I never had the opportunity of getting to know Dino Gavina in person. But I knew his background - how he worked with artists like Man Ray, Sebastian Matta and Meret Oppenheim. How an artist deals with design - breaking the myth of functionality, for example, or broadening the horizons of a project - is something that fascinates me. So I was flattered when they asked me to take part in the exhibition and to choose one of my works to contrast with the Man Ray mirror that Gavina produced because I studied design as well as cinema as part of my professional training.
I was always attracted by design methodology - for example, how you determine a problem and find a solution using a design system that fixes a connection between different disciplines and gives the needs of industry a human slant. These are questions that have always interested me. I think that the idea itself of design is an important aspect of my work.
Gavina was exposed to design through artists: it was Lucio Fontana who introduced him to the Castiglioni brothers. Later, after he had founded the Centro Duchamp (the Duchamp centre), he brought in artists to work on objects in an anti-rationalist way. As part of this, Man Ray designed the mirror that you've been asked to work on for this exhibition.
When they asked me to work on the Man Ray mirror, "le Grand Trans-parent" (the quote is Duchamp's), it gave me an opportunity to pay tribute to these great artists who have influenced my vision of the world. I thought that this would close the circle.
Obviously, it wasn't straightforward - but I had a kind of vision that helped me. Over the last two years, I have visited Siberia to pursue a film project on a community of whale hunters in the Bering Strait: it’s one of the most extreme environments you can find anywhere. My last three films have all been about extreme places where people live in total isolation. The first was shot in Patagonia, the second in the desert around the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan - and this last one in Siberia.
I lived with one of the last communities of whale hunters: they practise one of the last ancient occupations that still survive. Part of this material was used for a documentary I've shown at various festivals, including the one at Turin. While I was travelling around preparing the documentary, I had the idea of shooting a video of a huge frozen wave along the coast where the hunters live. The design of the form of the ice seemed to suggest that time could suddenly be halted. So, when I thought of Man Ray's mirror, I had the image of this magical beach by the Bering Strait in my mind. In the video, the only movement is the flight of a bird passing by the ice wave, and this shatters the illusion that you are looking at a photograph.
The mirror is often represented as a threshold: if you cross it, it is possible to extend the limits of perception and reach a higher level of awareness.
The idea was to hold the image of the ice wave fixed, almost as if it were an immobile, frozen image; in reality, however, it's a film shot in real time. The video lasts around thirty minutes. At the same time, the mirror emits the sound of the voice of an old hunter speaking in the original Chukchi, a language which is threatened by extinction. I wanted to fuse the viewer's gaze, which sees a reflection of itself in the mirror, with an unfamiliar voice coming from the other side of the world.
Do you think that the series you have called Fieldworks, where you work live, can be thought of as an extension of landscape photography?
In some ways, my working methods can be thought of as similar to those of an anthropologist's - even though I'm not an anthropologist and I don't pretend to be one. But I'm very interested in the processes they use to investigate the world - the methods they use to analyse it and enter into a direct relationship with the subject being studied. In my opinion, Fieldworks (which are exactly that, works out in the field) are a bit like jottings: I use the video camera as you would use a Polaroid or a notebook. I've always needed it to transcribe and collect these moments and, above all, to understand the landscape. Then they are useful when I make the film. Obviously, many of these Fieldworks follow other patterns. When I'm asked to change the emphasis between pure documentary and contemporary art, they give me the flexibility to enter one world or the other. In any case, they help me to develop my research, and to understand how to communicate the experiences I have when I travel.
How do you prepare, given that these are live works, and so can't be edited? Do you carry out research before you set off? Do you make surveys or put together material, or do you try to keep yourself "pure", to have a "virgin" perspective for the real time filming?
There's usually a long research process before the actual filming. The preparation for the work is perhaps the best time of all: it lets you come in contact with a huge variety of information relating to the place you're interested in. Once you have collected all this - once you have roughed out a kind of letter - you can start to pin down the points which interest you and which may be relevant to what you really want to say. So you construct your story little by little. I think of this phase as making the "glasses" I'll use when I go and shoot. For example, when I arrived in Siberia for the first time I already had these glasses in my mind. They had taken more than a year to research but they allowed me to perceive exactly what I wanted to say, and what I wanted to see. Of course it happens that you have an idea of the way a place is, that you arrive with a story in mind, and that you find it's completely different. Meeting people can change your perceptions. But this doesn’t mean that research is unimportant.
Do you see your work as documentary in nature?
I'd like it to be. There's no greater satisfaction than in knowing you have this ability to document things that are on the brink of extinction.
The ultimate value of these works lies in documenting these fleeting moments and these people who are doomed to disappear. It's about collecting their traces.
The sense of drama in what I'm doing is in the awareness that I'm at the edges of civilisation investigating people whose future is at risk, and ways of life and landscapes that are on the brink of disappearance. At the same time, I know that not even my point of view will endure because I'll change as well. Everything changes.
