“Video art provided me with a terrain in which I continuously work, and that only later could I understand: the doubt. It’s an important terrain for me because I interpret that working with the doubt is not to conclude, not to state, not to close senses, but to open roads, and because there’s doubt in everything, and I oppose it to the certainty.” (Gabriela Golder, 2008).
Gabriela Golder is an Argentinian curator and visual artist, born in Buenos Aires, 1971. She studied to be a film director at the Film University of Buenos Aires in 1995, though she has hardly used such title. Instead, video art (although she says that such term has already been “dissolved”) called Golder’s attention when she was just beginning her studies; she felt it potentially contained every other art she was working with until then (sculpture, theatre, photography). After obtaining her film director degree, she left to pursue her graduate studies at the Santiago de Compostela University, in Spain. After that, in 2000, she got a DESS (Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures Spécialisés) in Hypermedia at the University of Paris 8.
Golder’s career as a video artist flourished in the late 90s, and her works have been shown in several exhibitions and biennales, especially in Latin America. Her pieces have also received many awards, such as the Prize Luis Espinal in the Mostra CineTrabalho, Brazil (2011); the “Sigwart Blum prize” of the Argentinean Arts Critics Association, Argentina (2007); the Media Art Award from the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medietechnologie), Germany (2004); the first prize at Videobrasil, Brazil (2003); the first prize at Festival Videoformes, France (2003) and the Tokyo Video Award, in Japan (2002). She has also been an artist in residence in Germany, France, Canada, USA, and Brazil.
As for her oeuvre, it is certainly a politically charged set of works. Her reflections range from the Argentinian military dictatorship to the gender violence, among many other issues. Still, certain traits remain a constant. Memory. Otherness. She moves in the space of memory, both personal and collective, constantly asking herself, constantly listening to the others. Gabriela speaks of her own work in this way: “I believe that my journey, my path, is circular, permanently fluctuating between THE SELF and THE OTHERS, and between one thing and another thing, many paths crossing one another […] In my path, memory, the search for memory, inquiring, they all have to do with an encounter. I meet with the others, listen to them. They ask me questions and new elements are born, many of which were unimaginable […] In my work I can find two more or less clear categories. Collective memory/personal memory and the others/the self, or listening to the others and looking inside (as I said before, everything is increasingly mixed together).”
Thoughts born form the fractures in Latin America
For Golder, as for almost every other person in the southern part of this continent, the political struggles and later military dictatorships that took place in Latin America became main issues, especially when talking about memory, both intimate and collective. The trauma of such hard times was spread through the whole subcontinent, and the will of not forgetting, the strength of those memories that don’t want to fade away, acts as a uniting force, connecting nations and generations. In a context where post-dictatorship governments only wish to “look forward”, the struggle to bring back the memory of those who died or disappeared, is an effort many have engaged with all through Latin America.
Gabriela is part of these efforts as well. Being raised in a politically active, left wing family, she often wondered how could she have had a happy childhood in times of danger (General Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina lasted from 1976 to 1983. Hundreds of people were killed, tortured and disappeared during that time). How could their parents give her a quiet life at the same time that their friends were disappearing? How did she fit in all of that, as a child? Those are the thoughts behind “En Memoria de los Pájaros” (“In Memory of the Birds”, Single Channel Video, 2000). Here, memories of her own past (like holidays spent on the beach) are mixed with memories of her nation, both displayed in parallel, in separated windows within the same frame, along with some written texts. The images shown are taken from personal films and public film archives, as well as from some of Golder’s friends’ old personal Super 8 films. She also recorded many interviews (including an interview with a family friend that reappeared after the dictatorship), and some of them are played in sound during the video. The result of this process, which has been awarded and shown multiple times all over the globe, is beautifully described by the artist and art critic Fabiana Barreda: “How to construct from loss? The camera is the recovered memory, in search of an impossible, an unimaginable, an unspeakable. Two parallel images border a black interval […] A tragedy is displayed and survived through the invention of a parallel space. This survival strategy works until the limits of pain make of this parallel world an insufficient consolation. Right there, we ask ourselves: what is the space of pain in the image? Pain submerges in an aqueous flux, flowing in the thin and immaterial light of the intimate memory that begins to fuse with the collective history.”
Another piece addressing this period, although from a different perspective, is “Conversation Piece” (single channel video, 2013). Here, a grandmother and her granddaughters have a conversation as the kids read the Communist Manifesto, asking questions on issues as complex as freedom and equality. The artist Claudia Joskowicz wrote about this piece: “By contextualizing the transmission of ideology in a familial setting and mediated through a matrilineal agent, the piece meditates on the way ideologies are absorbed. […] Those who, like Golder, came of age in South America at a time when oppression and freedom were not abstract concepts but real conditions […] absorbed ideology while learning about survival and the possibility of resistance. Conversation Piece places us there, in learning through translation, both literal and metaphoric. That space between the girls and the grandmother is where we start to learn about understanding.”
Golder also deals with the recovery of memory in her net art vein. The project “Rescate” (“Rescue”, net art and video installation, 2009), which was presented as a video installation in Canada and Argentina (2009 in Canada, 2010 and 2011 in Argentina), addresses the cultural censorship suffered during General Videla’s dictatorship, where several books were forbidden and burnt. Rescue is an attempt to save some of those lost words, another effort of the artist to bring memories back to the present. The web-based project displays written words coming forward to the screen, while the user can move around a sort of infinite space with the pointer, discovering more words coming forward. At the same time, the user will hear Gabriela’s voice reading some of these words.
Rescate’s Website: rescate.gabrielagolder.com
The Installation:
The voice of the others
Gabriela Golder’s concerns are not only bonded to the obscure Latin American 70s and 80s. She works also to preserve the memories of those who are now, as if she was trying to raise the voice of those who won’t be heard in the concert of history. Or perhaps she is trying to build a collective memory –a voice that can be raised- by gathering the small pieces, those personal moments that lay silenced in people’s pockets. She says that “memory helps to create an identity for man, for peoples. […] My work is about recovering memory, activating memory, inquiring. And observing, showing, making others see, insisting, repeating, insisting again, on the need to create identity from memory. It is to assume the dialectic between the past, the present and the future.”
“Reocupación” (“Reoccupation”, 5-Channels video installation, 2006) is one of the pieces addressing the others. Here, unemployed workers appear talking about the loss of their jobs, and also performing the different actions that characterize those professions. The words pronounced by one worker start affecting those images of the workers performing their duties, transforming them into mere memories of what’s not being done anymore. As the author says, “the gestures, the habits of the man at work are tending to their progressive disintegration. The movements and corporal postures that characterized the identity of a job are stopped being done when losing it, are disappearing.”
Golder also addresses the issues affecting women in Latin America. In this vein, we can find pieces like “Doméstico” (“Domestic”, single channel video, 2007) and “Heróica” (“Heroic”, single channel video co-directed by Gabriela Golder and Silvina Cafici, 1999.). In the first one, women face the camera and throw a dish to the floor (the dish breaking is the only sound we can hear). This gesture is not only a metaphoric one, but it also contains a powerful memory within it, a sort of oppressed feeling that’s being released in the gesture; women on the video adopt very different attitudes before throwing the dishes. Some of them are defying, others are angry, and others even seem to be ashamed. Still, they all throw the dishes to the floor. Gabriela has highlighted the importance of “making noise” in some interviews. Just like the noise of broken dishes.
The other piece, Heroica, works in a more literal terrain. The video starts with a definition for “monument”. It then portrays four women performing a sort of dance in a rooftop where sheets are hanging. These perfectly clean sheets may work as an analogy in the piece, representing the women’s desire for an unharmed past, or a brighter, cleaner future. As they move in this setting, their written stories are superimposed on the image. The memories of these women’s difficult past appear, re-signifying their present, and giving sense to the piece’s title as the stories add weight to their characters, and their identities, once hidden (like people under the sheets, perhaps) begin to appear, bringing their “heroic” traits (usually assigned to men in history) to the foreground. The four women write down their stories in the sheets, and then play with school stamps of Argentinian illustrious characters, while the music adds to this heroism feeling that has been developing so far in the video. This “confrontation of the public chronicle with the private one, of the historic acknowledgement with the social anonymity” (Rodrigo Alonso) is what gives special strength to what Graciela Taquini described as an “anthropologic and feminist visual poem”.
Another project that addresses memory is the web-based “Arrorró” (Installation video, net art, online performance, 2009). The website holds dozens of videos of lullabies sung by the participants, acting as a huge lullaby archive. Ars Electronica awarded Golder with a grant to begin this project in 2009, and ever since it has been growing. Arrorró rescues small bits of memory, “an immense amount of little stories and tales that accompanied the presentation of the songs […] Mediated by an occasional cup of tea coffee or “mate”, stories of arrivals, birthplaces, different geographies or passed away relatives were heard. Our archive hosts the memory of these fragments of shared intimacy. Cultural diversity, memory and identity are the main issues of the project.” (Project Arrorró website). Here, once again, Golder’s desire for listening to the others is upfront. It is a political stand: only through the understanding of the otherness can we reconstruct our past, as well as constructing our identity for the future. As María Victoria Simón wrote, “in this act that precedes the piece, in putting in front of the other, in rescuing with the other a forgotten gesture or an important children song, lays all of her (Golder’s) political dimension, and one of the keys to think about her work: to constantly place her own view in relation to that of the others, to confront, to dialogue, to learn, to find the selfness in the otherness, and to build her own identity not only from her marks and obsessions, but from a profound bond of pertinence to a determined group” (On the Threshold. Notes on the female element and women in the work of Gabriela Golder. María Victoria Simón, 2010).
Arrorró’s Website: www.proyectoarrorro.com
For a final note, I will speak as a Latin American. People in our countries still have bleeding wounds from the past. Efforts for preventing our memory from fading away are still vital if we want to build a healthy society, one that finally has the tools for “moving forward”. I believe Gabriela Golder’s pieces go one step beyond that point, alerting us of the fact that, when constructing the identity of our peoples, not only the big, important (and sometimes dark) events are to be considered. Such events do not constitute the history by themselves, neither our identity. Instead, a huge crowd of small voices is to be stacked, bringing every tone, every pitch and every chord into the melody. Perhaps, one day, it’ll become a melody for our children to sleep on, a memory-lullaby that would induce better dreams on the future, with a truer voice of the past.
Useful Links and Resources on Gabriela Golder
http://www.gabrielagolder.com/ (Her Website. There’s a “texts” section with lots of… well, texts about her work . Some of them are available in English)
https://vimeo.com/gabrielagolder (Her Vimeo Channel)
http://multimedia.maimonides.edu/2006/09/una-obra-de-gabriela-golder-en-cultura-y-media/ (in Spanish)
http://boladenieve.org.ar/artista/8048/golder-gabriela (in Spanish)
http://www.praxis-art.com/artistas/gabriela-golder/ (in Spanish)
http://bombmagazine.org/article/7513/portfolio (Claudia Joskowicz’s article on “Conversation Pieces”. In English)
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