The gaze that doesn’t look away: the poetics of memory in the work of Maya Watanabe
September 5th, 6:30pm
Screenings:
– “Bullet”, Maya Watanabe, 2021, Peru-Netherlands, 10’
– “Liminal”, Maya Watanabe, 2019, Peru-Netherlands, 64’,
Talk with Maya Watanabe and Raquel Schefer.
The event will be held in Spanish.
© Maya Watanabe.
In “ESMA: Fenomenología de la desaparición” (“ESMA: Phenomenology of Disappearance”), regarding the systematic practice of enforced disappearance during the Argentinian military dictatorship (1976-1983) and its memorialisation, Claudio Martyniuk asserts that “Not seeing is the position assigned to the spectator,” and calls for “staring straight ahead, without looking away.” Looking at another historico-political process —the ‘Period of Violence’ (1980-2000) in Peru, marked by state violence, the Shining Path’s transition to armed struggle and the founding of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement— ‘Liminal’ (2019) and ‘Bullet’ (2021), single-channel video installations presented in their theatrical version directed by Peruvian artist and filmmaker Maya Watanabe, seem to respond to the Argentinian philosopher and epistemologist’s call. In both films, Watanabe looks and makes us look straight ahead, incisively and outright, at the traces of state violence —inseparable from class, race and gender violence, as well as, more broadly, the persistence of colonial structures in the territory of the former ‘Virreinato del Perú’— and revolutionary violence, placing the viewer in a position of active visualisation, the primary condition for the arising of action, justice and reparation.
In “Liminal,” Watanabe shoots two mass graves, one of them in Ayacucho, the epicentre of the conflict, containing the remains of murdered peasants from that remote Andean region, exhumed by the Specialised Forensic Team of the Public Ministry of Peru. The piece unfolds a complex historical horizon: the vestiges of the state violence and drifts of the ‘People’s War’ open up to the becoming, to a dynamic ‘continuum’ between the past, the present, and the negotiation of trauma to come. This historico-political background raises issues related not only to the poetics but also to the ethics of representation. First and foremost, what is that gaze that doesn’t look away? The two violence cases the film approaches took place in 1984, one year after Watanabe was born. If this aspect presupposes a mobile and historically situated gaze, turned towards the world, but also towards itself, as well as the intertwining of direct and ‘indirect,’ public and private, sensory and representational memories, how to give audio-visual expression, within this framework, to unfigured and apparently unfigurable forms of violence? Watanabe transgresses the canon and the poetic and epistemic modalities of figuration of violence and trauma. “Liminal” figurates the mass graves and mortal remains through a regime of figuration close to anti-figurativity, therefore calling for reflection on the limits and the possibility of representation. It is through a series of ground-level camera movements, either cadenced or unrhythmic, with variable rhythms, breaking the rules of narrative continuity, either ascending, descending or lateral, multi-directional, rhizomatic, in a narrative that shows its fractures, that Watanabe presents the interior of the mass graves and the surrounding area. The figuration of lifeless bodies also brings up questions related to the ontology of cinema, and the passage between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. Watanabe addresses this liminality through an exemplary work of the deframing, the out-of-focus and the soundscape. The confrontation with the past and its dynamic actualisation in the present thus emerge from a quasi-corporal impulse, the response of the technologically mediated filming gaze to the filmed bodies, an impulse that brings the latter back to life and the condition of actants, uprooting them from the potentially binary and essentialist position of victims.
“Bullet” expands and restructures the formal and epistemic system of “Liminal.” The short figurates the outside and inside of the skull of one of the many unidentified corpses, allegedly of Shining Path members, stored at the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Lima. Watanabe’s camera penetrates the skull with a bullet hole in it, dissolving the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the past and the present, history and memory. Once again, non-figurativity appears as a condition for visibility and intelligibility, an act of a formal and epistemic nature that not only challenges the assumptions of the official politics of memory but also offers fundamental elements for reflection in the context of the current genocide in Palestine, particularly regarding the ongoing reconfiguration of the relation between the representational model, the visible and the intelligible, and between seeing and acting.
Raquel Schefer
‘Amérika: Gestos Cinematográficos para Reencantar o Mundo’ is a Research Program curated and mentored by Raquel Schefer
Maya Watanabe
Maya Watanabe is a visual artist and filmmaker who works with video installations. She has had recent exhibitions at, among other places: De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2021), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2019); MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima (2019); Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts (2019); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto (2017); Das Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); and Matadero, Madrid (2014). Her work, which reviews Peru’s contemporary political history through experimental film procedures, has been shown at various art biennials and internationally, including Videobrasil, the 13th Havana Biennial, Asian Art Biennial, the 2nd Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition and the Beijing Biennial. She has also collaborated as audiovisual art director for stage productions in Peru, Spain, Austria and Italy. Watanabe lives and works in Amsterdam where she teaches at the Rietveld Academie. She is currently a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths College (University of London), Departments of Visual Cultures.
Raquel Schefer
Raquel Schefer is a researcher, a filmmaker, a film curator, and an Associate Professor at the Department of Film and Audiovisual Studies of the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, a Master’s in Documentary Cinema from the University of Cinema of Buenos Aires, and a degree in Communication Sciences from NOVA University of Lisbon. Raquel was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles and a postdoctoral FCT fellow at the CEC/University of Lisbon, the IHC/NOVA University of Lisbon and the Department of History of the University of the Western Cape. She is co-editor-in-chief of the quarterly of theory and history of cinema “La Furia Umana”.