Jen Southern

South London Gallery.

The information with the exhibition says that the work “takes as its starting point an extract from an interview conducted by the artist with a west African national seeking asylum in London, the work picks up on one strand from his life story and embeds it in several scenes that repeat in each film”.

The three films are progressively longer, and presented in successive rooms within the gallery. The central story is about how to make a trap to catch a bird, out of two sticks. In the first film a man is making a trap, there is a voice over describing making a trap. The second film is staged as an interview in which a man describes making a trap, but gets muddled about what the trap is for. More sinister overtones about his life story, his reasons for being interviewed, and the reasons for making the trap become apparent. The third is overtly fictional, in which a white man is in a country in which black people have the power. The story of making the trap goes around this circular film, the man over hears the story being told by a girl in class, he then tells the story to someone who might be a social worker, she then tells it to her lover, her lover then tells it to his daughter who then tells it in class. There is also another thread in which people are trying to escape a post apocalyptic city of the past, via the tube lines, but are being hunted down as if they are trying to gain illegal entry into another country.

As the simple story of how to make a trap is repeated and shifts meaning through the three films, this straightforward task becomes myth, memory, practical instruction, confession, show & tell. In the end the original meaning or intention of the story, and preconceptions about the background and history of the stories author have been challenged, shifted and  blurred.

The statement that the origin of this story is an interview with an actual person suggests a social starting point, a perhaps anthropological root to the work. This questions  the role of story telling in the work, who’s story it was to tell,  does the distortion and shifting meaning of the story in the film remove it from the original teller, and in doing so allows it to reveal a wider story, and more of the realities of storytelling and description in various accounts of a life.

What does happen in an interview when someone is asked about their past?

In thinking about art and anthropology there is always the issue of who ends up speaking for whom, how far the interviewer shapes the interview (and there are several interviews and conversations throughout the films), what roles the anthropology and the art play, and their capacities to both enhance and obscure the other practice. In this work ‘Nostalgia’, the process of storytelling weaves these questions together around the very material functions of two sticks being used to make a trap.

http://thaifilmjournal.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-on-apichatpongs-uncle-boonmee-and.html

I’d been discussing Art and Anthropology at a meeting in the morning, thinking about the different ways that the two fields deal with observation and representation of people. It turned out to be a good background to seeing ‘Primitive’ by Apichatpong Weerasethakul at FACT. The work is divided between four spaces, but is all the result of a period of times spent living in Nabua, Thailand, and of working with local young men.  There is in part, a feeling in the work that this is a document of memories about a place, and in part it is, the film footage of houses and interiors appears to be of actual houses in a real village, and that is supported by the narration. But the layered processes that are taking place make clear the flickering between fact and fiction, or the occupation of a space between the two.

Weerasethakul lived in the village whilst making the work. The project was to build a space ship with the sons of local farmers, and some elements of the films document this process. (particularly a film that had the invigilator sitting right next to the screen, in a way that made that the last bit of film I looked at in that space).  Parts of the conversation discuss a time when the village was occupied by soldiers, which appear to be real conversations, but then some of the young men then appear in military uniforms, but its unclear if these are parts they are playing for the film or not. Much of the rest of the films are obviously fictional, ghosts, lightening that is also explosives, the process of setting up those fireworks and part of that illusion. There is a flickering between states, by including not just the fictional films but the process of making them, and of living and engaging with the memories and lives of the place and people who live there. This work and approach to film making weaves fictional film making together with a social process of making, and an almost anthropological mode of living in a place in orer to live with people and engage with their lives and sense of place.

I went to a talk by Dr Amanda Ravetz at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester last night.

She was talking about her research into the relationships between art and anthropology. Doing a PhD in a sociology department as an artist this is something I’ve been interested in, the tensions between the two disciplines, and at what point I am ‘being an artist’ or ‘being a sociologist’ or being neither, or being both. Ravetz discussion of art and anthropology pointed to anthropological studies of art, but also other writing around relationships between the two, initially with Hal Fosters ‘Artist as Ethnographer’, but then the Tate Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology symposium in 2003 , and her own AHRC funded project ‘Connecting art and anthropology’ which brought together artists and anthropologists to explore the differences and similarities in practice. During this workshop artists and anthorpologists asked each other what their practice could not exist without – for artists it was the notion of practice and of an artwork, for anthropologists it was people, or the social world. Questions that came up in her workshop included ‘what do artists desire of anthropology’ and ‘why is there  perceived to be a special relationship between art and anthropology?’ – (and these kinds of questions came up from the audience at this event too). There was also a perception that aritsts are more comfortable reflecting on their personal experience, where as anthropology’s disciplinary boundaries discourage this kind of subjective reflection (although its inescapable, its not foregrounded in the way and artist would be able to).

Ravetz discussed Tim Ingold‘s view that anthropology can be pursued by anthropologists, artists, deisgners, architects, and dissolves some of the differences between the disciplines. Contrasted with Schneider and Wright‘s view that there are some borders betweena art and anthropology that can be crossed. In her view however it is wrong to dismiss the gaps and tensions between the two disciplines, and it is precisely in these gaps, the space inbetween, that is volatile and charged,  that collaborations can happen. There can be no collaboration without difference, and adding up the fields reduces complexity.