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Title Some things remain /

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58z208b0

Author Guerra Cota, Aldo

Publication Date 2014

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Some Things Remain

A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts

Visual Arts

Aldo Guerra Cota

Committee in charge:

Professor Louis Hock, Chair Professor Luis Alvarez Professor Anya Gallacio Professor Michael Trigilio

2014

The Thesis of Aldo Guerra Cota is approved and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically:

Chair

University of California, San Diego

2014

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The space within us reaches out, translates each thing.

For the essence of a tree to be real for you,

cast inner space around it, out of the space

that exists in you. Encircle it with restraint.

It has no borders. Only in the realm

of your renouncing can it, as a tree, be known.

R.M. Rilke, Uncollected Poems,1924

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page………..……………………………………………………..……iii

Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………iv

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….v

List of Figures…...…………….……………………………….………………....vi

Abstract of the Thesis………………....………………………………………..vii

Project Description….…………………..…………………………………….…..1

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………22

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Gallery View A ..…………..……………………………………...…..…2

Figure 2: Still image from video composite…………………..……………..…3

Figure 3: Sample page from notebook………………….………………………5

Figure 4: Oscar Muñoz “Project for a Memorial”, 2005……………………...7

Figure 5: Gallery View B…..…………………………………………………..…7

Figure 6: Tijuana’s local newspaper “Frontera” of Feb. 15th 2014………...9

Figure 7: Nina Pereg “RoundAbout Tel-Aviv”, 2007….…………………….11

Figure 8: Santiago Sierra “250cm line tattooed on 6 paid people” 2000...16

Figure 9: Sophie Calle “Take Care of Yourself”, Venice Biennale, 2007..19

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Some Things Remain

Aldo Guerra Cota

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego, 2014

Professor Louis Hock, Chair

A multimedia project revolving around a video performance composed of a two channel video installation, an audio track, and the display of hand written notes, all revolving around the reconstruction of the last hours in the life of a recently deported man who committed suicide by climbing to an electrical tower in the city of Tijuana. A fusion of the collective memory of his gesture with my personal memory, where by means of digital manipulation I take this man's place atop the tower for 310 minutes. The idea is to take this incident as a point of departure to create an abstract and fragmented portrait of the city, as this man's virtually non-existing memory fuses with my own.

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Project Description

“Some Things Remain” is a multimedia project revolving around a video-performance that references a recently committed -and upsettingly spectacular- public suicide: A man who had just been deported to Mexico, climbed to the top of an electrical tower in the main power plant in the city of Tijuana, where he stood for 5 hours and 10 minutes before finally leaping to his death.

While not ignoring the significance of the loss of his life, this work focuses on the metaphysical elements of the event: psychological and physical endurance, history and memory, ephemerality and permanence, literal and symbolical changes in perspective, of prejudice and common place around issues of identity and the city as a constructed image.

The work presented here is composed of a two-channel video installation, an audio track and the display of a series of photographed pages containing hand-written notes created by me during a performance where I symbolically take the suicidal man’s place atop the tower for a total of 310 minutes between the hours of 5am and 10:10 am, the same hours of the day as the tragedy/event originally happened.

1 2

The piece described above was achieved by means combining two video shots. First I recorded the towers at the site of the incident for five continuous hours, starting at dawn. Then, at a different outdoor location atop a squared-foot surface that corresponded with the top of the tower, I did a shoot where I matched the lighting, perspective, distance, and angle of the first video, again from 5 to 10:10 am, and without interruption. I then digitally composited the two videos to create a simulation of me standing on the tower. The resulting film runs for the entire 5 hours and

10 minutes, and it is the central image of the show, both conceptually and formally, as it projects on a 12 feet by 25 feet vertical paper screen that hangs from floor to ceiling in the gallery.

Figure 1. Gallery View A

Figure 2. Still image from video composite.

The rest of the images in the show are delivered through my writing, which I conceived as the way to provide a subjective perspective of the passing of time -one that the camera’s point of view could not- or better stated: writing was the way of recording my 'internal state'. At the

same time, this rather massive display of writing acknowledged the practical impossibility that any spectator would experience the video piece in its entire length, and so here the writing functions as the first evidence of the passing of time. Nonetheless, the most important part of the entire gesture (writing while taking this man’s place) was to make a particular portrait of the city.

Throughout the duration of the performance, I mentally reconstructed my city, that is, the city as I am able to remember it by means of continuously, and almost automatically writing on a small

'memo' notepad. Done mostly in a descriptive language that depicts visions, the resulting notes are the accumulation of memories of the spaces, objects, and places in the city that I was able evoke during the recreation of the last hours of this man's life. These pages where then photographed, transcribed, translated, printed and framed to be displayed individually next to each other, forming an extremely long line across the wall, as the stated second and subjective way of experiencing time. It is also a more immediate way, as one can see at a glance the remnants of an evidently time-consuming activity, in this case, the writing spread through the 60 pages of the notebook, each annotated with the exact time it was written at.

Figure 3. Sample page from notebook

What are displayed are to-scale reproductions of the unbound notepad. This 'distance' from the real object used for the writing, and the several iterations of the actual referent, by means of manipulation, simulation, or translation, is not just a technicality or a stylistic solution, but a part of my most deliberate interest in exploring every medium's role in the creation of meaning and how it affects, limits, or expands it. This is present not just in the photographed representation of the notebook, but in the video, the paper screen, and the constant concealing of other elements in order to problematize their validity as documents, yet

perhaps simultaneously increasing our understanding of that which they service to communicate.

In a similar manner, Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz -who works mainly in video and photography- deals not only with the difficulties of addressing the political issues affecting his immediate context, but he does it in way that introduces the medium’s conflicting nature by bringing processes of disintegration into the work, that is, he puts forth the ephemeral characteristics of the projected and the printed image.

Having made most of his work in the city of Cali during the 90’s, a time of heightened struggle with the drug cartel’s and narco related violence, he managed to develop an important body of work on the specificities of his circumstance, that in a broader sense, always evidenced oblivion. As curator Gonzalo Ortega, explains: The political sense —if it exists— in the work of Oscar Muñoz, is to go beyond that which the images show on first looking at them; it alludes to its temporality and specific materiality to dismember them…”1

1 Gonzalo Ortega. Introductory text for the Muñoz’ retrospective at MARCO Museum of Monterrey, 2014.

Figure 4. Oscar Muñoz installation, “Project for a Memorial”, 2005

In the second video of my project is a large projection which shows the single take –a close-up top view of me handling the original notepad– where page by page, I am erasing every single line of all of what I had written. As is the case with most of Muñoz’ works, we are left here only with a ghost object: An empty physical entity, a memory made relevant precisely because its referent is tinted with the gleam of disappearance.

Figure 5. Gallery View B

Investigations about the identity of 'Gian' (as he asserted his name was while still atop the tower) all remain inconclusive. In fact, different media refer to him with different names, as even authorities failed to confirm his identity, find or contact family members, or follow through with clarifications about what happened. All this renders him an even more mysterious figure which, given the impactful scale of his suicide, lends the memory of what he did an even larger symbolical potential.

Having had what I consider a tragic and privileged view of the city, and at the same time being socially devoid of identity, we became the forgetful audience for whom he paradoxically created one the most powerful images the city, as a collective entity, has ever seen.

It was precisely from within this fracture on the surface of all information concerning the event that I found a way for this project to develop. It is within this contradiction of image vs. memory (the fact that no one really knows who he was but that everyone remembers him) that the work attempts to widen our understanding of how we relate to our own creations, even if it's the creation of our own death or disappearance.

There was something inevitably intriguing about the original image of

'Gian' on top the tower, the covered desire of permanence fused with the decision to end all memories. If I were to state a main intention in

making this work, it would be a desire to take the collective memory of this man's gesture (after all, that image does not belong to me) with my own personal memory of the city and the domestic spaces I've inhabited throughout my life there, as a way of exhausting meaning from the city once and for all, of emptying my memory in his place, and perhaps poetically vanishing it. It is not his leap (his death) that I recreate, but his endurance. It is the point of inflection, the fold where we go from having memory, to being memory.

Figure 6. Local newspaper page published a day after the event.

Put it in other words, and perhaps making it less personal, I take this incident as a point of departure to create a fragmented, alternative and subjective view of a place often depicted as nothing more than a battleground for drug cartels, a garden of readily accessible controlled medicine, cheap alcohol, or at best, a field / laboratory for condescending social practices, but never as a place where life also simply happens to go on. It would seem that Garcia Canclini’s famous term of “hybrid cultures”2, one that explained the cultural phenomena of the border

(using Tijuana as the epitome) as a mere chaotic clash of identities, becoming more of a reductive concept. An idea which ultimately could not encompass the complexity of the sociological reality of the border phenomenon, as it developed since the time of his investigations during the early 1990’s. This is not to deny the reality of the negatives, but I sense a danger in not recognizing these issues as also happening in the context of an everyday life. It is not an exotic reality: it's a coexisting one.

Perhaps I am contradicting myself, by presenting this work as an opposing stance on the preconceived representations of Tijuana, but I am still placing those issues as the central concern. The work still revolves around the negatives, only this time addressing them indirectly. I

2 Nestor Garcia Canclini, “Hybrid Cultures”, Univ. Of Minnesota Press; 2005.

strongly believe that not being able to at least have this shift in perspective as a possibility when thinking about a place robs true significance from all the other aspects of our understanding of it, whether it is troubling, beautiful or mundane. And that is what is what the artistic approach allows. Much like what Israeli artist Nina Pereg does, whose projects are typically documentary based, but transform into quasi-theatrical events through the use of editing techniques and multimedia installations. As Pereg herself defines it, her interest in socials schemes draws on a unique and personal perspective. “Re-looking” is a primary concern in her work practice and her everyday life, and often builds on periods of intense travel and close observations.

Figure 7. Nina Pereg. “RoundAbout Tel-Aviv”, at Braverman Gallery, 2007

In this order of ideas, and perhaps in contrast to the grandiosity of the suicidal image in question here, that the memories taking place in the already diminutive notebook are detailed descriptions of often quotidian and rather irrelevant aspects of existence. Less about complex experiences and more about minor details, the writing starts evidencing decomposition in style, content and logic, as the hours passed and the physical and mental struggle began affecting my capacity to remain articulate and keep up with the self-imposed duty to, no matter what, never stop remembering.

This inevitably brings me to reference one of Jorge Luis Borges’ most known short stories: ‘Funes, The Memorious’. In it, Ireneo Funes – the object of this fictional testimonial, is thrown from a horse to find himself physically crippled, but finds himself, as he sees it, mentally enlightened. He finds he has become capable of complete and perfect recall. He can reconstruct his most distant memory, discern the number of stars in the sky, or recite entire books he has read, all with equal ease:

On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or

felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.3

But as Elyce Rae Helford notes on her analysis of Borges’ text: “However, in this enlightenment, Funes has simultaneously forfeited the elements essential for the creation of original thought: omission and abstraction.”4

It is here that connect this idea with my project, for as I neared the end of my performance –when my mind started approaching the more recent memories, they became less and less complex, drifting between listing and naming random objects, textures and smells; memories of prior times, to present-tense descriptions of physical sensations as I experienced them (memories nonetheless), and later more spaced out descriptions of present things I was perceiving and listening to at the site of the recording, all turned to memories by the mere act of writing them down. The exercise had revealed the impossibility of writing about anything but the past.

Furthermore, and challenging our most common conceptions of how memory works (basic data retrieval), or what we ultimately think it is (a peculiar type dead archive), the gesture of forcing the mind to do an extenuating feat of remembrance, also shed light on the role that

3 Jorge Luis Borges “Ficciones” Grove Press, 1994, p.132 4 Elyce Rae Helford “Langauge and Memory in Borges’ Funes, the Memorious”, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, 1988.

memories play on our modeling of reality. As exposed by Jorge Volpi in

To Read the Mind, an essay about the interrelation between –literary- fiction and reality: “Our brain is a future-making machine. We owe to this that imagination occupies such a significant place in our idea of the world. This is why fiction is such an indispensable tool for our species:

The brain only has one material from which to trace the scenarios of the future –the past, of course.” 5

An aside on the experience of having had to transcribe and translate the notes myself (they are originally written in Spanish), is that the second revision of what I had remembered detonated an even more detailed, and this time unaccounted for, series of things not remembered:

The space between the memories, of all that was forgotten, the unmentioned things, the emptiness and the silence others might encounter as the space in which they can connect with the piece.

For years I have had a strong reluctance to identify my work as

"representative” of the border, as the representations that often reach visibility are precisely the ones conforming to prejudice. I do not work in the maquiladoras or jump the fence to get to the United States. I do not

5 Jorge Volpi, “Leer la Mente”, (Alfaguara 2010), p. 57.

sell drugs, smuggle people nor turn to prostitution. These are serious and real issues, undoubtedly relevant, but of which I could only speculate, and probably within the same prejudice. So much like I initially avoided to make a work about the death of my father, which ended up being about him in the most direct of ways, I decided to face my reluctance about speaking of the city (in fear of the commonplace), and find a way of acknowledging it as what it is: An entity with agency over every aspect of me, and any other citizen for that matter, and to do it from a place where all that which is personal becomes a strategy of resistance.

This is not to say that firsthand experiences are the only possible source of content of any art practice, however, it is one advice I follow as if my only rule. Perhaps the concept of ‘embodiment’ comes in play here.

This is a point in which my project relates to the work of Spanish artist

Santiago Sierra, only it does so negatively in respect of how the aesthetical experience in authoring affects and shapes the work. Known for the pieces in which he hires people to perform or endure physical challenging labors, such as remaining in a gallery space for a works day holding a wall and preventing it from collapse, or to allow to get a straight line tattooed across their backs. Meaning is constructed in this works relying primarily on decontextualizing the other’s experience (to

bring it into the institutional space) hence detaching the author from the possibility of embodying (aesthetically experiencing) his own work. I consider that a strong limitation in the process of using one’s practice as means of developing reflective discourse through a body of work.

Figure 8. Santiago Sierra, '250cm line tattooed on six paid people', 2000.

Regarding my project, and needless to say, I have never died. But my interest is neither the event of death, nor the implications of suicide per se. My interest is social death, something of which I am a part of, either as a victim or as executor.

In general, contemporary Mexico –and the northern border in particular, keeps a rather lukewarm relationship with death. Learning

about the death of others, in the social context of constant crime and violence, has become normalized. It is beyond this paper to elaborate on how much media presence of the topic is the cause of its trivialization.

That's not what interests me. What I do believe is that this normalization of tragedy is worthy of attention. In the case of this project, I do not take a moral perspective of suicide (the suicidal figure is here not that of a hero, a martyr, or a coward) but only an instance that might grant us the possibility of discovering how we relate to the psychological spaces we create and indeed inhabit, and under what conditions we are participating in the circumstances of others. Occupying the other's moment and place is an opportunity to rethink our own place. Ultimately, happiness is a social project.

If we look at what is known about the intrinsic structures of memory and apply it to the puzzling development of urban space, we see that 'the remembered city' and 'the city imagined as possible’ are one and the same. What follows this is that the 'real city' is the result of the clash of all of our individual imaginations, as Italo Calvino masterfully exposed it multiple times –albeit poetically, with each of his ‘Invisible Cities’. He writes:

…Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat

her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.6

Although “poetic” would not be the first adjective to come to mind when speaking of Tijuana, this is precisely an exercise in transfiguring conceptions. As Clavino writes about a city called Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can ever forget: “… the city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember…”7

It is in tune with these poetics that would develop an alternative imagination of my particular city. My work is usually concerned with the seemingly evident, intimate and personal aspects of life, be it either through my own experiences, or of those who keep an emotional bond with me. This is not exactly a biographical exercise, but more a methodology to develop a discourse that takes subjectivity for granted in the hopes of turning it into a strategy to transcend it.

It is also an exploration based on the conviction that deep knowledge of any phenomenon must arise from a perceptual and affective

6 Italo Calvino “Invisible Cities” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) p. 46 7 Ibid. p.58

experience. In other words, the work is not a reference/ representation of something else (the fabled 'sign in the absence of the real') but a completely new phenomenon in and of itself, capable of expanding the semantic field it occupies.

Figure 9. Sophie Calle, “Take Care of Yourself” at the Venice Biennale, 2007

A last remark on this project is my initial concern for the lack of visual images, as words and documentation clearly dominate the space, and a strong conceptual language defined what I considered to be a rather straightforward and emotional work. But it’s here where this work connects with that of French artist Sophie Calle, particularly her project

“Take Care of Yourself”. In it she presents 107 outside interpretations of

a "breakup" e-mail she received from her lover the day he ended their affair. She then takes all of these documents, generated as answers to her prompt, which depending on the interpreter, manifest as psychological analysis, songwriting, linguistic breakdown, binary coding, friendly advice, and a seemingly endless set of outcomes. Well beyond a romanticized reading, she successfully creates new layers of meaning upon expanding our understanding of the original document, as with every new instance she plays with how the viewer confronts the evidential instrument , changing its size, color, framing, font, word arrangement, translation, in what appears to be an exhaustion of all possibilities of play, ultimately rendering our experience of this intimate issue –one that yet pertains to another individual, as a door to our own threats of exposure. Ultimately, she touches upon a sensitive issue that my project also deals with: How it is that, within the limitations of language, data and information, we confront invasions of privacy and identity. As writer/theorist Susan Sontag observes: “Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, the more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in.8

8 Susan Sontag “At the Same Time”Essays & Speeches (Picador, 2007) p.145

Most of my practice stems from a certain "tradition" of performance art of the 60's and 70's, with a particularity emphasis on documentation

(photography, video or storytelling) as the raw material that can then be altered, sometimes in very subtle ways, to obtain a later work that is the result of this process. This time, it is about embodying the ritual of remembrance/reconstruction prior to the final and ultimate act of disappearance –a simulation indeed. But art is never about the truth. It is about discovering the meaning of our creations, even that of our own demise. It's always about expanding the fictions through which we experience reality.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston “Poetics of Space”, Beacon Press, 1994.

Barthes, Roland, “Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography”, Hill and Wang, 1980.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Funes the Memorious”. “Ficciones” Grove Press, 1994.

Calvino, Italo. “Invisible Cities”. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Garcia Canclini, Nestor. “Hybrid Cultures”, Univ. Of Minnesota Press; 2005.

Helford, Elyce Rae. “Langauge and Memory in Borges’ Funes, the Memorious”, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, 1988.

Perec, George, “Species of Spaces”, Penguin Classics, 2008.

Sontag, Susan. “At the Same Time. Essays & Speeches”. Picador, 2007.

Teagle, Rachel (Editor). “Strange New World. Art and Design from Tijuana”. Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2006.

Volpi, Jorge.“Leer la Mente”, Alfaguara, 2010.

Yepez, Heriberto (Editor).“Here is Tijuana”, Black Dog Publishing, 2006