The sound arrives before the image. A tapping, perhaps of a drumstick against the taut leather of a sabar: deep, resonating when striking the centre, sharp when grazing the edge. Someone shakes a shekere, and the vibration of its beads joins the previous beat in rhythmic succession. Then comes the singing. When the image appears, delayed, the hands emerge, busy: grinding corn, skilfully wielding a machete, or dexterously braiding thread. In Reassemblage (1982), the Vietnamese filmmaker and composer Trinh T. Minh-ha portrays the communal life of the Serer people. Her approach sheds the label of ethnographic cinema, or rather it stretches a term that at its root encompasses both the people (ethnos) and the act of writing or recording (graphein). A film about Senegal but, she questions, what in Senegal? In that gesture of Reassemblage “putting the parts back together”, there is similarly an impulse to rewrite what has historically fixed “the other” as object. “I want to speak nearby, rather than speak about,” she states softly, and that phrase becomes a manifesto for a work that is determined to problematise the image of otherness. To speak nearby implies acknowledging the distance between the person looking and those populating the film, opening up the space of representation so as not to speak on their behalf, in their place, or above them.
In her own words, her nomadic cinema is interested in “remote parts of the non-Western world”. It swings in a dialectical movement: letting the world approach from the outside in – what some call documentary – and from the inside out – what others call fiction. With its silent intervals and seemingly disjointed syntax, Reassemblage doubts rather than affirms. It allows for gaps, pauses, sound holes that pierce the image. Placed at ground level – “where most daily activities are carried out in African villages” – or at eye level, the camera finds itself being looked at by a group of women and girls, and it pauses on the uncomfortable gesture of someone looking away. The camera acts as a switch on reality. A contract is quantified in that moment when an eye moves up and down. “What I see [she confesses] is life looking at me. I am looking through a circle into a circle of looks.”
The phrase travels through time and space until crashing against the outer wall of Artium Museoa’s main gallery, where it serves as a prologue and echoes each of the works waiting on the other side. “The practices on display in this exhibition are therefore those that in some cases directly seek to question these paradigms or interrogate them from various perspectives because of the way they are produced and generated,” notes Catalina Lozano, curator (in collaboration with the artist Louidgi Beltrame) of Looking Through a Circle in a Circle of Looks.
From the dimness of the foyer, Catalina and Louidgi attempt to establish a few points of reference, as if unfolding the pages of an exhibition guide in mid-air. A screen occupies a corner in the adjoining room. Someone is dancing in front of the camera, his hat defying gravity. The caption mentions his name: Titon. The dance is hypnotic, a spontaneous choreography performed for the camera. The person looking and framing is the filmmaker, poet and dancer Maya Deren.
Titon dances for the full four minutes of the footage, but the absence of credits ordering time leads us into thinking that the movement has no end. His dance guards an open secret of this exhibition, as it links archives, names and affiliations. Catalina Lozano came across these images via the Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, creator of La cabeza mató a todos (2014) and Marché Salomón (2015), two works that engage with Deren from the other side of the wall.
Inspired by her mentor Katherine Dunham’s films of the West Indies and her conversations with the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Maya Deren began to imagine what would perhaps become the most ambitious project of her life: an enquiry into religious possession through dance in Haiti. Perhaps she could access these invisible forces through the device of a camera, and by recording the ritual reveal trance-like states in which the self shifts and being is transformed in and through community relationships.
“Scrupulous observer that she is, Deren begins, as she penetrates Haitian culture, to realize that she is dealing with a form that defies the boundaries of her onto-esthetic [argues the art critic Anette Michelson]. It is with the realization that Haitian dance was not, in itself, a dance form but part of something larger, a ‘mythological ritual,’ that she begins to perceive the ‘total integrity of cultural form’.” How, then, can we break through that surface?
Maya Deren worked on the editing for at least 10 years, although her personal documents reveal a struggle that lasted until her final days. Stan Brakhage testifies that she stored her reels in coffee cans. The film remained unfinished, but the project found other ways to materialise, including the publication of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953), one of the most comprehensive studies of Vodou written by a non-Haitian author. The prologue serves as both a declaration of principles and a kind of retrospective conclusion to its own process: a manifesto on the ethics of observation, the will to control and the limits of creation. “I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.”[1] Titon dancing lingers on – without syntax – now no longer as evidence of failure, but as a grimace on a loop. Without being fixed or resolved: in its latency, in its secrecy.
Lozano claims it is vital to consider Deren’s gesture of renunciation in the face of a reality that reveals itself to be far more complex and elusive in cinematic terms: “That decision acts as a starting point for considering practices that use the moving image critically, whether to question the paradigms of ethnographic cinema – where the relationship between observer and observed is not challenged – or practices that, by their very methodology, suspend those traditional models. […] We were also interested in exploring how contemporary art has addressed these themes.”
We make our way in procession towards the main gallery. Louidgi and Catalina highlight the exhibition design as the central focus of the proposal: an open architecture that shifts the logic of the black cube and invites us to establish connections between films, images or people who keep reappearing. “This also allows us to create a common space where they mingle with non-film works – such as paintings, drawings or sculptures – that bring up major forms of representation or themes within the exhibition, represented from perspectives that have not been so widely publicised,” they explain.
This stretches a thread that weaves figures in circles or straight lines from one end of the gallery to the other, from one territory to another. It provokes rhymes and counterpoints, activating cross-references that challenge the coordinates of time and space: from the vever that Deborah Stratman superimposes on Barbara Hammer’s images of Guatemala to the Divine Horsemen drawings in the Colombian artist Wilson Díaz’s book, from the Haitian folklore in Hector Hyppolite’s oil paintings on cardboard to the Vodou deities that Frantz Jacques (Guyodo) draws with a Bic pen on the back of cereal boxes, or the ibobo (owners), the spirits of plants and animals in the Shipibo-Konibo worldview, which Lastenia Canayo (Pecón Quena) translates into acrylic.
Leaving the gallery is like surfacing to encounter the last moments of the day. Artium is built on the remains of an abandoned (failed?) construction project that envisioned a bus station, underground car park and also a shopping centre, offices and communal leisure spaces. Only the three-storey car park was ever built before the company went bankrupt. The museum rises on this site, reusing the basement storage area and organised into two elevated volumes separated by a dry plaza and defined by the materiality of their surfaces: white concrete and grey granite. The public programme unfolds from this granite block, the heart of the workshop spaces, inviting the Brazilian-born choreographic and imagery artist Ana Pi and the Malian writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara during a weekend in March to explore new lines of enquiry and expand the repertoire of ideas of Looking Through a Circle in a Circle of Looks.
Crossing the Atlantic is one of the most emblematic maritime routes in the history of navigation: thousands of miles plotted across the sea carry the symbolic weight of human migration towards the “New World”. A mausoleum for the millions of slaves who died during the Middle Passage, it is now also a mass grave for African and Global South migrants who lose their lives trying to reach Europe or North America. For six days and five nights, the luxury ocean liner Queen Mary 2 will be the setting for Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2009), an intellectual crossing out to sea during which Manthia Diawara reveals the personality and thought of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant. “Christopher Columbus left for the New World, and I am the one to return from it. Being on this boat, it’s not revenge,” he jokes, as the camera wanders through the plush, carpeted corridors, capturing as it lingers diligent waiters and other passengers who seemingly adhere to a similar dress code.
The Atlantic appears to be immense in Diawara’s camera. From the deck, he watches the ever-changing sky and the choppy waves. As they cruise along, the conversation unfolds over the course of several days. Diawara confesses that, although Frantz Fanon taught him how to think and organise his ideas, it was Glissant who saved his life. He envisaged this film as a homecoming: Glissant had to cross the Atlantic, as his ancestors did, but he also had to reach the shore. His return to his native Martinique serves as the pretext for portraying him among neighbours and family, invoking Mount Pelée, admiring that lush, humid landscape, prompting him to return to his luminous concept of the Creole garden: small-scale plantations that served as acts of resistance and liberation for enslaved people, continuing to resist the advance of monoculture today. Species survive in the Creole garden because they protect one another.
Glissant further develops his concept of Tout-Monde, which seeks to replace totalitarian modes of thought with an open attitude that embraces unity through difference. Moving back and forth between modern European thought and a Caribbean epistemology, he draws on the African diaspora: those peoples who lost their gods, their family possessions, their songs on ships, who have frequented the grave, “the oblivion of the abyss comes to them”. In this culture born of displacement, “Relation [Glissant insists] is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge.” Each diaspora is therefore a passage from unity to multiplicity.
“It’s important to know that what I am living now is the future that someone dreamed for me a long time ago,” Ana Pi muses in NoirBLUE – les déplacements d’une danse (2018). Crossing the depths of the Atlantic to her continent of origin became a journey “towards the future”. The experience of setting foot on African soil for the first time led her to trace a genealogy that transcends family ancestry: what precedes us is what enables us to be here today. The video is structured by the rhythm of her movements and the deconstruction of the word “preto”, by the spontaneous encounter with its inhabitants and the fascination with the contortions of local b-boys. What is black dance? Pi insists incisively: “It is the only one to have an assigned colour. If a black dance exists, why not then imagine a blue dance?”
NoirBLUE, blue almost black, unfolds at Artium as an expanded video work or a performance screening. A blue veil covers her and simultaneously extends across the gallery floor like a path. Her body composes and decomposes forms, rehearsing its own grammar. Ana Pi thinks in movement and reactivates the etymology of the word “choreography”: khoreia (dance) and graphia (writing). To choreograph is to write with the body. Barely illuminated by the blue lights of her shoes, the scene is traced in space like an ephemeral script: here and now.
Pi champions the margins as spaces for recognition, insisting on preserving and defining them with the utmost clarity. Recognising oneself in difference, in turn, involves identifying with Glissant’s ideas, whose categories of creolisation and opacity permeate her own research. To claim the “right to opacity” is to affirm the possibility of existing without being reduced to categories that correspond to colonial power. To exist without translation, as part of an unfinished process, open to what is yet to come. To exist in the difficulty of relationships, to resonate with the disquiet of others. We understand the world better if we tremble with it.
[1] Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson & Company, 1983-2004), p. 6.