Interviewed by Patricia C. Phillips
Jaar
I think that music is honest. When you listen to music, every- thing is on the table. You recognise the instruments, the tempo, the rhythm; the structure of a musical piece is transparent. Even if you do not fully understand the meaning of the lyrics, music communicates in a very compelling and undeniable way.
I wanted to show as little as possible while expressing as much as I could. We filmed twenty hours and reduced it to thirty-three minutes. I wanted to do a short visual poem and was thinking of the poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti, who expresses so much with two or three words in a poem. I wondered if this was possible to achieve with a film.
Because I want to communicate something very specific with each piece, I've used a lot of text in one fashion or another.
In a movie theatre, a spectator arrives mentally pre- pared to spend time with the film, sits in a comfortable chair, and there is one focal point of attention that attracts all the senses. The kind of attention that film commands is extraordinary, and I have always envied this power that filmmakers have to communicate with an audience.
I was always fascinated by the different ideological agendas of newspapers and magazines—to discover the subtle or more obvious differences between different reports about a same event.
I wanted to construct bridges to link the almost fictitious reality of the art world with the realities of the real world.
Once I got there, I realised there was nothing equal to the experience of witnessing something rather than reading about it. From this moment on, I decided to be a witness as often as I could.
It is not just a matter of witnessing, but it is about being present and sharing with other people who have left their homes and families to be there. It is about being part of a developing network of support and assistance. You simply react as a human being.
How do we translate this lived experience? I've always thought that we cannot represent this reality. Instead, you create a new reality with the work. Because I have faced and lived a specific reality, seen it with my own eyes, it demands a certain level of responsibility. This is not fiction! So I create little realities for the art world that are based on lived experiences. These experiences have changed me, I am who I am because I have been here and there. And the work is what it is because of where I have been, I cannot think of a better education—not only as an artist, but as a human being. It is an extraordinary challenge for me as an artist to communicate these experiences, I think this is why each project looks so different, I don't have a particular medium or format. I use different aesthetic strategies based on my response to a particular lived experience.
Regarding this question of ethics, I always cite ]ean-Luc Godard. He said that “it may be true that one has to choose between ethics or aesthetics, but it is no less true that, whichever one chooses, one will always find the other one at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en- scene itself.” There is no way to escape ethics. Whatever aesthetic decisions we make about our work, about our strategies of representation, they also reflect an ethical position. Accepting this, I think it is important to confront this unavoidable choice in the work from the beginning, as part of its structure.
