BIO

www.kikanicolela.com b. 1976, Brazil lives and works in So Paulo and Zurich Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator. Her works include single-channel videos, installations, performances, experimental documentaries and photography. Graduated in Film and Video by the University of Sao Paulo, Kika Nicolela also completed film courses at UCLA University and is currently doing a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK). She has participated of over 100 solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK and US. The artist was the recipient of several prominent Brazilian grants and awards, including the 2012 Award to Visual Arts Project by So Paulo Arts Council in 2012 and 2006, 2011 FUNARTE Contemporary Art Award, 2011 Piracicaba Art Salon Acquisition Award, 2010 Exhibition Abroad Award by the Biennale Foundation and the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, 2007 Production Grant by the Recife Arts Week and the 2006 Exhibition Grant by the So Paulo Cultural Center. Her videos have been screened and awarded in festivals of more than 30 countries, such as: Kunst Film Biennale, Milan International Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Bilbao International Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Videoformes New Media & Video Art Festival and International Electronic Art Festival Videobrasil. As a curator, Kika Nicolela has developed programs for the festivals Screen Festival (Barcelona), Videofomes (France), Alucine Toronto Latino Media Festival (Canada), AIVA Angelholm International Video Art Festival (Sweden), CineDesign (Brazil), Experimenta! (Brazil) and for the projects Wikitopia (China), Directors Lounge (Germany) and Manipulated Image (US). In 2012, Nicolela curated the IMAGEMCONTATO: Moving Image Festival, presenting 225 works by artists such as Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Jan Svankmajer, Stan Brackage and Pipilotti Rist in various venues in Sao Paulo. Since 2008, Kika Nicolela also curates and coordinates the Exquisite Corpse Video Project, an ongoing collaborative series of videos that involves more than 70 artists from 25 countries. She has received artist-in-residences stipends at the Sumu AIR (Finland), Rondo Studio (Austria), Knstlerdorf Schppingen Foundation (Germany), Gyeonggi Creation Center (South Korea), Casa das Caldeiras (Brazil), Objectifs (Singapore), Route Fabrik (Switzerland), LIFT Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (Canada) and Residence En Lycee Agricole En Region Auvergne (France).

THE FILM THAT IS NOT THERE

multi-screen video-installation, 2012

Based on a feature film script I developed during 3 years, I invite actors to participate of a casting audition. I provide them with scenes from this script and we shoot the tests in studio with the actors in pairs. But, while the goal of an ordinary casting audition is to choose one actor to play one particular role in a posterior shooting of the script, in this project the casting audition recording is the base of the artwork itself. The objective is to use all actors that were recorded, all versions of a same character and of the same scenes.
The Film That is Not There dismembers the idea of a feature film that will never come to existence as such. Based on a feature film script I developed during 3 years, I invite actors to participate of a casting audition. I provide them with scenes from this script and we shoot the tests in studio with the actors in pairs. But, while the goal of an ordinary casting audition is to choose one actor to play one particular role in a posterior shooting of the script, in this project the casting audition recording is the base of the artwork itself. The objective is to use all actors that were recorded, all versions of a same character and of the same scenes. So instead of utilizing the screenplay as a blueprint to make a film, I aim to face it as an open proposal of multiple and infinite possibilities of interpretation and translation. The actor is summoned not to embody one character, but to experiment and propose options and version of characters and scenes. With the support of international art residencies, I shot the project in Austria, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and Brazil, with the participation of local actors playing in their respective mother tongues an important part of the process was to translate and adapt the script, originally in Portuguese, to the language of the country. The final format of the project is a multi-screen installation using the scenes featuring about 200 actors from the 5 countries. The actors faces shot in close up are projected in large scale over the several screens. Sometimes I place several actors together saying the same lines, other times I use more than one take of the same actor. Through the exploration of montage tools such as repetition, superimposition and fragmentation, besides the distribution of the footage across more than one screen, I intend to create a distance from the original meaning of the pre-established narrative of the script, in order to reach a fluid multi-layered narrative one that is born from the unique experience of each spectator with the artwork. Project recipient of the FUNARTE Award for Contemporary Art (Brazil).

PREVIEW LINK (exhibition documentation): https://vimeo.com/56896829

installation view, The Film That is Not There, Palcio Gustavo Capanema, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

installation view, The Film That is Not There, Palcio Gustavo Capanema, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

A FILM THAT IS NOT ONE... CHRISTOPHER EAMON Kika Nicolelas ambitious multiple-channel video installation The Film That Is Not There lays bare the inner workings of classical narrative cinema while belying its propensity for precise and unwavering meaning. This particular investigation of narrative form takes as a starting point the artists script developed as if she had been in the process of writing, planning and producing a feature film. While the script in the end provides only an armature for the final work, the ghost of this narration is found everywhere in its intimation of an advancing plot, even if it appears, or is perceptible, only in fragmentary form. The basic footage for the piece was collected from numerous auditions in five countries with hundreds of actors of different national, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The final work consists of multiple takes of the same scenes enacted by all these different actors shot against a stark decontextualizing black background. The resulting video montages are screened in three specially constructed chambers. Two of these are octagonal rooms connected by a diamond shaped space, such that they flow one to the other unimpeded, and so its screens maybe viewed easily at various vantage points in the space. In the first octagon, one is presented with a three-channel video where actors appear and disappear repeating the same lines sequentially in different languages and with differing acting styles and presentational modes. Opposite to this, and connected to it by a diamond-shaped or square room, a second octagonal space contains a double-screen projection where simultaneity and multiplicity are enacted. Here, Nicolelas editing and montage techniques multiply the personages of her theatrical construct. The third and middle chamber houses a single-channel projection where the actors appear as talking heads, like the ones seen in so many documentaries, and yet here too, the actors are scripted. This confusion or slippage among, or between, cinematic forms further elaborates the active role of the perceiving spectator in the production of meaning and, yet, this is a melodrama at heart and the role of drama is pertinent to it. Other more non-linguistic elements equally constitute actingthe ability to produce affect, or feelings, is the most important. This melodrama contains suspicious individuals. Hector who is ill and has poor powers of recollection; Amanda, who undergoes plastic surgery, sometimes also known as Rick; and a cast of seemingly detached or uncaring characters such as Hectors wife Laura. None of them ever coalesce into someone we might recognize as a human being and yet we are affected, drawn into the story. While this narrative and these characters are never fully formed, we are poised to feel and interpret them, which brings us to the audition, the prototypical space where the enactment of affect occurs. For the audition is all about the repetition of the same, only it is different each time. If this existential concept of repetition were not fully anticipated in tragedy, or the theatre in general, then the audition, which the audience rarely sees, is both the testament of, and test for it. For the multiplicity of repetition marks the lack of an original and, as such, one could say it marks the essential characteristic of classical narrative cinema, that there is no truth in moving pictures save our own affective relationship to those images. Additionally, the multiplicity of actors playing the same characters in many ways also reinforces a kind of psychosis. In an ingenious double layer, The Film That Is Not There serves also as an allegory about filmmaking: an homage to the psychosis implicit in the process of feature filmmaking, made by many people, populated by many people and yet in the end all neatly sewn up into a unitary point of view, which can be tidily and easily consumed by movie goers. The cinema as reimagined by Nicolela for this video installation is the exact antithesis of this kind of storytelling. In fact, as both story and allegory, the work is simultaneously comprehensible and non-linear. Actors (in the double-screen section) act out scripted parts simultaneously, and mirror each other across the space, splitting the authorial point of view into many. This synchronized cacophony is eclipsed by the actors individual personalities. Through the multiple layers of content, meta-content and multiple actors addressing the same plot line, in The Film That Is Not There, Nicolela achieves a new kind of storytelling that is both spatially and experientially beyond conventional single-screen cinema. In a 2007 essay by Mieke Bal, a multi-screen video installation by another film artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, is examined from a primarily literary point of view. House (2001) tells the fantastical story of a psychotic woman both through her own eyes and those of an omniscient narrator whose point of view is suggested through the use of alternate camera angles in this three-screen installation. The fairytale aspect of the narrative becomes increasingly replaced by a pervading sense of psychosis, which is especially disturbing as a naturalistic portrayal. What Bal finds so fascinating about the work is the fact that, in viewing the supposed fable, the mixture of two opposing moods fills the interaction between work and viewer with affect,i which Bal reasons is the medium of the work. Her point is that Ahtila produces an intellectual break between what is rational and irrational. This gap is paradoxically breached by an affective experience.

So while the multiplicity of actors acting sequentially in the three-screen segment of The Film That Is Not There illustrates a lack of singularity in narrative cinema, the double -screen section doubles the characters, but it also doubles points of view, and in the repetition from one actor to the other the character is multiplied outward and beyond. The space that is elaborated here is now not only a cinematic space, but a narrative space, that space which viewers inhabit. This figurative space is full of contradictions and here that a friction occurs between artistic intent and audience reception. This friction constitutes the mechanism of our own desires as projected into the cinema. And it is here that our feelings and attachments are created. In the lunch scene between the recovering Hector and his wife Laura, the latter describes having been made in the image of a sculpture of a woman. She has undergone multiple surgeries to look like this inanimate object, because as she puts it he fell in love with this statue, and anyway what wife would not want to be loved in the same manner. Yet he cannot remember any of this. Her claims seem belied by the curt manner of her delivery, which seems matter-offact for such a painful reminiscence, and, his lack of recollection. In point of fact, because Hector doesnt remember and seems a rather sympathetic character, one might think this a cruel joke on Lauras part. For all of this imagining, all of this caring is deeply and truly false. This indeed is where the fault lines of narrative cinema fall, and into these crevices so, too, we go willingly, as viewers.

Christopher Eamon is an independent curator and writer. He has curated exhibitions at international museums and galleries and published books on film and video art. His publications include Anthony McCall: the Solid Light Films and Related Works (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL and Steidl, Germany, 2005), writings on film and video art from 1950 to 1980 in Film and Video Art (Tate Publishing, 2009), and is the co-editor, with Stan Douglas, of Art of Projection (Hatje Cantz, 2009), an anthology on the history and significance of projected images from the 18th Century to the present. He is the former director of the distinguished Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, San Francisco; and the New Art Trust; and former assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1 Mieke Bal, What If? The Language of Affect, in In)ter)discipline: New Languages for Criticism, eds, Gillian Beer, Malcolm Bowie and Beate Perrey (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2007): 6-24.

THE HUMANITY OF IMAGES LIVIA FLORES The film that is not there. Nobody comes unwarned, the title let it be known, from the very beginning: the film is not where it should be on the screen of a movie theater, TV or computer nor here where it could be museum, gallery or any other venue legitimated by the art-institution. For some decades now sheltered there are the most diversified experiments of displacement and resignification of the cinematographic image. The title goes beyond: it doesnt say there is no film, on the contrary, it affirms its state of not being as a distinctive quality the film that is not stressing at once the absence of its constitutive place and its condition of accomplishment. In other words, its mode of being is not able to be circumscribed, but it cannot be mistaken as an ill- being. Despite the common roots, or, better saying, the radical absence of topos, the atopical condition in this case doesnt carry any trace of utopia nor of surprise or irony. The 21st Century artist is completely self-conscious that her responsibility is limited to a fraction of the work, exactly that part prior to the regard that will ultimately constitute it the regard of the other. The dual relationship is at the core of Kika Nicolelas work. The artist doesnt give up her mtier in order to install the film-work, but from the very beginning she conveys it as a virtual dialogue between talking heads and thinking heads. We think, read and talk with images the whole time. This is what we will explicitly do here, as we do everywhere, but unaware of it. The film-that-is-not-there counts with the mutual implication between spectator and work, voyeur and model, viewer and frame, largely supported by the centenary experience of cinema and its developments. Lets include in it spectacular (and specular) uses of projection mechanisms. The work employs its smuggling operations, its subtle detours, through gaps installed in the core of this functional and extra-mediatic machinery: the very driftage of identitary games. Knotimages. A planetary movie, an international soap-opera, a melodrama performed by different races, peoples and idioms, all in unison, aware of the Great Drama. Utopia or irony? How to grasp the meaning whose direction escape us; we who are at once aware and unbelieving? We know quite well that the whole thing is a staging, but what intense desire to establish the true version of this fiction propels us to try it once again? Thought as attempt and temptation Nietzsche old dictate demonstrating its efficacy now, in exchange of nothing, a mere banal drama on a dark background. The counterpoint to the atopical is the commonplace, allowing the proliferation (in hospital, in jail, in the room) of non-places built by discourse. We recognize that which we dont know; everything resounds. In the angular perimeter installed inside the Modernist palace, reverberates, perhaps, the museum, the hotel of that other deserted island, whose reality is language. From our position as spectators (our role?), we guess some kinship with the fugitive-prisoner of Bioy-Casares The Invention of Morel. There, as here, the price paid for atemporality is repetition, deaf dialogues, the hallucination of the different in the similar. Or the contrary. Everything seen is dj vu. Nothings adheres to nothing. In vain, an architectural drive: yes, we need to distribute spaces, to restore broken syntagms, to gather losing threads. But the promise of rescue from this labyrinth of unequal mirrors is never fulfilled. Whether pristine it may be, every mirror divides and multiplies. Our images confuse us. Chaplin gracefully points this out in the initial scenes of The Circus, translating into gags the shock between the two versions of the imaginary as proposed by Blanchot. In the exact point when they bifurcate, nonsense finds the most absolute impossibility of meaning. The similar, similar to the absolute degree, is both perturbing and wonderful. But is it similar to what? To nothing.1 In Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author, actors play the role of actors and others of characters. To the last, Pirandello suggests the use of special, customized masks, made of a material that doesnt soften with sweat and is nevertheless light () fashioned and cut in such a way that leaves out the eyes, the nose and the mouth2. From this annotation it would be possible to imagine masks which power of adherence turns them indiscernible from the face they cover. The title used for the anthology of his theatrical works, Naked Masks, seems to synthesize a series of questionings and paradoxes explored by Kika Nicolela in her aesthetical propositions. Whether experimenting the very becoming-image from the heat of a lighted match next to the skin (Flickering, 2009), or side to side confronting expressive micro variations of the young and the mature Liv Ullmann (Poem of Ecstasies, 2006), as if the radical slowdown of the movement could contain its functioning while pellicle. Subcutaneous was the title of the film with no place before its existence.

On the edge. In the series entitled Distant Affinities, Kika exposes herself to the others regard investigating the beingimage of her own condition as a foreigner (from another place) and nomad (from no place). The film may not be there, but the camera is always there. Its presence is explicit, unavoidable, whether as safeguard or a pretext for contact, mediating subtleties, menaces and all kinds of fantasies phantasmatic image, imperceptible masks that we impose on the non-ego. Kika Nicolelas images possess a striking property: they invert the direction of the regard, but they also displace us from our position. We are captured by the image of the object to which the camera is pointed, but invariably an inner eye which we are not able to see turns to it: absolute center, pure irradiation. Main character, witness and persecutor. Bodiless voice. Hostage of its power, we lend to it our own. From where does it come? (the obsession of place) New Horizon (irony? utopia?)

Livia Flores is an artist and professor of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), teaching at the School of Communication and at the Graduate Program in Visual Arts of the Fine Arts School.

MEDIA MEMORY COLLECTION

multi-screen video-installation, 2013

With the project Media Memory Collection, the artist collected temporary donations of old homemade films from families in the countryside of So Paulo, and transferred all the collected material to video almost 30 hours in total. The first goal of the project is to return the digital copies in DVD to the participants along with the original material. These films ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s can be again seen by the families owning them. By the other hand, this material serves as base for a series of video and photo installations. The project offers a reflection about time condensing and uniting elements such as memory, the time of the recording, the documentation of time passage in the lives of the families and the impression of time over the media itself (with the physical deterioration of the film). In addition, the artist intends to investigate the tensions between fiction and reality, History and personal stories. Project supported by LIFT - Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Recipient of The So Paulo Arts Council Award to Visual Arts.

PREVIEW LINK (exhibition documentation): https://vimeo.com/80898709

installation view, Media Memory Collection: Vestgios, Museum of Image and Sound, Campinas, Brazil

installation views, Media Memory Collection: Vestgios, Museum of Image and Sound, Campinas, Brazil

KIKA NICOLELA: BETWEEN LIVING ROOM AND MUSEUM DAVID EVANS Brief Encounter A couple of months ago I briefly met Brazilian artist Kika Nicolela in Sao Paulo. She spoke of her new project that was shortly to be exhibited at the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS), Campinas. Campinas is where she was born in 1976. It is also where she launched a call last year for family films that she intended to preserve and exhibit, using specialized digital equipment that is hard to find in Brazil. The general public responded generously, mainly supplying Super 8 footage from the 1970s that was often long forgotten and seriously deteriorating. The roll films were laboriously cleaned up and converted during an artists residency of two months in Toronto. Eventually, the original loans - and new, highdefinition, digital versions - were given back to the donors, with an agreement that the new material could be used by the artist for her own exhibitions. The films were conserved, then, but were also poised for a new career within the context of contemporary art. The project interested me from various angles, and I was subsequently delighted when Kika explained it further in e-mail correspondence, and invited me to contribute a short text to this catalogue. Kidnapping We were both in Sao Paulo for an international seminar at the Porto de Cultura called Kidnapping Photography. A provocative title - but the seminar had nothing to do with innocents being snatched by gangsters or guerrillas and held for ransom! Rather, the main theme was contemporary art that involves using the photographs of others without permission. And it must be added straightaway that such kidnapping has been going on for a long time, ever since technological breakthroughs around 1900 permitted the mechanical reproduction of photographs in all forms of printed matter like books, magazines, newspapers and commercial publicity, providing new source material for artists who wished to expand their palette. Different generation invent different terms. In the early decades of the 20th Century, there was a riot of Modernist neologisms: collage, found object, photomontage and readymade are some obvious survivors. In the mid-20th Century: assemblage and dtournement (an everyday French word meaning corruption, diversion or hijacking, depending on the context, and used by the Situationists to try to differentiate their own kidnapping from what had gone before.) The eighties to date: appropriation, or taking without authority. A familiar word in history books dealing with colonial conquest, for example, but from around 1980 it began to circulate widely as a key term in the lexicon of Post-Modernist art. To date: words like sampling and re-mixing register the influence of DJ culture on contemporary art, and now artists are regularly taking imagery from the internet, as well as from printed matter. In addition, though, I am surprised by the number of contemporary artists who are happy to describe themselves as collagists, taking us back to Cubism where we began! Kidnapping Photography emphasized illegality and my paper dealt with double appropriation. One: Brechts War Primer (East Berlin, 1955) is a book by German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, mainly containing press photographs about World War Two that the author clipped from newspapers and magazines, and to which he added new captions in the form of four-line epigrams. Two: War Primer 2 (Gttingen, 2012) is by British-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. They downloaded images from the internet dealing with the so-called War on Terror and pasted them into the English edition of Brechts War Primer (London, 1998). That is, they occupied Brecht, encouraging reflection on two world wars, two forms of photographic reproduction, and the history of kidnapping photography. However, what made the seminar stimulating was the tension between work made without and with permission. For instance, Dor Guez is an artist from Israel (he doesnt want to be called an Israeli artist) who spoke about an ongoing project that he calls The Christian Palestinian Archive. The archive is mainly scanned material based on family photographs supplied to him by a Palestinian minority historically linked to the Greek Orthodox Church that is generally excluded from dominant explanations of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Guez subsequently installs inventively in art galleries and museums. In short, he seeks to make visible those who are hidden from history. Two alternatives, then, and Kikas project clearly has closer links to The Christian Palestinian Archive than War Primer 2. Cut All of the papers delivered at the Sao Paulo seminar dealt with still photography, but Kika works with movies. Nevertheless, still and moving photography have had a complex relationship over the last hundred years or so. The term photomontage, for instance, acknowledges affinities between cutting and pasting photographs and cinematic

editing or montage; and the found object is close to the notion of found footage. Films based on found footage were made across the 20th Century, but we are currently experiencing something of a golden age, primarily because of the existence of relatively cheap digital editing software, plus contemporary artists who are keen to use it. An important international survey of some of this recent work was held at The Milwaukee Art Museum in 2004 with the title Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video. Various contributors were working with Hollywood feature films, like Scottish artist Douglas Gordon who stretched Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho (1960) to make to 24-Hour Psycho (1993); or Candice Breitz from South Africa, whose Soliloquy Trilogy (2000) worked with removal, dramatically reducing three films of two hours or so to a few minutes, by just concentrating on the words and images of the respective stars Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson and Sharon Stone. In contrast, Israeli artist Omer Fasts CNN Concatenated (2002) used news programmes from American television as his found material, arranged to challenge a supposed transparency. (My terminology comes from a stimulating essay in the exhibition catalogue called The Editor by Stefano Basilico.) There are a number of striking parallels between the innovative artists in Cut and Kika Nicolela. All use found footage, digitally transformed. All embrace the idea of the artist as editor. And all are sensitive to the fresh possibilities presented by the migration from cinema or living room, say, to the art gallery or museum - 24-Hour Psycho hangs in an art space so that the viewer can walk around it in a way that would have been impossible in a cinema in 1960, for example. This dimension of Kikas work at the MIS is particularly impressive, revealing her sensitivity to the rich, new possibilities provided by the rooms of a former palace. Beyond The Family Album Artists and critics have shown little interest in domestic photography, still or moving, until quite recently. The turnaround is in part due to the widespread influence of one book: Camera Lucida (Paris, 1981) by French literary theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes wanted to discover the essence of photography by systematically analyzing the small number of photographs by professionals that moved him. However, he comes to a halt halfway through the book, feeling that he is going nowhere. He then re-starts, switching his attention from professional to domestic spheres. Famously, the book concludes with his conviction that he has found the essence of the medium in one anonymous family photograph of his recently deceased mother that means so much to him personally that he refrains from reproducing it. Domestic photography was also seriously scrutinized by Feminists in numerous countries from the seventies onwards, often inspired by the slogan the personal is political. A famous example from Britain is Beyond the Family Album (1979) by Jo Spence, a portable exhibition of family photographs and extended captions, mounted on cheap laminated panels that mocked the high production values associated with major art institutions. Her main aim was to investigate her own identity by exploring the class and gender antagonisms that are either absent or muted in the albums that are generally presented as a celebration of domestic harmony. The exhibition was first shown at The Hayward Gallery, London, in the Feminist section of a survey of contemporary British photography, but its portability has facilitated continuous showings in less prestigious venues. Spence died in 1992 and has never had a major retrospective in Britain. However, the enduring significance of Beyond the Family Album and related projects was acknowledged by radical Spanish curator Jorge Ribalta who recently organized an inclusive solo show at the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona in 2005 called Beyond the Perfect Image. Today there is a less condescending attitude towards domestic photographs, and many artists use them, informed by varying agendas. For instance, Floh (Gttingen, 2001) is a limited edition book by British artist Tacita Dean made up of anonymous family snaps found in flea markets in Berlin and elsewhere. Dean has no interest in the provenance of the photographs. Instead, the selection and editing of found images are guided by the artists subjectivity. Scrapbook (London, 2009) offers a useful contrast. The book is a collaboration between Irish photographer Donovan Wylie and Timothy Prus, director of The Archive of Modern Conflict, London, that houses all forms of vernacular photography. The core of the book is a scrapbook kept by the photographers uncle during the recent Troubles in Northern Ireland. Now, though, the original scrapbook is supplemented by materials bought on eBay by Wylie and Prus to create an impossible document that transcends sectarianism. In many ways, Kikas work is different from the above examples. She is not mourning like Barthes. She lacks the strident Socialist Feminist agenda of Spence. Her foregrounding of home movies made in her hometown during the decade she was born signals a fascination with the origins of her found footage, unlike Dean. And in contrast to Wylie and Prus, she has no obvious interest in recent political history, even though her source material was created under a military dictatorship. Yet why do I persist in believing that there is something deeply political about the project?

Writing in Berlin, I am reminded of visits across the eighties to the East, when that half of the city was still under Communist control. I regularly enjoyed the hospitality of a chimney weep and his family who made very clear their cynicism about the so-called German Democratic Republic. At weekends we would stay at their little house and garden on the outskirts of the city, a modest - yet utopian - space where the grim reality of dictatorship could be temporarily forgotten. At that moment still and moving cameras came out to record family life. Here, too, the personal was political, I would argue. Kikas re-presentation of home movies from seventies Campinas touches me in a similar way.

David Evans is a British writer and picture editor, based in Berlin. Recent publications include the anthology Appropriation (London and Cambridge, Mass., 2009), Critical Dictionary (London, 2011) and The Art of Walking: a field guide (London, 2013).

TRACES: FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF KIKA NICOLELA ALESSANDRA MONACHESI RIBEIRO In 2012, Kika Nicolela asked the population of the region of Campinas to donate their homemade films, especially the super 8mm films. These films would be scanned and then returned to the families, who would give consent in order for the images to be used in her project called Media Memory Collection. A collection of images is then formed, but not any collection. The artist was born in Campinas, precisely in the 70s, a time when the super 8mm film was widely used. Would it be a desire to create a collection of personal memory from what would be common to families in this region at that time? Would it be a desire to find in the loopholes of the memories of others something of her? Would it be from this project an autobiography rediscovered and rewritten in the footsteps of others who participated in the artists work? In the dark room, there are floating deteriorated still images. A minimal movement is announced, frozen in the midst of its own process of deterioration. What is this image that, instead of preserving an important moment not to be missed, surprises us with the mise-en-scne of its destruction? A single video channel without sound and in slow motion. Colors and lines parading slowly. Textures of time passing. Signs of aging images that form an abstraction of watercolors. A blue almost melancholic settles in the thousands of nuances on the screen, a blue where red and yellow eventually jump, and from time to time, there is one or two fragments of images. Is it people in an open space? A family on the beach? A woman lying in the sun? People cooling off with soda bottles? They are just shapes, shades of dark blue among all the shades of blue, as if in an ocean is unfolding. Its an image stuck in the blue time, just like in the Windmaker (2007). But, now, the matter seems to have shifted from one ocean to another. If the thoroughness of the treatment of the images seems to have been what has guided many of the previous productions of Kika Nicolela, regarding mainly the care in its conception, production and editing, now its like she showed us the other side of the coin. The image of the deep blue that previously tangled the viewer with its extreme beauty, poetry and musicality, now it has become rough, full of indentations and bumps, and smelling moldy. The image is projected onto the walls of the beautiful palace of the Museum of Image and Sound Campinas that are also peeling, melting into layers of paint and revealing, among the gaps between each other, traces of memory. Traces ... Without sound, without being driven by the clarity of the images or by connections that are always reassuring, just as many other artists showcase others are bothersome and disturbing like the lovers in Face to Face (2006), transvestites in Tropic of Capricorn (2005), and the actors of the Film that is not there (2012), or even the unknowns of Let me in! (2009), which at least are similar, identifiable and present. We are helpless against the screen, listening to the silence and looking to those who can look back at us and recover in our own humanity and permanence. Where are they? The appropriation of images is not the first time that it occurs as a strategy of the artists work. In the Poem of Ecstasy (2006), there were pre-existing images and reflections about the time that were already articulated. Furthermore, wouldnt be this that Traces is trying to highlight in the midst of your cloudiness and opacity, meaning that any discussion about image brings into play the idea of time and, consequently, the memory? And that ahead of time, the comforting memory of one self and others reveals as an effort doomed to failure? The shift made by the artists new project seems to try to explicit the opacity and loss. Its not anymore about the disturbing and the surrounding beauty of the stories and memories of others, but its dissection. Instead of the perfect image, traces and textures that insinuate images take place. Thus, we find out that those previous images were based on what it has always been its essence: only traces made of a material which dissolves over time, which ends up being lost. Just like the memory that, to psychoanalysis, consists of traces that, in order to stay, can no longer be there. The textured blue of Kika Nicolela gives signs of these traces that are almost lost, which we might call the unconscious and that is no more than an attempt of a fictional reconstruction of what creeps over time. Because the unconscious is lost to the extent that it is established, and we cant be aware of it except for remnants and constructions. We dream and we create what we cannot perpetuate. And our memory is the seam of such fictions. Time gives memory its true meaning: a free creation from traces. We do not know if there is a woman who is tanning, or family in the outdoors, or children that are enjoying their soda. Did we see them jump from the film? Or did we deduct it from that seafloor of silhouettes? Everything is so fluid that we cannot be sure. And it does not matter. The possibility of memory being proven through facts captured in pictures it is not what ensures its veracity, but its ability to tack fragments and create meanings. True and false are lost on what each individual can say with absolute certainty about itself, as Freud discovered very early in his dealings with the hysterics. And if this may sound distressing to our

yearnings to anchor knowledge in a supposed objectivity, the work of Kika Nicolela seems to recover a certain grace present in this movement that requires every human being, in order to exist, the capacity to reinvent their self and their history. A collection of images is an overview of memories confined in an attempt to be preserved by freezing. They might be photos or videos, which are mainly produced for the purpose of eternalize something and ensure that people, events and impressions are not lost with the passage of time and finitude of living beings. Derrida shows that this fixation that the collection does, by recording the image and the desire to preserve something, is precisely what constitutes its paradox, leaving it vulnerable to its tendency to be destroyed. The attempt to try freezing brings its opposite, the impossibility of memory. A well-kept collection of images is a trace that is lost. In another room of the exhibition at MIS Campinas, Media Memory Collection, it is performed in duo channel with all of the family archives, face to face with another projection of 8 and 16 mm films of the 1940s-1960s. The youth of the parents of the youngsters from the 1970s and 1980s faces those that are tangent to the artists history. There are two generations in various scenes that, facing each other in common themes, lose their weight and their uniqueness, becoming indistinguishable ingredients from the same soup. Scenes from childhood, babies in arms, family celebrations, birthdays, plays, pets, family meals, Christmas parties ... the banal everyday special occasions unfolds before our eyes, showing how everything is interchangeable. The pride in the eyes and attitudes of characters parading past the camera becomes the restless look of the spectator who, plunged in the excess of those special moments, quickly realizes the trap that the art work puts us in: does to immerse yourself in your personal memories completely reveal how much they are composed of a substance that is common to all, and therefore unimportant in itself? A story could be another, a person could be someone else, and an event could be something else. But there is not much difference between what each human being lives or what each chooses to perpetuate what is meaningful in life. We want to preserve the memory of what we consider extraordinary and keep it alive, but, in reality, what is shown is a sequence of images of common events. It is the cruel realization of our insignificance as singular beings, which is the wire that connects the current project Kika Nicolela with so many of her other productions: the explanation of this lack of intrinsic importance, the indistinctness that everything plunges when confronted with the mirror image. The risk of the image / recovered memory is the revelation of this commonplace. But it is also the greatest opportunity, since that frees us from the burden of the extraordinary and it allows us to rediscover, on what is more banal, something that sensitizes us when facing each other. And that contemplates its fragility in ourselves, presenting us with a rough, blurry and inaccurate mirror to our own fictions.

Alessandra Ribeiro Monachesi is a psychoanalyst, post-PhD in Visual Arts from ECA-USP and in Art and Language from EHESS-Paris.

IMPRESSIONS OF A LOVE DISCOURSE

video-installation, 2013

The artist proposes to 6 actors to interview her, using as frame the last 2 years of her love life marked by stories of love, separations, profound changements and physical displacements. Each actor then developed a character mixing the stories they heard and the impressions they had of the artist, with their own personality and stories. 2 weeks later the original interview, the actors are individually interviewed on camera, by their theater company s director, and they reply to the questions improvising as the character they created. The result is a 6 monitors installation that mixes the voices and the love stories of these fictional characters.

PREVIEW LINK (exhibition documentation): https://vimeo.com/80913556

installation views, Impressions of a Love Discourse, SESC Pinheiros, So Paulo, Brazil