should also be careful not to make too much of it.

I prefer to look at it as a phenomenon of contemporary culture — not sociologically, but phenomenologically. For example, I compare these pieces to a sort of folklore by calling it material folklore. But there’s no real tradition of this, not in any conscious sense, you’re not closely following what a whole body of people has done before you. These things are sporadic, occasional. You can’t understand all the why, where, and how, but you can admire them, appreciate their ingenuity. You may even appreciate how they look, although they weren’t necessarily made to look good.

What do you mean by phenomenologically?

These things are traces of the creative force in man. Creativity belongs to everyone, but everyone is different, so the manifestations, expressions of it are different. Some men have a facility with words, others with sound or numbers. And there are others who still understand the world with their hands. Those last people are the people who interest me the most.

“He who says something is impossible is not speaking Korean”
—Kim Jong Il

Throughout the twentieth century, certain filmmakers explored the relationship between visuality and language. One such person was North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who elaborated his father’s theories of communist governance and society, known as Juche, to literature and cinema.

Jim Finn inserts excerpts from Juche writings (“Let Us Create More Revolutionary Films Based on Socialist Life” and such) into a droll mockumentary about a South Korean artist living on a commune in North Korea, teaching ESL (“English as a Socialist Language”) and making her own cinema according to Juche precepts. Finn’s film is a delightful analogism and a micro-museum of ‘Kimilsungisms’ aptly titled The Juche Idea.

From Finn’s synopsis: In the late 1960’s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and  authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st century. Inspired by the real-life story of the South Korean director kidnapped in the 70’s to invigorate the North Korean film industry, the film follows Yoon Jung Lee, a young video artist invited to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm. The story is told through the films she made at the residency as well as interviews with a Bulgarian filmmaker and even a brief sci-fi movie.

[Update: Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a theatrical run of Juche Idea May 27-June 2, 2010, along with a retrospective of Finn's work. Juche Idea is also discussed in this New York Times feature on Kim Il Sung as cinema mogul.]

An effect of weaving the mockumentary and excerpts from North Korean film and television is that some of the archival footage appears more absurd than the fictional doc scenes. Was the structure of the film originally intended to be like that? Was it improvised during production? Or was it a mad political science experiment in post?

Originally, I was going to create my own Juche-style film made in a fictional Juche art colony in the US. That artist colony got transferred to North Korea. Another thought was the sci-fi film and that got folded into the narrative of the art colony-Juche studio. I have always modeled my films on a studio model. I started out making experimental short films in my kitchen and bathroom with my pets among other things. I had so much found footage from North Korea and I really wanted to use it, so I came up with the idea of a political artist allowed in to their archives and allowed to re-edit and punch up the propaganda a bit.

The English as a Socialist Language part was natural since I taught English as a second language and citizenship classes for years in the Mexican  neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. I just wanted to radicalize it since so many lessons are based on becoming part of the American system.

I know the basic structure going in. The trick in post-production is tightening it up, cutting scenes, moving them around and going back and adding scenes. The dialogue scene in the editing room, for example, I wrote but never filmed. And when we looked at the rough cut, we realized that something was missing, which was that Yoon Jung was never established as a video artist. So we shot that scene in one weekend frantically before a festival deadline.

In many scenes, the screen is split between subtitled old Juche film excerpts or text from Juche books. It was challenging to focus on everything on the screen at once. This reminds me that the matching of text with corresponding images was not always a formalized convention. Ideally, how would one ‘read’ these scenes?

Well, I wanted to give a Juche film lesson in the film. I wrote a monologue sketching out an explication of Juche film using Kim Jong Il’s theories. Which are really an adaptation of socialist realism for Korea in the 1960’s.

But then parts of the film were so talky, and I realized that there were direct quotes from his book On the Art of the Cinema that had obviously been read and applied to the films. This is why he gets credit for directing and producing so many movies. He’s in there somewhere all the time.

I think first-time viewers mostly ignore the text on the left since the film clips are pretty engaging and the 16mm titles are kind of hard to read, but some of it sinks in, and I think it adds weight to what could be a light film.

The Juche Idea (clip) from jimfinn on Vimeo.

So the film was not only informed by the Juche ideology but also to an extent, intended to be a Juche film itself. I know that film language was an important part of the Juche theory. Subjects in your film have their hysterical encounters with language, and the film itself experiments with conventional forms of presentation. Were you making an intentional semiotic investigation of filmmaking?

I think all of the three feature films I’ve made are to one degree or another about the process of art making, as well as ideological studies. Though, studies is really too dry a word. I am making these experimental comedies to a certain degree. One of the things that really appealed to me about Juche film was that they make really cheap films very fast with pretty good acting and with a correct ideological understanding. I feel that that’s what I’m doing. My idea of correct politics might not fit exactly with theirs but I can relate to their chollima speed campaign.

Do you feel that films are necessarily a political endeavor, whether conscious or not? People tend to characterize your work as being political satire. How do you feel about that?

I wanted to create an art movement that would point back at our political system, as well. I also think there is a real nostalgia for something that never really existed, which is an open political system that supported leftist artists. It existed in moments, maybe in Mexico or Russia right after the revolutions, but they were always used to prop up some internal political system as well.

I understand that I am not making work in a vacuum. My work is not easily classifiable, so people try to fit it into a category so they can program it or persuade people to see it. It’s part of our capitalist system. There is such a strong tradition of irony and satire in literature and film and I’m happy to be part of that. Mark Twain is from my home state. And Jonathan Swift was Irish, like part of me. As far as film being political, hell yes. It is so complicated and expensive and time-consuming to make movies that people often make deals with the devil to get the thing done.

How did you get your hands on so much archival footage?

I found a North Korean bookstore online. I ordered DVD’s and books and comics. So much stuff! I had a grant from the Hallwalls Artist in Residency Project in Buffalo, so I could afford to get what I wanted. And I just read tons of stuff. I used the library to get a lot of political background on North Korea as well.

Did you get hooked up to go to North Korea as well? The information is presented with an incredible authenticity, and anyone who has lived in a socialist country who has seen the film has been delighted by it.

I did look into going to North Korea. The problem is that even if you get in, everyone goes to the same areas. I haven’t ever been to a communist country, though I did have members of the Shining Path come to all my screenings of my movie about their group in Buenos Aires. And I had lunch with them. It was pretty intense.

They said the things I got wrong were not “errors” but “limitations” of being a low-budget filmmaker far away from Peru. They felt that I was a filmmaker of the left making my own interpretation. I’m not sure I’d get such a generous thought from the North Koreans. But I think that it is reductive to think that I am merely satirizing the North Korean system. The irony points right back at us.

I read your article on film festivals. What role do film fests play in your personal and professional life?

I have mixed feelings on them. I think they can be exploitative of filmmakers by charging fees and not paying for films. But the good ones that are able to put together strong and diverse programs that are smart and take chances are really great. For films like mine, good festivals are opportunities for me to get exposure and reach an audience that would be hard to reach with a small venue or a film tour, which I’ve gone on. Because I’ve made three back-to-back-to-back feature films, I feel like I’ve been on the festival circuit on and off for three years now.

With smaller festivals, there is no chance of making money so they have to push for quality and taking chances. The bigger festivals can be taken over by these horrible people trolling around like the National Review cruise ship visiting the Alaska governor a couple years ago.

Wait, one more question…gerbils! Why?! They seem to be a preferred motif in your other features as well. Cheeky metonymy for Social Darwinism? Or just cheekiness?

I made a film in 2002 called Wüstenspringmaus, which is a short history of the gerbil and capitalism. Then the guinea pig showed up in Interkosmos (71 min, 2006) as the international youth symbol of communism due to its gentle peaceful nature and its tendency to move in groups. I like to radicalize animals and sports and all these seemingly innocuous apolitical things in the world. They’re already loaded up with ideas of, as you say, Social Darwinism, or healthy competition. Plus, I really miss the Olympics from the ’70s and ’80s where the most badass luge team was East Germany.

Journal: Havana, Sept 14, 2009
Photographer Lorne Bridgman and I tool around Miramar, where the Spanish colonial, art nouveau and deco mansions of Havana’s pre-revolutionary rich have been given over to embassies and company headquarters. The most conspicuous foreign mission is the former U.S.S.R./now Russian embajada, which we get out of the car to gawk at. It seems to glower rather direly back at us. Some Cubans say it resembles a syringe—as in ‘the syringe used by the Russians to inject communism in Cuba!’ (Seriously, I’ve read that in several places.) But ‘monstrosity’ is the word I’ve seen most often used to describe the thirty-three story structure, whether by locals or foreigners.

I happen to enjoy the sight of it, but I have an unhealthy fascination with totalitarian architecture and design. Sure, the obelisk erupting from a brutalist tower block does suggest a periscope from which those inside might be surveilling the city—a menacing cyclopean eye on Havana. But its face has the kind of enigmatic expression one sees in primitivist stone statuary, like a Polynesian moai. I also find myself thinking how the building’s form mimics the distorted proportions and elongations of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of the human body. Those descriptions still make the building sound pretty creepy, and that’s probably not the best tone for an embassy’s architecture to convey. But in and of itself the building is compelling.

We only manage to squeeze in a few photographs of the building before security guards from other embassies in the area whistle and shoo us away. Lorne protests, “They build an architecturally provocative building and don’t expect people to want to take pictures of it?”

Los Carpinteros, Embajada Rusa

The work of local artist collective Los Carpinteros takes its cues from Havana’s built environment, and has produced a series of wooden sculptures that playfully reconfigure the city’s most iconic, landmark buildings. In 2003 they produced Embajada Rusa, a finely crafted cedar chest of drawers that replicates the Russian embassy. The tiny drawers like filing cabinets crammed with secret memos on all those potentially troublesome Habaneros.

During my recent Brazil excursion to research the book I stopped in Salvador, without much of a specific agenda. I had long wanted to visit, mostly because the city and the surrounding state of Bahia, predominantly Afro-Brazilian, have had such a definitive influence on the country’s culture (from samba to candomblé and capoeira). And it was the region from which so many of my favourite tropicalia musicians hail from (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé… the list goes on).

My first couple days in Salvador, however, elicited a mixed bag of feelings. I enjoyed the clove-infused cachaça at O Cravinho; spent the better part of an evening with percussionist and composer Ramiro Musotto, who talks about rhythms like a giddy, pot-addled mathematician; and put myself in one dodgy scenario by befriending a recently released convict named André and hanging out at his favela flat where I was, at least initially, not welcomed by the favela’s chief. (André also had the discomfiting habit of pacing about shirtless at very close quarters, vaguely agitated, insisting I also remove my shirt because it was so hot, and gesticulating with a homemade machete in one hand.)

All that was good fun! But the rains had followed me from Manaus. Wicked rains, worse than normal for the season, were falling across much of Brazil’s northeast, causing floods, landslides and deaths. The daily downpours curtailed my usual happy habit of the full-day walkabout. (And Brazilians, I found, tend not to get up to very much when it does rain.) Also, having thought about visiting the place for so long, I had probably over-idealized my arrival. It’s not that I had any particular expectations, but much of what I saw at first was distressing. The city’s historic Pelhourino district, near to where I was staying, had lost much of the bohemian vitality that once made it special. In the past ten years it’s ceased being a place most locals would consider going out to—partly because it’s becoming so touristy, and partly because of the dismal preponderance of barely-teenage street waifs hustling money for crack.

(Salvador, Brazil, by Valéria Simões)

Then I saw a photography exhibition by local Valéria Simões at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. It was through Simões’ images I learned how to read Salvador in all its gruff, melancholy splendour, and some kind of psychological or emotional barrier was finally lifted between me and the city. The show, entitled Lugar de Ausência, or Place of Absence, consisted of images taken in the old Pelhourino and Centro districts, as well in towns in the surrounding Recôncavo (plantation lands).

(Valéria Simões)

In retrospect, it’s a little odd that Simões’s photos did arouse in me a new appreciation for the city, as the faces of its inhabitants figure so rarely in the collection. When people are present in the frame, they’re in silhouette, or their faces are blurred, or obscured by objects in the foreground, or it’s merely a gesture of limbs. Much of the work focuses instead on the city’s historic degrading spaces and the ephemeral traces humans mark them with. (Brazil’s original capital, before Rio and then Brasilia, Salvador is perhaps the richest repository of colonial architecture in Latin America.)

When I met with Simões, she told me that the project began several years earlier, when she began shooting the windows and doors of abandoned buildings that had been bricked-in or filled with concrete. These emparedados (literally, it means “bricked”) are a ubiquitous sight in the city’s older neighborhoods, and for Simões they were suggestive of the city’s interrupted heritage, and the more universal theme of transitoriness. From there her eye wandered to other spaces that had been rendered almost anonymous with neglect and decay, the presence of people usually only insinuated by the echoes left behind.

So rooted in her place, Simões has a difficult time shooting anywhere but Bahia. When in Montreal ten years ago for an exhibition of her work, she had a month to wander around with her camera but couldn’t photograph anything. “I felt like too much of a stranger to the way the people lived, the colours and the light. I just felt like a tourist.” At home in Bahia, she said, “I’m in love.”

Finishing up our chat, I asked Simões about Salvador and Bahia’s much diminished influence on contemporary Brazilian culture. So many of the seminal musicians, dramatists and filmmakers (Glauber Rocha) that transformed Brazil in the ’60s were from around here; now, all the cultural industries are concentrated in Rio and São Paulo. “The influence then was so much stronger,” she said. “Nowadays it’s only axé music, the big pop hits played every year at Carnival that gets any interest. Mass culture has pushed everything else out. In the past, you had Glauber Rocha in cinema, or tropicalia—it wasn’t explicitly for mass consumption but it became popular. Now people want only to make money writing the next big carnival song.”

Valéria Simoes, blogspot
Valéria Simoes, fotolog

(Photo: Heidelberg Project, Michael Takasaki)

Following up on last post: In Detroit, at least, there’s already a number of projects underway that are designed to staunch the bleeding in neighborhoods struggling with urban decay and foreclosure. Boing Boing led me to James Griffioen’s marvelous set of photos of the abandoned Detroit Public School Book Depository, which led me to his passionate, excellent blog; it describes several initiatives reclaiming once-derelict homes and neighbourhoods and putting them back to productive use, including:

The Power House Project, which is converting a foreclosed house into one capable of generating power to sustain itself and supply power to those around it.

The Yes Farm, a group of transplanted San Franciscans trying to turn a street into an art and gardening community.

And the Georgia Street Community Garden, which has planted gardens on the lots of now-demolished houses and are rehabbing an abandoned store to become a community centre and store to sell the food they grow. They even have movie nights in the garden.

Addendum: Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre’s website has other photos of Detroit not included in the Time essay.

More from the Heidelberg Project:

[Photo: Heidelberg Project]

While staying in Detroit, we head out toward 8 Mile and stop at the Heidelberg Project. It’s a two-block public art exercise that consumes the sides of houses, empty lots, the sidewalk, and even the trees of a long depressed, black (but once racially integrated) Eastside Detroit neighborhood. Tyree Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg St., launched the project in 1986 as a way of revitalizing his ‘hood through low-budget DIY creativity and it’s since become an ever evolving outsider art installation.

Guyton, who believes Detroit never really recovered from the riots of 1967, was disillusioned after returning home from his military service—finding a neighborhood (known as “Black Bottom”) seemingly beyond repair, and, as far as wider America was concerned, beyond care. He began by painting bright pop-art polka dots on houses, and artfully affixing them with detritus collected from surrounding vacant lots.

The site vibrates with energy and a playfully anarchic spirit. But while it’s ostensibly about restoring pride of place to the residents—and attracts 275,000 visitors a year to an area that people were once afraid to walk through—it still feels like the deeply personal work of its creator, eliciting a conflicting stew of reactions.

Heidelberg St. is not simply a feel-good restoration project; there is a palpable anger on the flip-side of its hopeful communitarian face, backed by an affinity for the grotesque. Guyton’s paintings on salvaged planks of wood, his welded sculptures and conceptual set pieces (stray, incongruous items assembled together just so, like the flag and phone on ironing board at top), riff on themes such as war, displacement, addiction and poverty almost as often as they seem to engage in pure silly fun. And because Guyton has a fixation for certain objects and images—brightly-coloured polka dots, painted numbers, shoes, chairs, crudely drawn faces, television sets, children’s dolls, stuffed animals, the word “God”, telephones, bicycles—there’s a perverse kind of unity to the whole scene.

Guyton was there while Mike and I were milling around on Heidelberg St. We introduced ourselves; he was polite and asked where we were from, but he was obviously preoccupied with the next idea he was working on. It’s a never-ending piece, a fragile, self-contained world, that he obsessively keeps adding to.

(Note: We’ll throw up more images from the Heidelberg Project in coming days.)

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Many are now looking to Detroit as an indicator of what many struggling cities in America’s post-industrial northeast may soon look like—or in the case of Cleveland, already do (see the feature in last week’s New York Times Magazine on how Cleveland is dealing with the foreclosure crisis). TIME Magazine has just posted a photo essay by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on Detroit’s many derelict, long vacant, but once magnificent twentieth century buildings (Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline).

(Photo: Michigan Central Depot, from Forgotten Detroit)

In addition to visiting the Heidelberg Project, we spent a couple hours scoping out the architectural decay. The most iconic of its ruins is probably the Michigan Central Depot, once the city’s main train station, now a hollowed-out shell that really does look like the last building left in a war zone. (When you cross the Ambassador Bridge and go through Customs it’s one of the first things you notice—this stolid, once stately, monolithic slab you can see right through.) A Detroit preservationist who hosts an excellent web archive called Forgotten Detroit, says, “I like to view [the MCD] as the ultimate symbol of the automobile’s complete triumph over public transportation.” Which, thanks to recent events, gives the building a whole new layer of irony, tragedy and resonance.

Maybe the MCD needs a Heidelberg Project of its own. Hell, so does the whole city. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more Heidelberg Projects—ingenious, intensely personal, quotidian stand-offs against the backdraft of history—all across the country.