Gordon Matta-Clark came up with the word "nonuments" to describe his "detournement" position vis-a-vis the monument. This is a point of tension between formalizing the emotion of in-situ demarquation and the actuality of being.
You talk about that uncomfortable tension in terms of documentation. Referring back to Baudrillard isn't all media "performed" nowadays?
I know that I can't do straight video performance art without acknowledging the media-sphere and the segmentation/sampling/repetition of post production.
non-uments
Well in my project La Conchita mon amour, I am working inside a real place that people have turned into a monument of sorts, or at any rate an architectural and topographic project of shrine building on top of the mudslide that killed 10 people and still exists right in the middle of their tiny village.
I am interested in a kind of knowledge production that comes from the encounter with that space, that monument, from the inside, in a sense, mutually generated, since the shrine itself is continuously being rebuilt, falling apart and then refreshed and restored with new stuff, like dolls, prayer flags, crosses, buddhas, tipis, photographs. There are no edges or limnalities outside to which I am excluded. I, the 'i' of the photographer does not have any special priviledge; i could try to claim an outside surveillant position, even an ethical position of trying to 'give voice to' or 'rehabilitate' the space of aftershock and continuing trauma that residents live in as they make these vernacular gestures. If i did that i 'd only be adding to the same old schlock of patronizing comment about a place of disaster. Like who cares what i think? It's not about my engagement, its' about my disappearance, that makes it possible for there to be some kind of generative narrative at the site in my 'fictions' about the site. Working 'inside' in this sense I don't have any hegemony and actually my presence doesnt matter except that in a sense my presence makes it possible for there to be a coproduction, or shared production, of a sense of place beyond the reaches of the disaster, possibly. Its perhaps possible even to imagine a shared heuristics about the production of a new sense of place out of the suffering and the 'bare life' of such a place. There has to be a space created anyway for this to happen in. Is there still a monument then? yes a memorial maybe, but one that is dynamic and changing rather than holding onto a frozen moment. One that corresponds to the intense dynamism of geologic, marine, atmospheric, and political forces that bear down on this tiny place of La Conchita.
www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html
Christina McPhee
www.christinamcphee.net
www.strikeslip.tv
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