Hito Steyerl
01 Jan - 02 Mar 2008
HITO STEYERL
1 January – 2 March 2008
E-mail interview with Hito Steyerl, artist, Berlin by Catrin Lundqvist, curator, Moderna Museet
Catrin Lundqvist (CL):
I first saw your work at a seminar on documentary video art in Zürich in 2000. You held an impressive lecture and screened your video, The Empty Center (1998), a work stuffed with content and a severe postcolonial critique. Four years ago this work was screened at Moderna Museet within the series Contemporary Film and Video. The same year the series toured to Umeå, Norrköping, Borås and Istanbul. In the last few years, your videos have been widely shown, and Journal No. 1 received much acclaim when it was presented at Documenta XII in 2007. It was also displayed at the non-commercial gallery 300m3 Art Space, in conjunction with the Gothenburg Art Biennial the same year and at several international film festivals, including IDFA Amsterdam, FID Marseille, Duisburger Filmwoche, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, etc. What is the video about and how did you start to work on it?
Hito Steyerl (HS):
The video is about the disappearance of the first monthly newsreel in Bosnia Herzegovina, which was shot in 1947 and disappeared in 1993. It showed a literacy class in post WWII Bosnia and was printed on nitrate film. I asked two people working at the Sarajevo film museum to tell me their memories of the scene and had those drawn by a graphic artist. The result is, of course, two diverging images – phantom images of the film. But this discrepancy is representative of a more general characteristic of documents. One always needs two witnesses to create an “objective” document or to confirm a historical fact. There is an old Roman law called: Testis Unus, Testis Nullus – “one witness is no witness”. Bosnians who lost their documents during the war had to present two witnesses in order to prove their identity. However, the paradoxical thing is that when you have two witnesses, their accounts are usually slightly different. And the objectivity of the document is predicated on this contradiction within the document. The outcome of the experimental set up of Journal No. 1 is that it cannot be reconstructed, at least not now.
On the other hand, there is also another movement within the film, because although we basically cannot trust documents, we still need them. We need to be able to distinguish facts from lies, especially in a situation where the fog of war has slowly spread around the world. Otherwise, we would be lost in a hell of revisionism. So there is a parallel ending to the film. While the reconstruction of Journal No. 1 ends with several versions, another part of the story establishes how the film reel was destroyed in the first place. And in this part, the graphic artist also starts to tell his own story...
CL:
As a documentary film maker and author you have displayed great interest in the reliability of moving images. Would you consider the story of the disappearance of the first newsreel to be more reliable than the other parts of Journal No. 1?
HS:
No. Some are reliable because they acknowledge the inherent unreliability of the documentary form and its relation to history, some are reliable by establishing facts anyhow.
CL:
In recent years, your works have had frequent screenings in art contexts. Has this had some immediate effect on your film making? And do you, today, consider yourself more of a visual artist than a documentary film maker? Or are these questions irrelevant to you?
HS:
I try to do my best with my work and how others want to categorise it is up to them. The important thing for me is to pay respect to the subject matter, not primarily to the circumstances in which it is shown.
CL:
Your exhibition includes separate screenings of several of your other videos. Looking back on what I wrote about you in 2002, I began by saying that the discourse of your artistic work carries a severe postcolonial critique. Is that a statement you still agree with today?
HS:
Yes – but only if one could change the inherent limitations of the postcolonial framework and thus the framework itself. Increasingly I have the feeling that postcolonial studies are stuck in stagnation due to the inherent Anglo-Saxon focus on the field. The invisible background of postcolonial studies is the colonial Empire and its power relations, thus it usually has geographical and temporal confines, even if it pretends not to. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help in theorising many other interesting contemporary phenomena: Labour migration without an apparent colonial background; New Europe, rampant anti-Semitism, the so-called War against terror, or, for that matter, Sweden’s relations with some of its neighbours. It’s not enough to just stretch postcolonial critique in order to account for these phenomena; it has to be reconceptualised so thoroughly that I doubt it could even be called the same afterwards. So in my recent work, I focus on very specific cases of global (power) relations; often migrations of images in a digital no-man’s-land riddled with conflict and resounding echoes from alternative pasts.
1 January – 2 March 2008
E-mail interview with Hito Steyerl, artist, Berlin by Catrin Lundqvist, curator, Moderna Museet
Catrin Lundqvist (CL):
I first saw your work at a seminar on documentary video art in Zürich in 2000. You held an impressive lecture and screened your video, The Empty Center (1998), a work stuffed with content and a severe postcolonial critique. Four years ago this work was screened at Moderna Museet within the series Contemporary Film and Video. The same year the series toured to Umeå, Norrköping, Borås and Istanbul. In the last few years, your videos have been widely shown, and Journal No. 1 received much acclaim when it was presented at Documenta XII in 2007. It was also displayed at the non-commercial gallery 300m3 Art Space, in conjunction with the Gothenburg Art Biennial the same year and at several international film festivals, including IDFA Amsterdam, FID Marseille, Duisburger Filmwoche, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, etc. What is the video about and how did you start to work on it?
Hito Steyerl (HS):
The video is about the disappearance of the first monthly newsreel in Bosnia Herzegovina, which was shot in 1947 and disappeared in 1993. It showed a literacy class in post WWII Bosnia and was printed on nitrate film. I asked two people working at the Sarajevo film museum to tell me their memories of the scene and had those drawn by a graphic artist. The result is, of course, two diverging images – phantom images of the film. But this discrepancy is representative of a more general characteristic of documents. One always needs two witnesses to create an “objective” document or to confirm a historical fact. There is an old Roman law called: Testis Unus, Testis Nullus – “one witness is no witness”. Bosnians who lost their documents during the war had to present two witnesses in order to prove their identity. However, the paradoxical thing is that when you have two witnesses, their accounts are usually slightly different. And the objectivity of the document is predicated on this contradiction within the document. The outcome of the experimental set up of Journal No. 1 is that it cannot be reconstructed, at least not now.
On the other hand, there is also another movement within the film, because although we basically cannot trust documents, we still need them. We need to be able to distinguish facts from lies, especially in a situation where the fog of war has slowly spread around the world. Otherwise, we would be lost in a hell of revisionism. So there is a parallel ending to the film. While the reconstruction of Journal No. 1 ends with several versions, another part of the story establishes how the film reel was destroyed in the first place. And in this part, the graphic artist also starts to tell his own story...
CL:
As a documentary film maker and author you have displayed great interest in the reliability of moving images. Would you consider the story of the disappearance of the first newsreel to be more reliable than the other parts of Journal No. 1?
HS:
No. Some are reliable because they acknowledge the inherent unreliability of the documentary form and its relation to history, some are reliable by establishing facts anyhow.
CL:
In recent years, your works have had frequent screenings in art contexts. Has this had some immediate effect on your film making? And do you, today, consider yourself more of a visual artist than a documentary film maker? Or are these questions irrelevant to you?
HS:
I try to do my best with my work and how others want to categorise it is up to them. The important thing for me is to pay respect to the subject matter, not primarily to the circumstances in which it is shown.
CL:
Your exhibition includes separate screenings of several of your other videos. Looking back on what I wrote about you in 2002, I began by saying that the discourse of your artistic work carries a severe postcolonial critique. Is that a statement you still agree with today?
HS:
Yes – but only if one could change the inherent limitations of the postcolonial framework and thus the framework itself. Increasingly I have the feeling that postcolonial studies are stuck in stagnation due to the inherent Anglo-Saxon focus on the field. The invisible background of postcolonial studies is the colonial Empire and its power relations, thus it usually has geographical and temporal confines, even if it pretends not to. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help in theorising many other interesting contemporary phenomena: Labour migration without an apparent colonial background; New Europe, rampant anti-Semitism, the so-called War against terror, or, for that matter, Sweden’s relations with some of its neighbours. It’s not enough to just stretch postcolonial critique in order to account for these phenomena; it has to be reconceptualised so thoroughly that I doubt it could even be called the same afterwards. So in my recent work, I focus on very specific cases of global (power) relations; often migrations of images in a digital no-man’s-land riddled with conflict and resounding echoes from alternative pasts.