June Drevet: How can we, through photography and film, enter into relation with the world, with history, and with other people? That's a question that connects the two of us. Since the documentary turn, the documentary has once again been widely criticized, given that pointing a camera at a person or a web of relations always carries something violent: it can objectify or neutralize, tearing people/voices/stories out of their contexts.
The camera has been accused of being a central tool of generalization. To approach this issue, let's talk about the surface of the image—that is, about questions of representation, use, and conditions, as well as about the materiality and technologies involved in observing, recording, and holding on to stories about ourselves and others. What's so exciting about the two mixed-media installations we'll be showing in Stuttgart—to which you will also add a third—is that the stories you tell involve your identity and your observation, but they aren't only yours.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku: As a human, I have to reflect on my own position, the position from which I tell stories about myself and the world. I come from a working-class family. With such a background, your position in society is never self-evident, but it is something you feel early on. Neither going to art school nor not dropping out was self-evident. The first thing that engaging with my own positionality gave me as an aspiring artist was the sense of legitimacy to have a place at all. At first, this legitimation had nothing to do with speaking about myself. What struck me more was that I saw myself represented by people with a similar history, and that was very important to me. The first time that I took my own family history as a starting point was in Bricks and Cement Don't Make a House. Prior to that, I always resisted telling personal stories. I always had someone else read texts aloud. I never spoke myself because I wanted to maintain a distance and go beyond mere representation. As a marginalized artist, you often show your work in those places where exclusion is happening most directly—where most of the people are not marginalized. That's an uncomfortable tension: having to negotiate beforehand how much of yourself you show, how vulnerable to make yourself. At the same time, it's absolutely central to my practice that there is a radical relationality, that I want to touch people on an emotional level, and that requires me to open up and show myself.
Whatever medium I use to tell stories about the world or my environment, I need a medium that makes my presence within the entire construct visible. Positionality doesn't have to be renegotiated every single time; it's automatically built into the medium. I learned that from the artist Tina Bara, who was my professor. She frequently uses a series of self-portraits, but sometimes the camera briefly pans to a mirror, allowing us to see both the protagonist and Bara herself. For me, that's what the LiDAR scan does: how I move has a significant impact on the result, meaning my body is inscribed into the medium.
This early sense of one's position in society—a sense of class consciousness—is for me the precondition for being able to effectively tell stories with and about others. In my case, this path—from a cacao farm in Ghana, via an education in Hungary, to an artistic practice, teaching, and research in Germany and Switzerland—took two generations.
JD: Absolutely, and at the same time I think that our different ways of working provide different possibilities for deploying class consciousness. In art criticism, the format itself is language, and language is a way of creating discourse. Language allows me to intervene in discourse much more directly: an article can be taken up at the next symposium, developed further at a conference or cited in a lecture. That gives it a different kind of leverage compared to making art, where the work first has to pass through layers of mediation before it becomes discursively effective. And we can deploy, carry out, mark, or inscribe the question of positionality quite differently too.
VAO: How do you deal with that in your writing?
JD: For example, in the beginning I always built in a note on the conditions under which I write or under which a given text came into being. That's how I learned institutional critique; I noticed that it is necessary to connect content with structure and conditions. But the social misalignments repeat themselves. I can't point out the same problem every single time. I think this pointing-out has, over time, migrated further and further into the underlying structures, similar to what happens for you. As an editor, I can respond to this concern even more directly. I ask myself each time: How do I invite authors? How do I shape collaboration? Or how do I approach a set of themes? And, I think the discourse has, fortunately, become much more complex. I think that every debate—if we see it through to the end together with all the parties involved—gives us something to learn.
VAO: Yes, it only works together. This question of facilitation, by which I mean how we (jointly) make a space possible, is absolutely essential. So how do curators see their role such that it is possible at all to exhibit the work—when it is made accessible to the public—in a space that opens itself up?
JD: Exactly! Mediation is also one of our responsibilities because artists shouldn't have to explain their work. In particular, they don't have to respond artistically to every piece of criticism; that's what institutions are for. Otherwise, individuals would censor themselves. In recent years, artists have become more political; put positively, they've allowed themselves to let criticism in. But because of that, they're also frequently expected to take a position on and speak out about particular things.
VAO: I would still say that's also a co-creation. It gets interesting once the process and the exchange become part of the work itself. The focus is on relational work: the circumstances under which a work is framed and curated, just as much as in the practice itself. How I work with places and people, and how I make myself visible in doing so. That takes a great deal of time. I need it so that the people I work with have agency over how they're recorded and shown—and so that I can really connect with the places I work, instead of just capturing them quickly.
JD: What I've noticed is that your works aren't there to point out conditions. Quite the reverse: conditions serve as the basis for the works or for the qualities that define the artistic practice itself. Either it's a collaboration, a long-term project, or it's working with certain materials and technologies. Can you say, briefly, how do you understand the conditions inherent to the technologies and materials you use, and how do you respond to them? Which conditions feed into your choice of tools and which influence things in terms of image?
VAO: This decision about materials is like a chain reaction. How an image finally comes about has to do with so many loops that are so interlocked with one another that I couldn't possibly put it all together from the beginning. It's a process that develops over many iterations. That's why I work with installation. For me, it's a way of keeping things mobile so that new combinations can happen.
JD: Yes—with different logics and dynamics pulling in different directions. Some things become visible through the processes that weren't visible before, and some things are made unreadable in order to produce a different kind of visibility.
VAO: Making infrastructure visible, yes. I have to become conscious of every technology and every material—how it came about, the conditions under which they were produced, their historical significance—so that the decision is made consciously, not out of impulse. On the material level, I often work with different things, but they keep coming back whenever they can fulfill a function. On the technology level, it always comes back to the same tools: field recorder, camera, LiDAR scanner. They're all sensing technologies that capture something physically present over time, not through a single, closed-off image.
JD: In previous curatorial projects, I've repeatedly engaged with works in which the embodied camera plays a role; a strategy used by feminist filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, or Barbara Hammer. The embodied camera is, on the one hand, one that makes the artist's movement visible but also—you spoke earlier about Tina Bara's influence—brings you, as the artist, into the image. Do you also think of the LiDAR scanner and the infrared camera as a kind of embodied camera?
VAO: Yes. I'd say both the camera and the scanner are embodied. The LiDAR scan depends inherently on the movement I make; an image only comes into being through movement. I never use a tripod when I'm filming—it's always handheld. The image stabilization compensates for the movements I make with my body without it making me or the device invisible. That's not a contradiction for me but a tension I want: my breath stays visible precisely because the stabilization can never fully smooth it out.
When I tell a story about coloniality, I have to be aware of how weaving has been used in that context, historically and today. When I make a work about bodies, I have to become aware of what wax has meant historically in the process of making death masks while also being aware of the structure of exploitation involved in how humans keep bees for their beeswax. The infrastructure behind it is essential to the logic of the work. Recording is, for me, an active practice: a signal is sent out and reflected. It is just as important to me that reception is active too. Not passive consumption but making one's own decisions: to step into this space, to open oneself up to the theme or the story, to decide how deep to go, whether to sit down, to pick something up. That is also true for the people I work with and their agency. When I do scans, the person can move and thereby make themselves less visible or more blurred. In both cases, it is less that they are people observing or being observed and more that they are "user-designers."
JD: That's interesting because it's actually not easy to reverse that and become agents again when these technologies are owned by companies. It isn't possible to use smart technology with an awareness of where and when you leave data traces. When I think of the optimistic texts about the internet in the 1990s, immateriality seemed to represent unseen opportunities. Everyone had the feeling, regardless of their background, that they could see some potential in it for themselves. Today, that's completely changed. We're realizing that the possibilities have been capitalized to such an extent that it's once again a question of rich and poor in terms of who sees opportunities in technology and who doesn't.
VAO: It's also the invisibility of technology: this plays with the smooth experience that makes everything disappear into the background so that we never notice how it actually works. That also means we no longer have to develop our own competence. And yet it's so important that people actively connect with their environment and don't limit themselves to passively consuming. We have to understand how something is built in order to be able to build it differently or turn it against itself. But that requires competence and awareness—and that, again, is a class question.
//
This conversation is an excerpt from the full interview originally published in "Synthesizing Realities", the book accompanying the exhibition of the same name at ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, Germany. The exhibition was curated by Vanessa Amoah Opoku in collaboration with June Drevet.