Laura Guerricaechevarría
Ominous Visions
In terms of the research which guides my process, my sources are both historical and fictional. This mass of information becomes an amalgam or chimera of the imagined and the factual. I am interested in the dialogue of these two polar opposites and the challenge of this binary in relation to art. In addition to this the mayor pillars of my practice delve into the language of the uncanny, the insurrection of terror, poetics and belief systems, as well as the rapture and serfdom of femininity within historical art and the Christian mind.
The making of the material artistic object at present consists of a variety of approaches. I make experimental films with analogue photography as the visual basis of the product, creating specific archives to be used in each film. The introduction of digital clips documenting the development of the pictures in the dark room reclaims this activity as an alchemic process, which I have used as a theme equating it with supernatural apparitions. I am interested in this esoteric aspect of the tradition of photography, specifically the post mortem portraits and spirit photography.
All films share a common narrator, which I perform myself, favouring intimacy and considering this action a medium of its own, with the same material presence as any other form of plastic art. This perspective shares a certain aspect of the vision of Susan Hiller which I came to know after experiencing her installation Monument, which also treats the themes of Death and Memory using her voice as guiding spectre. In relation to the writing; language has become not only an instrument, but rather an aesthetic concern. The script provides the thread that binds every other element, placing both the narrative and the voice at the nucleus of my conceptual core. The final edit equates to the coming into being of the audiovisual creation, establishing an all encompassing rhythm or harmony.
My work concerns a critical approach to belief. Both spiritual and political. My previous films were poetic video essays on the constructed character of the Virgin Mary, with an argument directed towards the portrayal of the sacred icon as a fragmented entity that inhabits a place between legend and history. I have discussed the fetishism and hope the believers execute in their cult of the Virgin; along with this the problematic matter of Mary being simultaneously elevated and humiliated; often reduced to a biological determination. Gender becomes a central topic; which is explored in depth through the characters approach to desire and devotion ultimately succumbing to an all consuming passion.
In my approach to the topic and use of temporality I have found Giorgio Agamben the most clear voice in terms of the execution of the untimely which has been an obsession throughout my artistic development. As he mentions in his essay on contemporariness “This urgency is the untimeliness, the anachronism that permits us to grasp our time in the form of a too soon that is also a too late.” Aside from its concrete relation to the perspective of the artist when facing his or her era, and the act of creation I have found this sentence to be closely bound to the idea of mortality.
Another word for this “the ungraspable threshold” a phenomenon which again encompasses the practice of sublimation and the experience of expiration. Although at its root this connection might seem desperately romantic or even nostalgic in some way, it does reveal something that belongs in a space that is above and below the present simultaneously, speaking to our human nature and our creators complex. Finally in strict definition with historical art and the archival fever which Walter Benjamin planted and nurtured with genius, Agamben states that there is in fact a secret affinity between the archaic and the modern. I have found this relationship to be imbued by an ambiguity between fact and fiction, hence dedicating a unique space for this binary to meet and ferment becoming a presence of its own. The imprint that establishes chronology and that exists within every artwork always implies the work to be a remnant of a dead subject, as Roland Barthes analyses in his masterpiece Camera Lucida.
My most recent project has been inspired and informed by the Spiritualist movement of the Victorian era, considering its philosophy as an adjacent cult to Christianity. In the storyline I introduce the passions and motives of the spiritualists in the format of an epistolary compendium. The project becomes then, not only a portrayal of the rising of a movement in another epoch, but also a play of language and a reflection on the concept of narration itself.