OTHER SPACES


In 1973, Nam June Paik announced in his Global Groove: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” Although Paik's prediction did not come true as precisely and radically as the video suggested, since there are no channels dedicated to experimentation and none boasting the diversity of images proposed by Paik in his video, we do live surrounded by images. It is an imagescape of sorts (Burnett, 2004), combining the intensities of direct reality with modes of media presentation and representation, thus creating a tension between proximity and distance, as for instance in the case of television and the place it occupies in households throughout the world.

The question we posed ourselves for this curatorship inevitably involved the relation between spaces and electronic image. Far from painting an apocalyptic scenario (Lyotard, Baudrillard), we believe it is more important to draw a landscape as it unfolds, as much for displaying the power of video to reveal the space that we experience in contemporary life (hybrid, flowing, heterogeneous, discontinuous), as for thinking of how video occupies space in contemporary life. Which is to say that there are two distinct, yet intertwined trends: on the one hand, we have video as a possibility for revealing space; on the other hand, we have space itself filled with images, filled with screens (Virilio). But getting back to domestic spaces: the space of the inhabited house-which in a way is organized around the TV as a form of distraction, a window to the outside world, or a mirror* to itself-has prompted many different considerations. Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Margareth Morse, Run Burnett, and others have approached the questions that arise from the presence of images in contemporary spaces.

Despite the attractiveness of the issue posed by these two trends, here we will approach only one of them: the way in which video portrays/reveals space.

We believe that contemporary audiovisual production is on its way to a reflection on space that will bare the daily tensions we experience in the various spaces through which we pass. On the one hand, we are aware that long-distance communication technologies allow us to take the space back in a different way. The boundaries between public and private are in motion, and so are we, with our cell phones, palmtops, and other mobile communication and information access tools. On the other hand, technology aside, the contemporary conflicts force us to redefine identities, ethnicities, and, above all, places, territories, spaces. How does the audiovisual production cope with this situation? What we have is a diversity of strategies designed to widen the meanings that space can attain. The concept of heterotopia, defined by Foucault in “Of Other Spaces” can help us understand these relationships.

Foucault wrote: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”** Given the situation we experience, Foucault points to three basic stages in the ways in which we have perceived space over the course of history: initially, in the Middle Ages, there was a split between real and celestial space, which created a space of localization. Afterwards, Galileo introduced the concept of the space of extension, i.e., infinity opposing the Middle-Ages view. Man had lost his central place in infinite space, which “has no center and no margins.” Currently, according to Foucault, we live in the age of positioning. Therefore, space is “defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids.”

This space, which offers itself in the form of “relations among sites,” as Foucault put it, is based around two concepts of space: utopias and heterotopias. Utopias are “sites with no real place.” On the other hand we have heterotopias, which are actual sites.

There are (...) probably in any culture, in every civilization, real places-places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society-which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.


The study of these heterotopias of crisis and deviation allows us to understand the relations among sites of individuals and groups in these different spaces of “simultaneous contestation between the mythic and the real.” Despite Foucault's citing a few highly metaphoric examples such as the mirror (utopia and heterotopia at the same time), the cemetery, the asylum, and the boat, based on these premises one can attempt to explore the relations among sites generated by images and their devices in space.

Therefore, we believe that some of the more recent audiovisual work deems feasible the situation of space as heterotopia. In the case of the videos, it is all about a way of handling images so they reflect the multiplicity of relations among sites that we experience nowadays, in the various spaces we travel. Each artist, in his/her own way, knew how to build his/her images of space in “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.”

It was not by chance that we inaugurated the Other Spaces curatorship of the FF>>Dossier with Landscape Theory (2005), by Roberto Bellini. The space Bellini is able to unveil in his video is amazing. The cliché images show how space is being furrowed by capital in a complex range of power relations, turning the simple act of recording images into a threat. The friction in the dialogue between the one who records the images and the one who comments on the act is not reflected by the plain images of birds flying across the sunset. This context transforms the image, which then translates and reveals the ways in which power is exercised. The empty space supports all of the control sites at the same time, confronting us with the idea of juxtaposition.

Without confronting any space as image, Bellini reveals to us the degree of the heterotopias we experience, invented spaces juxtaposed with real spaces. The image-device lays bare the tension networks and the lines of force that characterize the relationship between the place of the image (“There was a guy taking a picture of Dillard's over here the other day with a movie camera (…) and the Austin PD held him in,” goes one of the conversations in the video) and the image of the place (the sky in a U.S. city) as property, which is the ultimate furrowing.

In Uyuni (2005), by Andrés Denegri, the situation repeats itself. The barren space shown in powerful, processed images seems to oscillate between security and insecurity. A foreign view experiencing the new. The empty space in Uyuni reverberates the situation of the featured couple, which does not seem to be a part of all that, not included in that situation. As opposed to providing images with new meanings through audio, as does Bellini, Denegri shows us that the images reflect precisely the situation of the couple. Space is no longer juxtaposition, but rather a “system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” The dimension of the city of Uyuni, disclosed by Denegri, relates to the couple's situation. The image does not show space as it really is, but rather as a reality constructed through a situation.

In Alugo-me (2004), by Fernanda Goulart, space is subjective. Recorded in consecutive visits and sessions at empty houses for rent, Goulart created a space between the private and the public. On one side, images of the empty house, ready to be occupied; on the other side, the sound of love ads on popular radio stations. Loneliness? An empty feeling? The spaces in the houses depicted by Goulart hold us captive, in a situation where we have the house on one side and the street on the other side. Her video seems to build an intersection between these two spaces, a connecting link through the combination of image and sound. The street seems to invade the empty space in the house to fill it up with its hopes for love.

That same public space is the focus of Vue Panoramique (2005), by Bouchra Khalili, with a different approach. Instead of bringing things into the domestic realm, such as Goulart, Khalili deals with motion and contemplation. She contemplates and comments on the public space. In this way, her own way, with much delicacy, she bares our nomadisms, the transitions between spaces, the coming and going of boats. Space here is the landscape that allows itself to be watched with an intense gaze concerned with seeing beyond, interested in discovering the function of motion. Landscape and memory seem to meet each other in this nomadic view of the landscape.

Claudia Aravena takes on the subject of memory, territories, and nomadisms, the latter of which somehow reflect upon identities. The issue can be detected in the meeting of different memories in Berlin: been there / to be here (2000), as well as in the approximations between Santiago and Berlin in Lugar Común (2001). In Out of Place (2005), though, Aravena seems to delve deeper into these questions, as she discusses, in a very personal way, the situation of Palestinian families exiled in Chile. The situation is that of space as recreation of memory, a quasi-Proustian*** memorial project, free in its time of search and seeking. Such is the work of Aravena. Here, the function of space is to seek time and to reveal/twist memory.

In Background to a Seduction (2004), by Gregg Smith, the space is pure playful recreation. A couple sharing a bottle of wine switches from situation to situation, as the camera softly moves around and ends up revealing where and in what context that setting is located. Smith shows us that space is, first and foremost, motion and recreation. Heterotopia that approximates distinct places. Thus, the realm in which the couple lives, with all the delicacy and subtlety of small flowers moving gently in the background, could be any place, since that atmosphere of encounter always creates a space, which in turn incrusts other spaces, giving rise to a juxtaposition of several different spaces.

Far from exhausting the relations between image and space, this curatorship is a point of convergence for reflections, and it is intended to fuel the debate on the issue, even if it is an initial one, in order to prompt and provoke further discussion.


* See: GRAHAM, Dan, “Video in Relation to Architecture” IN: HALL, Doug and JO FIFER, Sally (eds.), Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, New Jersey, Aperture Foundation, 1990. GRAHAM, Dan, “Three Projects for Architecture and Video / Notes (1977)” IN: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, STILES, Kristine and SELZ, Peter (org.), University of California Press, 1996.
** All quotes from Foucault's “Of Other Spaces” mentioned here have been extracted from http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html.
*** One cannot help but recall Proust waking up in the middle of the night, searching for a place: “For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years.”

Eduardo de Jesus
curator