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Curated by José Roca
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A
Taste of the Pain of Others includes works from Argentina (Iván
Marino), Cuba (Carlos Garaicoa), Panama (Brooke
Alfaro) and Colombia
(Monika Bravo, Juan
Manuel Echavarría), that address the issue of someone else’s suffering.
Video cameras, no longer solely a tourist fixture, have become commonplace in
both domestic and working environments (not to mention of surveillance in the
public sphere), so each and every aspect of our daily life is being documented
in some way. In this context, "reality", "documentary", "historical
fiction" and "sociological field work", are categories that
merge into each other, establishing a veil of suspicion over what is being presented
before us: are we witnessing something, or is it being staged for us? If
so, does it make a difference?
Pain has always been a difficult subject to deal with within the documentary
tradition, since ethical constraints determine that the subject needs to be treated
with a balance between critical distance and empathy, between due respect and
the space for "giving voice". While tragedy is seldom beautiful,
meditations on pain can be visually seductive or aesthetically pleasing. Karl
Heinz Stockhausen created a stir when he infamously stated that the destruction
of the Twin Towers was "the greatest work of art for the whole Cosmos",
referring to the spectacular nature, in visual terms, of the horrendous tragedy.
A Taste of the Pain of Others brings together works that simultaneously entice
the viewer into delving into someone else's tragedy while maintaining a degree
of strangeness and/or repulsion. This is approached from very diverse angles.
Iván Marino has addressed the complexities inherent to filming physical
decay due to illness and old age, and to being personally implicated with the
subject. Un día Bravo (A Bravo Day, a play of words between "brave" and
the family name "Bravo") is shot in what appears to be a home for
the elderly. The camera relentlessly follows an old woman and her companion,
while they try in vain to resist the voyeuristic gaze, in a tense and antagonistic
exchange of words and gestures. We soon realize that the person behind
the camera is somehow familiar to those being filmed (the woman is in fact the
artist’s grandmother, the person who raised him). As critic Horacio
Gonzales has remarked, "the theme [In A Bravo Day] is obviously old age
and death, taken by surprise in their slug trail, creeping dreadfully through
the corridors, collapsing on armchairs and toilets. Nevertheless, even if these
images are highly pathetic, the film shows, from the beginning, that its goal
is far more demanding: to expose the [simultaneously] fight and flirt of the
elder against the image, as a loving surrender".
Carlos Garaicoa’s serene Cuatro Cubanos (Four Cubans) offers a
view of
four "un-talking Heads", silent portraits of veterans of the war
in Angola, where Cuba sent its military aid. Far from demanding answers
from his sitters, Garaicoa offers a space for silence that also stands for self-censorship
in a charged political environment. As Gerardo Mosquera has observed, "Us
Cubans have been conditioned to cope with fear and protect ourselves by forgetting,
when we need to rethink our history for the future". These young survivors
of a bloody war in a foreign land don’t try to offer any explanation to
an absurd tragedy, but rather remain silent, without any comment, letting the
living ruins of Havana speak with eloquence of the crisis of the social project
they once stood for.
Also a form of video portraiture, Juan Manuel Echavarría’s series
Bocas de Ceniza (Mouth of Cinder) are short videos of people that have experienced
firsthand the most abominable acts of violence, either inflicted on them or on
their loved ones. In the manner of the cantores (a popular form of music
in Colombia –that harks back to the Spanish juglars and trobadours that
sang the news as a form of reaffirming collective memory), the characters in
Echavarría's videos sing of their tragedy so that it will be passed on
to future generations, and that the suffering does not fade into oblivion.
Brooke Alfaro’s split-screen video Nueve (Nine) was created specially for
L.A. Freewaves, to allow an approach to the original project, done by Alfaro
in his native Panama city. Alfaro invited young men, members of rival gangs,
to sing for the camera a song by El Rookie, one of Panama’s most well-known
popular singers. The videos were projected on the blank walls of buildings in
a working-class neighborhood that is in fact the ground of territorial dispute
between the gangs, thus bringing them together –albeit momentarily- through
popular music.
In Monika Bravo’s haunting September 10 (uno nunca muere la víspera)the artist has acted "as a vehicle for conveying images that belong to
humanity", as she has herself stated. Bravo was part of the World Views
residency program at the World Trade Center in New York, and had been taking
video footage for A-Maze, her ongoing project on urban landscapes. She left the
buildings the night before the terrorist attacks, taking the tapes with her.
The evocative and severe images are arguably the last cinematic views to be taken
from inside the buildings. The subtitle of the work, which has a karmic ring
to it, is in fact a popular saying in Colombia: nobody dies the day before his
or her time is due. |
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