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Review

**Steffanie Ling** is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments and diatribes. Her books are _Nascar_ (Blank Cheque, 2016) and _Cuts of Thin Meat_ (Spare Room, 2015).

The cohesion of three particular films—Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s _Walled Unwalled_ (2018), Onyeka Igwe’s _Specialised Technique_ (2018) and Gabi Dao’s _The Protagonists_ (2018)—anchored the _Inquiring Minds_ program in distinct considerations of sound and experimental inquiries. The more I thought about the program’s aims to highlight the complexities, tragedies and triumphs of recorded lived experiences, it became apparent that zealous objectivity has historically produced more than a few models of false authenticity.

In _Walled Unwalled_, Abu Hamdan performs across three sound effects studios at Funkhaus, the former headquarters for the German Democratic Republic’s state radio. Today, this purpose-built facility is a highly sophisticated recording complex hosting a plethora of recording artists. In his description of the work, Abu Hamdan writes that worldwide, 49 border walls have been constructed in under two decades. The title alludes to the ironic, molecular by-product of border states that he explains in the film:

> “As these walls were being constructed, millions and millions of invisible cosmic particles called muons descended into the atmosphere. Scientists realized that these deep penetrating particles could be harvested, and a technology could be developed to use their peculiar physical capacities to pass through surfaces previously impervious to X-rays…. Today, we’re all wall, and no wall at all.”

Recording studios are designed to isolate and control sound, but Abu Hamdan’s movement between them, followed by the camera, treats the spaces fluidly, his performance pouring through them. His script incorporates narratives drawn from legal cases that focused on evidence based on what witnesses heard. He is accompanied by a drummer, stationed in one of the studios, hitting a repetitive lick throughout the performance like a subtle human metronome. The testimonies describe explosions and the sounds they make, as heard by earwitnesses who struggle to imitate the sounds that produced a decimated room. The choreographed display within this culturally coded site emphasizes how far removed audiences at a film festival are from the events that prompt these testimonies.

_Specialised Technique_ shows archival footage of Nigerian women dancing, recorded in the mechanical, slow, unadorned, cinematographic style developed by British colonialist William Sellers for the Colonial Film Unit in Nigeria in 1939\. These documents are interrupted by white-on-black intertitles or text super- imposed onto still images. They are simple, taut questions: _Is it ok? Is it why I look down?_ The film’s deep score further emphasizes the heaviness of the women’s movement, soaked with the weight of accumulated colonial gazes. Igwe’s trilogy, of which this film is part, strives to unpack colonial moving image by reassembling it before us.

The textual interruptions seem to be drawn from the voices of her subjects, but a voice in intertitles is barely a voice at all—a mere projection. So, this is a film about movement, not a commentary, not a study. Since voice cannot be recuperated here, how about gesture that can transcend calculated witnessing? In a new frame, projected onto the artist’s midsection is some of this colonial footage. Igwe wears a high-waisted leather skirt, and her body recites the vernacular of the African dance depicted in the footage that illuminates the surface of her clothing. This moment in the film—intensely alluring, complicated, produced by an embodied investigative impulse—also provokes the question: when do we ever think of bodies on top of bodies in ways that are not sexual or violent, but as reclamation? In “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” Trinh T. Minh-ha describes how the scientific universalism of moving image technology has always been a one-way power dynamic: “In the progression toward Truth … one can only gain, never lose. First, conform to scientific demands, then show scientists are also human beings. The order is irreversible.” Minh-ha’s critique of that gaze was in 1983, before mass surveillance and big data, fields of inquiry—given as _natural, uninterrupted_ documentation—that have been instrumentalized to oppress the subject anew.

Yielding to “scientific demands” guarantees that the authentic subject cannot be removed from the neutral technical gaze, so the gaze must be averted, interrupted. Dao’s 8-minute film _The Protagonists_ compresses a catalogue of imagery from her parents’ home and garden in British Columbia. Fronds of aloe are sliced, their shape echoing the hand that dissects them with a kitchen knife. A mechanized, 3-D-printed hand pathetically flinches as it tries to grasp that knife, the plant’s gel applied across its inorganic fingers, its fingertips later adorned by long gem-laden nails. Scenes from _Apocalypse Now_ and _Platoon_ hover over shots of the garden, like clouds, juxtaposing the jungle with the suburban vegetable patch. Vibrantly coloured smoke bombs are discharged around a small greenhouse. Rapid cuts browse this catalogue energetically.

Dao’s cryptic voice-over breathes prose into the film’s popping and clicking repetitive soundtrack. _A hand in the domestic cinema is a will over bodily manipulation_. The hand is a busy instrument, cutting, pressing, throwing, but not in service of. _The only innocent record in history is the dirt that you churn with your petal fingers_. The only innocent record in history is what we touch and you can’t see. _I return to the domestic cinema at the end of the day_. Her script speaks and references indirectly, swerving at every opportunity away from making lived experience legible. In other words, it is encrypted against the banner of authenticity. In the description of her solo exhibition _A knife to wither your petal fingers_ at Blinkers, in Winnipeg in 2018, the film was said to propose “a subtext that allegorizes the movement within moving images to diasporic experience.” Dao’s film is without the typical trauma and nostalgia that informs the colonial imagination. Instead, through this unapparent assemblage, it mystifies. _The Protagonists_ pays homage to the Vietnamese diaspora by employing an iconography that speaks to the diaspora, before all other audiences.

When sound is processed by human description and becomes legal evidence, when the colonized reinterpret the archives of the colonizer and when authenticity is the secret visual language of the diaspora, dusty empiricism is kicked to the margins of inquiry. A house of intellect is repossessed.

Writer

Ownership

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Steffanie Ling reviews the _Inquiring Minds_ program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 23 – February 3, 2019).

Inquiring Minds: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Gabi Dao, Eitan Efrat, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Henry Hills, Onyeka Igwe, Martina Melilli

Fabiola Carranza (b.1983) is a Costa Rican/Canadian visual artist living in Southern California. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Carranza recently attended the Chris Kraus Summer Institute at Plug-In, Winnipeg and the Summer Program at SOMA in México City. She is currently at work on an English to Spanish translation of _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_ by David Wojnarowicz.

The bilingual publication _Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028_ marks the beginning, the end and a speculative decade ahead in the life of an art space in Central America. Despacio was started by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero to give artists in the region an opportunity to think and act autonomously. Despacio is also the Spanish word for “slow” and for “slowness,” and although nothing at this venue was ever fast or too concerned with artistic careerism, this gallery helped shape an entire generation of practitioners—myself included. 

The idea to start an art space came to Herrero in 2008, a few years after he had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, at the young age of 22\. Herrero’s work was chosen for inclusion by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, a man who worked hard throughout his career to show artworks produced outside North America and Europe. At a time when few others in the art world did, Szeemann paid attention to work from Central America. His approach and mentorship registered with Herrero who—like fellow Costa Rican Virginia Pérez-Ratton, the brilliant late artist, writer, curator and collector, had done before him—chose to use his privilege and share his appreciation for cultural production by investing free time, energy and resources into a small independent venue where emerging practitioners could work with curators and fellow artists for the first time. (Pérez-Ratton had founded TEOR/éTica, one of few ongoing places in the country exclusively devoted to the dissemination of contemporary art, critical theory and ideas.) 

While many of the individuals who put together this publication have familial or geographical ties in Central or Latin America, back in 2008, many had a hard time tracking down and articulating what was going on in the local scene. Despacio was a platform where cultural experiments and alternative practices could flourish and were celebrated. It was never meant to become an institution or artist-run centre in a traditional sense and this might be the reason it’s closing its doors today. In fact, in many ways this publication is one of the most internationally professionalizing endeavours the gallery has ever undertaken. 

The first of the book’s three parts comprises writings about the space and the region, including essays—most notably by the book’s editor, Jens Hoffmann, and the gallery’s chief curator, Sandino Scheidegger—and interviews with independent curator Pablo León de La Barra, conducted by Erno Hilarion and Cristina Ramírez, the manager of Despacio and the book’s Spanish language editor, respectively. These texts articulate the ties between their authors and the gallery and situate its efforts in great detail, providing the unfamiliar reader a conceptual and geopolitical framework within which to understand Despacio’s past and suggesting ways to imagine future possibilities of dissemination, experimentation and professionalization in the region. The second “section” is interspersed between the essays and compiles visual documentation of the projects the space helped produce, including artworks by Adriana Arroyo, Sol Calero, Julian Gallese, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Dino Urpí and Mimian Hsu, to name just a few. The documentation of these projects is somewhat unframed, making the book a kind of family album whose photos are best understood by its members. The only didactic information provided about the work is a list of exhibitions held at Despacio, tucked at the end of the section. Unknowing readers might not linger with each work, but overall, the book demands that the reader support transcultural exchange rather than limit a potential for cultural growth—by seeking, for example, full-fledged definitions or a clear identity mapping of the artwork from the region. 

The space performed like a sun or an orbit, a ruling member around which we revolved. In this way, the publication, designed to mimic the format of a daily planner, also asks the reader to be a witness from the future—not only of the gallery and what has been produced there but also of the community and what it did and can offer. The third section of the book interposes blank sheets of ruled paper with a series of photographs by the artist Pablo Cambronero. These images show San José, a modest, clumsy city inhabited by workers closing shops, pigeons, storefront reflections, soccer fans, carnival masks, pedestrians and bejewelled body parts. The empty space between them is presumably dedicated to the venue’s imaginary future (until we reach the year 2028 mentioned in the title) while acknowledging the emptiness left by its closure. The more romantic reader can fill in the void while a more cynical person can close the book and leave those pages empty. 

The English texts in the publication were translated into Spanish by the country’s favourite poet, Luis Chaves, and the Spanish texts into English by art editor and writer Lindsey Westbrook. The graphic design collective Åbäke (who co-founded the London-based publishing house responsible for the publication) and Alyssia Lou are responsible for the book’s futuristic layout, which features thermo-chromatic red decals, similar to those on a Formula 1 car. Like a race car, cultural production requires machinic assemblage, where one thing relies on the next. This is echoed in the web of interdependence that shaped the publication and the gallery’s continuous efforts. 

In “Ask the Artists,” Fernanda Brenner examines the parallels between Despacio and other spaces in Latin America, like Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), FLORA and Lugar a Dudas (Colombia) and Casa do Povo (Brazil), all of which are part of the region’s future. It is because of venues like TEOR/éTica and Despacio that more and more artists in San José are seeking to self-initiate and come up with new models for artistic discourse. None of them would have had the chance to get far had it not first been for Herrero and Pérez-Rat-ton, two visionaries who spread the goal of creating a critical community of artists in Central America without expecting any returns—and thus single-handedly opened the Costa Rican art scene to an international audience. 

Despacio was open, plural and full of inventiveness. Its absence will be felt and its past should be celebrated. The book ends speculatively, as a notebook which readers may or may not use to face the challenges ahead: the need to secure living wages for artists in the region, to develop curators and to open commercial spaces that in turn will help to promote and sustain this growing community of practitioners.

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Fabiola Carranza reviews the book _Twenty Years of Despacio 2008-2028_ (2019) edited by Jens Hoffman, published by Dent-De-Leone.

Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028

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C Mag

Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028

Inquiring Minds: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Gabi Dao, Eitan Efrat, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Henry Hills, Onyeka Igwe, Martina Melilli

Beatrice Gibson: Plural Dreams of Social Life

Karla McManus: Inside/Outside: Images of the LAND in Artexte’s Collection