The Lost Cemetery of Images. A Conversation with Carlos Casas

Digicult presents:[p]
THE LOST CEMETERY OF IMAGES
A CONVERSATION WITH CARLOS CASAS
by Pia Bolognesi[p]Complete article & interview with Carlos Casas on Digimag 60 - January 2011:
http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1964[p]The use of archive material is a tendency which has established itself in
the last few years as a common practice in audiovisual contaminations. It is
an ongoing search which paves the road to countless approaches to the work,
as well as involving the individuality of the artist in the reprocessing of
traces and memories in an imagination which is set on the present. With
Cemetery (Archive Works), inaugurated on 28 October and ongoing until 14
January at the Marsèlleria in Milan, Carlos Casas steps onto this path at
its edges, balancing between visual anthropology and rethinking images as a
form of trans-cultural memory.
The work of Casas - filmmaker, video artist and sound experimenter - ranges
from documentaries on the furthest reaches of the Earth (Aral, Fishing in an
Invisible Sea; Hunters since the Beginning of Time; Solitude at the End of
the World) to pure, exploratory research of sounds and images. This
materializes in the experience of the Fieldworks and of the Archive Works -
projects developed at the same time as the making of the films, which Casas
uses to probe field research as he continues to mix different languages.
The Fieldworks come into being in 2001, during a journey to Tierra del Fuego
for the preparation of Solitude at the End of the World, as a series of
free, anti-narrative notes in which the artist takes the time to plunge his
gaze into the meaning of the place, of the landscape, without drawing on the
need for the definition of a complete story. Abstract fragments with an
essential grammar, in which the processed ambient sound goes over the hidden
connection with the image and defines it (each acoustic episode is made up
of live recorded short and medium AM/FM radio waves).
For the Archive Works, on the other hand, the approach is shifted to the
opposite front; the discovery of the geography occurs through preexisting
film material. Here, too, we have a physical study of the places that Casas
has chosen to document occurring through the examination of the modes of
analysis with which these places have been represented, used and
diegetically manipulated through classic and contemporary films. The Archive
Works, created between 2002 and 2010, are dreamlike inspections, maps of
shared imagination, memories of the visions which have shaped the author's
gaze, preliminary sketchbooks to study language and sound solutions for
films which are coming to life from other films, where the visual material
is toned through an ongoing iconographic re-absorption.[p]Digimag 60 - January 2011
http://www.digicult.it/digimag_eng/[p]