Listen

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The period of geographical dislocation and flux between Africa and Canada led to an exploration of the effects of globalization on subjectivity.

The resulting work has dealt with issues of location, place and culture in light of the experience of living and working between two cultures. A consistent thread in much of my work has always been a duality or doubling within the structure, and the sense of conflict now includes projection and embodiment; analog and digital. This work continues an interest in doubling and duality, photo-based technologies and mimicry, and the politics of voice and representation. In addition, this body of work deals with Issues of displacement, colonization, social erasure and subjectivity

Listen is a video installation that was produced over an eight year period from l992 – 2000. I met Florence Chiweshe through a friend in Zimbabwe in 1992 while shooting Continental Drift. We discussed the project and her interest in participating, and she decided what she’d like to say and where and how she wanted to be filmed. She was completely aware that the images I filmed of her would be shown in Canada, and was very specific about her desire for me to tell her story there. After asking her what she imagined it’s like in Canada, she talked to me about her life, introduced me to her children, and showed me her garden. During the interview, there was a moment that, according to the conventions of documentary filming, should not have been recorded, but my cameraman left the camera rolling. During this two or three minute shot, I was speaking to a translator, discussing the details of a question. Florence, the woman who was being interviewed, was left listening and waiting for the interview to resume. The moment was very much about an in between space, a space of translation. Over time, I became very obsessed by this footage, and after watching it over and over again, at some point I needed to do something to understand it, to take it on in a way that was not just looking – to embody it in some way. I decided to try to copy it. To re-enact it.

Listen is like a conceptual mobius strip, a play of similarities and differences that never ends, never coheres into certainty. It is sheer possibility, sheer projection. There is no sound, no narration, no text to lead you into closure. It poses very large questions and doesn’t give any answers. Posing the question is always the main thing with my work, to formulate the question that has no easy solution and therefore pulls you in, gives you something to think about, perhaps also to implicate the viewer in the situation. Engagement with the work demands from the viewer a self reflexive process of becoming conscious of the complexities and implications of viewing or witnessing.

Listen is concerned with a phenomenology of the gaze, in the sense that a set has been constructed that allows for the enactment of a conscious presence within the piece. The viewer must perform — become aware of the ground on which she/he stands, and the angle at, and distance from which he/she views the other. You, the viewer, are standing in the place of the photographer. You are standing between us. You are invited to return the gaze, intersecting awareness.   And if you do so, you enter into the interaction, and become included in the implied or virtual intersubjectivity of our gazes, between each other, and the camera, and you.   And at some point you may become aware that we are not just being looked at, we are also watching ourselves being looked at.

If you listen very carefully, you might see what is not being said. The viewer is positioned to consider where we stand in relation to the us and them of ethnographic and news photographs, and also the us and them of subjects within discourse and within representation.

But there is something else. It is after all not Florence I’m copying but a video image. So in one sense I’m copying my own copying.   Cameras are mimesis machines, devices we have invented to do our copying for us. This is something my culture does, we mimic, we copy, and we pretend that it is someone or something else doing it rather than our individual personal selves. By attempting to copy an image that I in fact took, I am functioning like a camera, putting my self in the place of the camera, doing what the camera does, becoming in fact a mimesis machine as I generate more copies of my image copying the image of Florence …

The works in this exhibition, Listen, The Impossible Dream and Double Bewitched are like a series of open-ended games that the viewer can enter.   Each piece presents a realignment of codes of similarity and difference that allow the viewer to question the nature of the ‘space between’ and the act of viewing. The work explores complex issues of the location of voice, and the relation of personal, local voices to larger material, historical and social realities.