Ancient History questions the reading space by visually intensifying the tensions between text and image. The book is understood here as a space for limit-experiences where a living body squirms. The work is at the same time a tribute to the poetry of the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik and a way to break through the melancholic choking into which she leads the reader.
Laura Erber, 2008


Interview with Laura Erber by Federico Nicolao

On your video installation Ancient History, the image of the fish squirming in the air projected on an open book, creates some sort of vertigo between tangibility and sheer imagination, it is as if you had faced us with an idea of fate. Could you talk about that?

In that work I tried to capture a vertigo-inducing reading experience, the encounter with a type of writing that is reminiscent of a maze with no way out, because that is how I see Alejandra Pizarnik’s writing, which has inspired my work. For that, I also needed to stretch the spectators’ eye to the limits of the tension between body and words. Her poems stress the flawed nature of reality, thrusting the reader into a language at once fascinating and gloomy. Pizarnik was young when she committed suicide in 1972; obviously – as is often the case – the interpretation of her poetry was saturated by her biography and, on the other hand, interpretations that tried to neutralize the uneasy presence of death in her writing emerged. I was not interested in deciphering or interpreting Pizarnik’s suicide; rather, I wanted to capture, to try to provide a body to the erosion that those gloomy and at the same time very delicate poems provoked in the reader, the refined cruelty with which she destroys her own voice. Her poetry allowed me to create a visual situation in which language and death were kept under tension. I was also interested in the possibility of disturbing the rigidity of written words in media like video, given the fact that the filmed word has a different materiality and a different kind of malleability. That might be my way to try to dissolve Pizarnik’s language, a language that can paralyze the reader.

A projected image is also, to a certain extent, a meeting point for two memories. When faced with your work, my memory as an observer meets your visual and artistic memory as an artist. When filming, did you have any specific visual references, be it in terms of your chromatic choice or by making the book emerge so powerfully?

I believe that this idea of the agonizing fish on that specific book was a response to the need to go from reading to acting. I was trying to produce other solutions in that text. I needed a visual situation that could allow me and the reader-spectator to leave the maze of the Complete Works of Pizarnik. Therefore, I did not have a visual reference modulating the work beforehand, at least not consciously. I think that I was imbued with musical forms and not images, the jazz ostinatos, for example. But there is a film where the presence of fish has a great impact, and that is The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova) by Sergei Paradjanov. This film is made with static takes with utterly dazzling tones of red and blue. The objects have a very strange presence in it, and perhaps a memory of it’s visual strength might have influenced my images.

Even though the fish images have a hypnotic vibration, you chose to project this agony in an intimate format and with a provoking silence, which reminds me of the expressive power of silent films, but in this case you have silence invaded by the explosion of color. Could you speak about your choice of neither dramatizing images nor rendering them spectacular? And in what way is that choice akin to Pizarnik’s own language?

I think that the images are already so disturbing that there would be no point in making them even more dramatic. The fact that I was filming a fish in agony already brought about a spectacular element that I had to deal with. The format and scale of the projection tried to stick to the scale between the human body and the book, but the words are slightly overblown. Yes, I have drawn upon Pizarnik’s language for inspiration. If you read her poems you will notice that there is often a desire to find something terrible and to be able to name that which is terrible… her poems are a bit like miniature killing machines. Everything is very lacerating and intimate but, at the same time, abstract and open. She creates such a bleak and pleading voice - sometimes almost kitsch, sometimes sarcastic - that the reader chokes and is forced to remain without a place; there is no position to read. I feel attracted to writers who put the reader in an uncomfortable position; it is not by chance that the project that I am working on right now is based upon a book called La Mort Morte (Dead death), written in 1945 by the poet Ghérasim Luca, another poet for whom the relationship between poetry and death is crucial. Yet, differently from Pizarnik, Ghérasim created fatal traps in the language even as he simultaneously invented ways to escape them.

In your work, there is a clear link between visual arts and writing; nevertheless, whenever there is a need to show the extent to which words and images coexist in you, I feel lost. This might happen due to the fact that not only the images you produce but also your way of dealing with verbal language defies descriptions and commentaries.

The idea is to pose questions to the spectator, to make him/her tinker with those very questions without destroying his/her doubts. In each work I do, there are different configurations to this relationship. In the videos with silhouettes (The book of silhouettes, 2004 and Own Name, 2006) there is a playful situation that disfigures the subject and the identities. In História Antiga I use Pizarnik’s language to ask a broader question: how can you escape death built by words? How is it possible to breathe within hellish lyricism? I believe that in the Brazilian context – saturated as it is by abject images – this question about other possible articulations between language and death is quite valid and may even allow us to find other ways to have access to that which is extreme and violent.

Federico Nicolao (1970, Genova) is a writer, translator and curator who has written many essays on art and literature. He cooperated in various international exhibitions and institutions, among them the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (ARC), Picasso Museum (Antibes), CCA of Kytakyushu (Japan) and the International Centre of Art and Landscape on the Island of Vassivière (France). He has translated several authors into Italian, such as Edmond Jabès, Alain de Libera, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Marie Pontévia, Roger Laporte, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Federico is the founder and director of the Chorus, Una Costellazione magazine.

Translation by Martha Lima