Associação Cultural Videobrasil

How did you get started in audiovisual production? What interests and/or possibilities for artistic development led you to the field of audiovisual, and more specifically of video?

My initial vocation is cinema. I migrated to video because, to me, the impurity of the medium, its malleability and its “lonely” character seemed to favor the invention of a brand of cinema that is personal, experimental, and similar to the conditions of writing. In more concrete terms, to me video seemed capable of producing more cinema than some films do. The way I use video, it becomes a sort of return to the roots: a capturing of reality in its heterogeneity, free from the need for romantic, linear narratives. Another aspect I like about video is the fact that it instantly establishes a paradoxical relation with reality: it is both present and absent, and its time of duration is one that only moving images are able to reveal. In that sense, I remain true to what renowned French film critic André Bazin called “change mummified,” i.e., “the conservation of the features of what image records, and the motion of the motionless.” This is undoubtedly a melancholy definition of image, but it has the merit of believing its own power: the unique ability of fixating and revealing something about the world and time in their own impurity. And an experience of the world that we can convey and share.

The urban space is almost the protagonist in narratives such as Vue Panoramique (2005), Vue Aérienne (2006), and Napoli Centrale (2002). Also, in your work, space is clearly regarded as a possibility for tackling political or identity-related issues. How did you develop this approach throughout your career? What is your main concern?

My nature spontaneously compels me to a contemplative gaze of things, especially of the urban space. This may seem paradoxical, since the modern city, with its permanent agitation, tends to make this kind of gaze impossible. Nevertheless, what I am interested in when I record cities is precisely that which does not allow itself to be seen immediately, but rather that which emerges from simple recording and alters perception. Urban space is also an echo chamber, and it becomes a mental space in my work. In all of my videos, the outdoors are transformed into a place without topography, a labyrinthic space, sometimes on the verge of invisibility, and seen based on a time that is not the present, but rather a time in which events are permanent. This, without a doubt, is my way of making images nomadic, in the places that I turn into spaces of passing and displacement.

The dialogues in Vue Aérienne (2006) were taken from Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation), a 1979 Fassbinder film that tackles, among other issues, the relationship between cinema and video, and political and terrorist organizations. What is the main idea behind that appropriation?

The shadow of cinema is often hovering over my images. To me, making images also means reactivating the filmed images that marked me and formed me, such as those of Fassbinber, but also of Pasolini, Buñuel, Rossellini, Glauber Rocha. In other words, a certain type of modern cinema, sometimes disenchanted, but which definitely believes in the power of the image. What I was interested in when I did a “remake” of soundtrack fragments of Fassbinder's film was being able to revisit the modern confusion he staged. With the difference that, in Vue Aérienne, it is impossible to know who is talking, and what exactly does that talk represent. Confusion is at its peak. The voices become ghosts that haunt a city of which we do not even know the name. It is also a way of reformulating the question about the statute of images in the contemporary world, this permanent, ambiguous flow. I conceived this video as a sort of mental exploration that weaves, but also “unweaves” the signals that are sent out to the world. And it is also a probe into the difficulty in understanding these signals and, most of all, in comprehending them.

The convergence of space and identities, migratory flows, and political issues is very intensely present in Straight Stories (2006), your work in progress. Is it a synthesis of concerns featured in previous works of yours, or does it represent a new, more documentary-oriented approach?

Straight Stories is not exactly a documentary film. The basic difference between this work and the previous ones is the fact that the voices we hear in it are identified, they belong to singular persons, even though I am not telling the story of the people who agreed to talk to me, neither do I show their faces. It is more of a fragmented trip to different nomadic experiences. In this work I am interested in dealing with an experience that is individual and singular, but which has no value as an example or reference. Nomadism is a major contemporary issue, and at the same time, it is a totally archaic experience. Man has always moved around. Men are nomads, it is part of the human condition. But now, nomadism has become harder than ever, because everything makes it difficult to move around. This is the reason why I never make films to discuss borders per se, in the physical sense of the term. To record the sea is to record a space that has no borders, a landscape that represents infinity, endless motion. By the same token, not recording faces makes it possible for the word to echo throughout this endless space, so it travels. That which I present highlights an imaginary geography, circular and permanently moving.

In some of your works, sound and image go along different directions, and the processes of resignification seem to become viable due to that tension-estrangement. Do you agree? How do you work to create this relationship?

In my work, sound really is disconnected from image. It seems to tell another story, to speak of things that are absent from the image, as if they belonged to another story, another time. This is the reason why, in my videos, many different languages and accents are heard-surely because I also live with many languages that coexist in me. These convergences of languages, of sounds, of potential and fragmented narratives are my way of opening up and extending the space of the video. In this sense, I create a sort of ambiguity: places are unrecognizable, voices are unidentified. That extends the possibilities of the image. Is it reality? Is it an imaginary projection? Is it a mental concoction? To me, that disconnectedness, which sometimes verges on discordance, becomes a mental dimension of image, one that opens image up to a broader horizon.

What are your upcoming projects?

It is difficult to discuss my upcoming projects because, in order for the desire to make images to arise, I must have a nomadic experience, I must move around in a space that is not familiar to me, one which I will discover as I record it. Right now, I am still working on Straight Stories. Two new parts will follow.

The artistic career of Bouchra Khalili extends beyond the realm of video making. Born in Casablanca (1975, Morocco), the artist lives in Paris, where she studied cinema at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle, the same school in which she has been teaching aesthetics and history of cinema since 2000. Khalili also holds a degree in arts from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy, and is coprogrammer at the Tangier Cinematheque (Morocco). Established in 2006, the Cinematheque has the mission of shedding light on Moroccan film culture, becoming a hub for international exchange and a training center for cinema professionals and students.

Cinema is the main reference for Khalili, who produced her first works - InSide/OutSide, L'Antichambre, À rebours, and Appuntamento - from 2000 to 2002, the same period in which she held a residency at the Cité des Arts, in Paris. From 2003 onwards, Khalili's videos and installations started attracting attention in audiovisual festivals and exhibitions around the world, garnering awards and becoming part of important collections, such as those of the OVNI (CCCB) and of the CaixaForum Mediateca, in Barcelona, and that of The Film Society of Lincoln Center, in New York.

Aspects of Mediterranean culture provide an imaginary territory for Bouchra Khalili's works. Their strong experimental character problematizes traditional audiovisual formats, absorbing procedures from documentary films, fiction, and video art, and taking in productive contaminations from the visual arts field. Khalili's imagetic constructions reveal the experiences of displacement typical of contemporary nomadisms, with all their implications to the construction of identities-at the same time gliding smoothly between the preestablished territories that sometimes limit formats. 

The formal construction of Khalili's works features precise cuts, extended shots, and a near-absence of image treatment. Her inventiveness is apparent in the relation between sound and image and in her subjective-reflexive treatment of subject matters, using texts that are both poetic and elucidative of contemporary situations.

One example of Khalili's way of dealing with said situations is her answer to Tunisian curator, writer, and poet Abdelwahab Meddeb's invitation for her to participate in the exhibition West by East, held in 2005 at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture. In the installation La Soltera/La Novia, a woman runs a selection process for candidates to having a liaison with her. By dealing with “the taboo of foreign love in the heart of a Muslim woman,” her work reinvents, in our days, the syndrome of Zoraida-an Arab woman who falls in love with a Christian man, in a story told by Cervantes in El hombre de la mancha.

That same way of tackling complex issues is present in works dealing with the subjects of territory and nomadisms, such as Napoli Centrale (2002), presented at the 14th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, Vue Panoramique (2005), screened during the 15th edition of the Festival, and the recent Vue Aérienne (2006). In these three works, the issues of territory create a sort of landscape, characterized by a focus on subjective relationships, and in the territorialization/deterritorialization motions typical of our times. Through Khalili's images, we glimpse a subtle revelation of the situations and tensions that territory, borders, and the urban space provoke in our subjectivities.

Maybe this is why her new work, Straight Stories, still under development, shows precisely how people view each other near the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Morocco from Spain. Again, Khalili's editing dissociates sound and image: voiceover statements are played as a backdrop to images of the landscape, the passages, the territory. This elaborate editing resource helps us viewers realize to what extent that narrow, specific space is capable of giving rise to such radically different and foreign views of the world and of the Other.

BOUCHRA KHALILI
A brief introduction to the work of Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili at the portal website of the UNESCO DigiArts pilot project for music, art, design, and multimedia.

CINÉMATHÈQUE DE TANGER
This is the website of the Tangiers Cinematheque, which relocated in December 2006 to the refurbished Cinéma Rif building, in the Moroccan capital. Bouchra Khalili is the assisting programmer at the Cinémathèque. Future projects of the institution include workshops and facilities for North African artists and producers. 

AMONG THE MODERNS
Dedicated to the research and screening of contemporary technology-inspired art, Scottish organization Stills presented, in the last months of 2006, the exhibition Cinémathèque de Tanger / Among the Moderns, dedicated to film and video production from the Arab world. Curators Bouchra Khalili and Yto Barrada compiled works by Nassim Amaouche, Ali Cherri, Myrna Maakaron, Katia Kameli, Dalila Ennadre, and Mounir Fatmi, among others. 

VIDEOKARAVAAN
Curated by Moroccan artists Abdelaziz Taleb and Abdellatif Benfaidoul, the project traveled through the West to promote electronic production from the Arab countries. The site includes images of the project's final workshop, held in Agadir (Morocco) and coordinated by Toni Serra (Spain) and Bouchra Khalili, among others. 

LAURA WADDINGTON
Contains the full text of the essay “The Pain of Seeing: The Videos of Laura Waddington,” by Bouchra Khalili, which discusses the work of the English artist, and was published in the 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen catalogue