Minnette
Vári
Alien: general information*
Alien is a short video animation of one minute duration, made in 1998, four
years after the first democratic elections in South Africa. It has a soundtrack
of just less than two minutes. The piece is based on about ten short sections
of television news footage of events in or concerning South Africa spanning
a time from 1993 until the beginning of 1998. This was a time of great adjustments
for this country, and South Africa was in the news often. Whether at home or
abroad, I was always very interested in how the stories of this country and
its people was presented to the world, and to itself. The big television news
networks ran regular items featuring histories and circumstances I felt to be
very close to me, but at the same time there was a very strange shift that I
guessed to have been caused by these events having been translated into the
narratives of newscasting. I felt I couldn't any more 'see' myself within these
histories, with all the repetition (items repeating every half hour at least)
the histories represented aquired a surreal feeling for me, drawing the contours
of a 'home' I felt I was becoming more and more unfamiliar with, an alienation
setting in. I saw bodies that moved, gestures being made, words uttered, I heard
voices ring in town halls carried forth by deep and troublesome emotions, and
I wondered, where, in all this, am I? In the medium of television, I find whom-ever
is portrayed, becomes a spokesperson of some sort, someone who speaks on behalf
of somebody else, be this body ideo-logical or biological. In this sense, every
body that features and is held up by the media as some representative voice
from South Africa is in a way speaking on my behalf as well. In alien, I have
appropriated the moment, taken my turn to represent the representatives, knowing
full well that I will find myself in fragments of a history that will not offer
me a comfortable fit.
Alien features a delegation of South African politicians at a UN conference
in Berlin in 1996. It features a praise singer at the inauguration of Mandela
in 1994, a group of dancers at an ìAfrican Renaissanceî corporate
show in Johannesburg in 1997, and a percussionist at the same event. Two women
and a girl modeling ìauthentic Africanî clothing at an expo. A
VW combi carrying AWB (right wing movement) members to a rally on the East Rand,
a police vehicle following in its wake. Helicopters doing a fly-by at a government
celebration, voters being frisked (body-searched) before entering the polling
station. Politicians waving their fists in the air. A photographer being escorted
away from a riot scene by a policeman. A man holding the cubs of a lioness in
a piece on a wildlife hunting scandal (canned lions). Two SA soldiers in Angola
somewhere in the 1980. Someone putting on a set of earphones at the TRC hearings.
A man pushing a trolley full of evidence at an election fraud inquest, two members
of the press standing by with their cameras. Because this work deals with memory
in the way that we remember history, or experience it, and the emotional vertigo
that sets in when you cannot recognise yourself in another's account of the
same history, I went into the studio and, from memory, re-enacted, re-animated
the movements of the people represented in the original footage. But because
I am not the same size and shape of those originally filmed, and because my
memory and re-enactment of their movements was not accurate, and in fact, because
I was never really physically there (although somehow represented), when I finally
tried to fit my body into these pieces of filmed history by using a digital
grid, it resulted in the peculiar distortions and alien appearance of my body.
Like something that is uncomfortable in its own skin going through the motions
of a process it doesn't understand.
I left some 'souvenirs' of the original footage in alien the microphone stand,
the ledgers and bottles of Perrier water on a conference table, a puma helicopter,
a sangoma's stick, spotlights, a lion, motor vehicles, etc. This sets the scene,
preserves in a way the original context, and makes it somehow South African
at least to me.
The sound of the piece has been done in very much the same way. I have fed the
sound of my heartbeat through the voices in the original footage. This gives
the work its driving beat. You can also discern the voice of Eugene Terreblanche
(the leader of the AWB), coloured with the tone of my own voice, saying in Afrikaans:
'Hy is die draer van God se wit lig in donker Afrika' ('He is the bearer of
God's white light in dark Africa'), whereafter there is Thabo Mbeki's voice
(our current president), saying 'Thank you very much'. And so forth.
I have used my own body because for me it is the first index of thinking about
a self, constructing a notion of who or what it is that I am. And have stripped
it of all over-identifying features like clothing and hair: things that say
too much about a certain time. I wanted to give the viewer an opportunity to
inhabit the space I have in a way opened through my intervention. Given it a
shape that remains somehow open. Have I succeeded in doing this? I don't know.
Yet in a way I do: through countless conversations with people from Accra to
Antwerp, men, women, children. Alien is me. It is also you, and every body in
between.
* This is an informal text in conversational style to give some
basic information about Alien. Please do not quote from it directly.
© Minnette Vári
1999