Minnette
Vári
Alien: an interview
Rory Bester: How have you tried to use different kinds of archival footage
in the video?
Minnette Vári: I preferred sources such as television news footage from
the distant and recent past.
I also used free publications by various South African organisations, travel
brochures and commemorative pamphlets of the South African Armed Forces. I chose
the kind of information that is endlessly recycled on global media networks.
I was once snowed in at a motel room in Detroit, watching CNN for news on South
Africa. It was 1994, a very important year for South Africa. Inevitably the
requisite news items came up and I photographed them straight off the television
screen with my small automatic camera. Ironically these re-claimed images became
part of my souvenirs of America. Eventually I decided to re-animate these low-tech
stills. I wanted to restore a new kind of authenticity to these over-familiar
images by applying the aesthetics of cyber-animation, broadcast news and virtual
reality games. I've tried not only to reconstruct the way the images were used,
but to also rewrite them.
RB: It isn't really clear what images you're using as sources for the animated
video...is this important?
MV: The original content is all but lost through this process of visual encryption,
but I think the sequences contain clues that say a lot about where the images
originated and even their context. Some details do remain, things like microphones,
emblems, aircraft. These trivia may be arbitrary, but when read as part of a
sequence they reveal the trappings of a kind of reportage: a version of South
Africa that the world sees in eye-witness account-type reporting. We start seeing
ourselves in this revolving mirror of up-to-date-ness, but also uncover the
world's desires with regards to this country and its situation, the tell-tale
patterns of othering. TV frames events and crops meaning, animating world events
in a very particular way. I'm interested in how images get convoluted and translated
in the narrative of news and sent all around the world, becoming quite detached
from their origin, almost alien. That is why the figures in the video seem so
bizarre and distorted. They speak of the discomfort of an ill-fitting interpretation.
In my failure to fit into their forms I become misshapen, yet remain recognisable.
Because one is instinctively drawn to one's own image, there is a tension in
being repelled from it at the same time. My project is about reclaiming these
images, re-inscribing them, personalising them. It's about embodiment, quite
literally giving a new body.
RB: How important is it to you that you end up re-creating a narrative?
MV: We live in a time where everything has to be redrawn. A simple analogy is
the new constitution. 'Draw' implies a going back, a tapping into, but when
you make a drawing you also advance along a line. Drawing is a process of appropriation,
always covering new ground. 'Draw' also implies pulling, tugging, an act of
struggle. To draw is to give shape to something. Applied as an implement of
narration, it can be a way to plough up pieces of fragmented history, a means
to re-member certain things. Art can be a powerful instrument against the forgetfulness
of history. In the animated video, I render the silhouettes live, drawing myself
into that space. With this appropriative gesture I am re-inscribing the photographed
figure with the vernacular of self-portraiture, as part of a need to create
a new subjectivity in post-apartheid art. It's about our paranoid fantasies
of ownership and loss. One cannot take one's identity as a South African for
granted. This kind of identity-configuration always remains negotiable.
RB: Why have you inserted yourself into the images?
MV: It is a way to figure out what the implications are for me. In an image
of a policeman escorting a photographer away, I wanted to register the moment
of forced erasure and alienation. Both the policeman and the photographer were
acting in the interests of particular bodies of people and are caught up in
that moment of discord: a desire to remember and a counter-desire to erase,
to forcibly divert the gaze. It is a moment where distinctly different agendas
draw these figures into an explosive unit. I attempt to write my own implicit
presence into the narrative of these crises. But by doing this I myself perform
an act of erasure. My body is not a-political nor neutral, my access to it is
not uncomplicated. It is a site of continuous arbitration and transformation.
I find the same sense of tentative uneasiness in images relating to transformative
events. The figures in the original footage, members of the armed forces, press
and political delegates, are all in some way emissaries, representatives of
a South Africa. As representatives they have a mandate to speak or act on my
behalf. This way I'm not actually absent in the images I've used. Yet my implied
presence in the original images is fraught with uncertainty. Like news events,
it needs to be explained and recounted again and again.
RB: Are these images about your own guilt about the past?
MV: No.
RB: In using documentary processes, how important is the visual discourse itself?
MV: To me it's important to show how the same visual iconographies can be applied
in propagating vastly different agendas. The context of representation is easily
tainted by the way images are presented.
Excerpt from an interview conducted by Rory Bester, from the
catalogue of Democracyís Images: Photography and visual art after apartheid,
Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, September 1998.
Rory Bester is a Johannesburg-based critic and curator.
© Minnette Vári, Johannesburg, June 1998
info@zieglergalerie.com