Departing from the questions mentioned aside, I have been approaching site-specific performance practice as a lens-based exploration. On the one hand, by experimenting with how the processes of translation and mediation can be used to transfer a site-specific engagement into different forms of media (e.g., performed photography, video-essay); on the other, by looking more closely at how the camera can be included within a site-specific inquiry and research process. Not only as a recording device for documenting and eventually securing an event for posterity, but also as an artistic research tool for developing a cinematic language.
By this, I am referring to the emergent field of screen production research which, according to Susan Kerrigan, proposes “an iterative process of practice and reflection by a researcher who is also the screen practitioner and a theoretical perspective that informs the overall research.” 1 While such a process draws from the researcher’s ontological and epistemological position, a key emphasis lies in employing the camera to bring forth a screen work as a research output. In doing so, my interest in working with the camera, departs, on the one hand, from an embodied approach to screen practice which according to Vivian Sobchak, suggests that “we experience films not only with our eyes. We watch, understand, and perceive films with our whole physical being.” 2 On the other hand, it stems from my experience as a performance artist who is not only acquainted with being in front of the camera, but also with creating performances “in the space of the image”. In short, with exploring how a certain body/space relationship can be framed, captured and, especially, translated into still or moving images.
From this perspective, I have been engaging with a filmic and/or documentation process by looking more closely at how I can attribute agency to a camera. In other words, how I, as a performing and documenting body, can play with the materiality of a camera through something I call, its narrative agency; for example, by allowing the camera to take different positions and roles in the space and, in turn, by letting go of the control of what is being filmed or the type of audiovisual material that is being generated. Even though this may compromise the filmic result, or to some degree, what was envisioned, it can nevertheless permit the camera to be both a recording device and a sort of “co-author”.
In terms of screen production research, such a cinematographic approach can also be compared with a visual strategy that Cathy Greenhalgh describes as follows:
Primarily, I view cinematography as a type of thinking, as sketching and scripting, and try to find ways of working which foreground this habit. The ‘footage’ is acquired through a material, embodied process, improvised performance, and reflective, contemplative periods of editing, rather than rigorous structuring methods.3
According to this, I consider the narrative agency of a camera as, on the one hand, a way of creating linkages between the body and a specific place or, between an embodied and performative engagement with a place and its mediation process; on the other, as a way of experimenting with how the narrative qualities and structures of an audiovisual material (and all its potential contingencies and surprises), can be (re)framed and (re)performed in the editing room or, in “the space of the image”.
To give you an insight, follows a video (11:00 min) entitled Shoot – Kameran, Går, which exemplifies how the different technological devices – a GoPro, a iPhone and a professional camcorder – were used to:
- generate a multilayered audiovisual material
- create a relationship between the characters and the shooting/documentation process on site
- touch upon the topic of humankind’s relationship with the camera.