Column

A landscape that speaks

by Fernando Chaves Espinach

Courtesy of the artist. Malena Szlam, ALTIPLANO, 2018, 35mm, color, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds.

Exploring three pieces of creative documentary, Fernando offers us a reflection on the relationship between landscape and History, and the ways film and photography can reconnect that bond blurred by oblivion.

Let us look at absence: concealed, suppressed or untold histories, at what is not there and yet demands to speak; what silently deafens us.

When contemplating a landscape, and especially when we set out to traverse it, we look for the keys to read it: what goes where, how and how much do we perceive of its composition, which processes shaped it. To read a landscape may imply an effort to reintegrate it to History: an active reading that, by transforming it in the present, recovers its past to clinch it to another future, a future where mourning is possible and visible.

De 1915 a 1923, el Imperio Otomano, en sus últimos estertores, lanzó una campaña de deportación y asesinato de los armenios cristianos en su tierra. Armenia estima más de un millón y medio de muertos; el gobierno turco no reconoce lo ocurrido como genocidio. El proyecto multimedia 1915 (2015), de Diana Markosian, busca reconectar los extremos de la tragedia, sus últimos sobrevivientes con los vestigios, apenas discernibles, de un crimen en gran parte negado por políticos descendientes de un Estado que ya no existe.

Markosian reúne a las víctimas con su pasado por medio de imágenes de sus pueblos natales, hoy apenas visibles. Gracias a ellas, conocemos a Movses Haneshyan, entonces de 105 años, tocando una inmensa fotografía de su tierra, que ve por primera vez en un siglo. Yepraksia Grevorgian, de 108 años al momento del proyecto, recuerda haber visto a los soldados otomanos tirar los cuerpos de armenios al río Akhurian. Cien años después, Markosian la retrata con una foto de aquel río, con una torre derruida como una de las pocas evidencias de la vida que, antaño, vibró en este rincón del mundo.

Markosian llegó a la historia de su pueblo por la vía más personal, la del reencuentro con el padre. A mediados de los 90, tras la caída de la Unión Soviética, su madre se la llevó, junto con su hermano, a Estados Unidos. Papá quedó atrás. Su madre había ejecutado el olvido en las mismas fotos familiares al cortar la imagen del padre. Markosian viajó a Armenia en busca de un hombre al que nunca creyó ver de nuevo. Inventing My Father (2013-14) no solo representa ese reencuentro: lo realiza en su propia ejecución, como una serie de fotos colaborativas creadas en conjunto con un hombre que, poco a poco, vuelve a ser lo que no pudo por dos décadas.

La práctica colaborativa de Markosian complejiza nuestra relación con las imágenes al exhibir el tejido interno de la búsqueda. Nos hace partícipes del proceso de recordar, de producir las imágenes de la distancia y la separación. Reúne lo escondido por la historia mediante un esfuerzo físico implícito en los retratos de los ancianos con las vistas de sus aldeas natales, de las que solo vemos escombros, huellas indefinidas.

Con el advenimiento de la fotografía, nos recuerda Jacques Rancière, “todas las vidas entraron en la luz compartida de una escritura de lo memorable”, antes privilegio de las figuras “grandes” de la Historia en mayúscula. La aparición democratizadora de la “escritura de la luz” ha engendrado algunos de los más influyentes proyectos fotográficos, por supuesto, siempre en la búsqueda de extraer de las tinieblas los rastros de vidas periféricas, marginales, subalternas. Esa búsqueda nos ha llevado, incluso, a fotografiar fantasmas, como en el proyecto de Markosian: presencias espectrales que habitan parajes vaciados por la violencia. 1915 restituye la historia a su paisaje e, incluso, la desplaza para regresarla a sus testigos y sobrevivientes, privados de ella por un poder amnésico.

Image courtesy of Icarus Films and Grasshopper Film. Dead Souls, 2018.

Wang Bing erects monuments whose massive scale barely begins to have an effect on the gigantic oblivion enterprise they are fighting. For Dead Souls (2018, 495 min), filmed between 2005 and 2017, he collected 600 hours of testimonies from 120 survivors of the “reeducation” camps for rightists, commanded by Mao Zedong in the Gobi desert. Out of 3200 prisoners, only 500 survived. The first seven hours of the film compress statements of about 15 persons; in the last hour, the reconstruction of a prisoner’s experience is outlined through multiple perspectives. But pain is, ultimately, unspeakable. By the end, the film traverses the landscape of death.

Temperatures in the Gobi desert can drop down to −40°C. In summer, they can reach 45°C. The “crimes” of the condemned went from opposition to the Party’s trivial rules to indefinite accusations that, nevertheless, condemned them to endless months in that inhospitable land. Another manifestation of this director’s project, Traces (2014, 29 min), is a silent look at what is left of the labour camps. Very little, almost nothing. Until a bone appears. Then a handful of bones. Then another. And nothingness. Plenty of nothingness

Meanwhile, Dead Souls, with its testimonial accumulation, forces us to confront the silence of the landscape. Referring to Man with no name (2009, 92 min), which follows a hermit cave dweller in northern China, the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman writes: “The duration of Wang Bing's shots seems to me first and foremost a gesture of respect before the gestures of that tiny life”. In Dead Souls, this respect is brought to paroxysm not just by the duration of the shots, but by their intense humility, restricted to the frontal recording of the interviews and to details that, in their apparent banality, do nothing but reinforce the unbearable presence of death in the testimonies of the elders.

To watch the film requires a physical and intellectual effort. An extremely painful scene places us in front of a man who can barely communicate. In others, survivors smile bitterly, laughing at the randomness that led them to their punishment. Women complete men’s narrations, correct them, move away. The lightness of some conversations doesn’t reduce the impact. If anything, it deepens it, because we confront the simple fact that it is possible to keep living after going through hell. The effort of Wang Bing is to reconnect the previous life to this transit with which it walks towards the future, afflicted—even physically—by the past.

Courtesy of the artist. Malena Szlam, ALTIPLANO, 2018, 35mm, color, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds.

However, language falls short to enunciate some oblivions. In the film Altiplano (2018, 16 min), by Malena Szlam, what is normally inaudible speaks of what has been suffered by the landscape, its first inhabitants and its constant transformations. This telluric recitation is composed by “nature’s infrasounds, frequencies below human hearing range: inner voices of earth, underground waters, volcanoes and whale vocalizations”, according to the filmmaker.

In Altiplano we see, as in between flickers, lands traced (imagined, seen, felt) by ancestral peoples. We know what has happened to them. We know that silence that is not such, that reverberates in America’s highs and lows. Day and night, soil and sky blend together in the exploration of an ecosystem that bursts under the pressure of mining.

Filmed as a sensorial process, a reaction to the rhythms of the image, the film extends the inner landscape outwards until it dissolves it in geological infinity. We are left before a timeless shot, yet, filled with historic inscriptions, some visible, some concealed. A landscape that speaks.

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Mariam Sahakyan was 101 years old when she agreed to collaborate with Markosian. She asked her just one thing: to bring her back soil from her home village to be buried with it. The photographer brought the soil back to her —soil scattered by History.