How did you decide
to create the video projections?
WODICZKO:
When I first began this type
of work in Krakow, I didn’t have any experience in
filming or projecting motion images on buildings. I’d
been working on still slide projections. So the shift was
radical. The projections might look similar in photographs
and documents, especially photographs, but they are completely
different. In the slide projections, I was animating the
monuments with icons and images that I produced in order
to actualize them so they could speak on contemporary issues.
Now, I create a situation for others to animate monuments
and project themselves. So the process of filming is a situation
for them to learn what to say and how to say it—because
I don’t tell people what they should say. I don’t
know what they will say. They don’t know themselves.
Through the experience I am a completely different artist
now, I’m not the one that I was before. My role has
changed. I am proposing something that people may or may
not be interested in taking advantage of. As I see now, they
must reject it. They must say, “No, we’re not
going to be manipulated here, we went through this before,
there were so many journalists and documentary filmmakers
trying to make art of our misery and nothing has changed,
why should we do it again?" They must put in doubt the entire
operation. But then they should learn that there is some
difference between previous situations and the one I propose.
There’s more room for them and there’s more time.
It won’t be a short one-hour filming session, they
might work on this for a year to figure out what to say and
therefore survive their criticism and their doubts. The project
must survive, I have to show up again and again, ready to
be useful. And they may realize that it’s no longer
my project in which they are passive parts, but it’s
becoming their project. They are becoming artists, monument
animators, and truth tellers. I am becoming more of a protective
person, someone who protects their process, like a mother.
There is a playful aspect to it, the animation of the monument
and also the editing process, which requires reduction of
the length of material and choice of what the monument should
transmit. The person and the monument working together, that
is an artistic process and it must have some kind of playful
and creative aspect to it. I think that step-by-step those
co-artists realize that it’s their project more and
more, also that they can make good use of it for their own
lives and for the lives of others. So they’ve become
co-artists, but also co-agents. They are doing something
for those who, at this point, cannot do what they do. They
cannot speak well or they’re not ready or it would
be too risky for them to be part of the project. They may
later be ready for it, but the project won’t be there.
ART:21:
Talk about the visual aspects
of what you do.
WODICZKO:
To talk about beauty is too
difficult, spectacle may be more appropriate. The architecture,
façades, monuments—the entire city—with its various
forms and arrangements is an aesthetic environment. So entering
this kind of environment, trying to speak through it, add
a new dimension, project a new meaning, I have no choice
but to try to be as spectacular as that environment is, or
more. Even without discussing the particular aesthetic quality
that I am looking for, I must match the spectacular quality
of a work with the environment in order to speak through
it.
But we could also approach it from a different angle. To
speak of things that are not only difficult, painful, or
in many ways the opposite of spectacular or beautiful, it
might be worth reaching the spectacular. To convey something
difficult it’s easier if one can have some convincing
aesthetic means. We have to see the relationship between
what is being said and how it’s being transmitted.
For people to open up and come closer to those who are conveying
difficult truths, it may be easier through a spectacular
project. So there is a function of the spectacular here,
an artifice that is more acceptable because of its aesthetic
quality.
Art in general seems to be a very useful artifice. Film,
theater, painting, literature, media art—all of this is
a very good conduit for transmitting the things which people
would rather not hear or see. This is a possibility for transmitting
something uncanny, something that ought to be hidden but
comes to light. It takes aesthetic form as an artifice, it’s
partially real and partially fictitious. So, those faces,
they are partially people and partially façades, partially
testimonies and partially spectacles. It’s much easier
to accept them for what they’re trying to say this
way than, for example, listening to someone speak directly.
It’s not attaching specific aesthetic decisions. When
I am speaking through those structures I have to learn what
particular aesthetic method or technique they are using already.
We’re talking about a neoclassical vocabulary of buildings—symmetry,
bodily metaphor. They are wrestling with their own bodily
metaphors, every building and every monument. Even architecture
that seems to be far away from neoclassicism, still often
maintains this same bodily metaphor or play. It’s a
play of corporal masses, components that form a whole. It’s
an old metaphor—a social body that is made of particular
bodies. Most civic structures are trying to reproduce and
reinforce certain concepts of unity and harmony. This kind
of perfect, seamless, highly organized façade is something
that fascinates people. We have a special relationship with
them. They seem to be corresponding to our own desires and
tendencies to become like buildings, to become as perfect
as they are. We have a pleasure in looking at it because
it calms us down, we are exchanging something. This is a
process of architecturalization of our bodies and bodification
of architecture.
Assuming that what I am saying is at least in part true,
then through this kind of dialogue we are able to accept
all sorts of things. For example, we are already identifying
with the tower, lonely tower, because we already also feel
very lonely and lofty and dramatically alienated. We might
wonder what’s happening when there is a projection
happening on that tower because there is already us inhabiting
that tower. Now there is somebody else there. It’s
difficult, it is uncanny—because it’s us and also
it’s somebody else. But via this architectural form
we somehow build a bridge, link with other people. I have
seen some evidence of it in the case of earlier projections,
when I was closely watching the reaction of various members
of the public. It was amazing, someone said that rhetorical
question out loud, “How is it possible that one doesn’t
believe another human being but does believe the tower?” In
Polish it’s actually much more humorous because belief
and tower are the same word. But the question shows that
there is a special relation that we have with the spectacle
of architecture.
All of those devices that I use in projection
are simply attempts to make it as organic as possible, so
the boundary between architecture and projected body would
be blurred. The skin of the building and the skin of the
person would be background and foreground at the same time.
It will be shifting focus. And I am not sure if I am always
successful. Sometimes I think that perhaps I ask too much
from those silent and motionless structures.
ART:21:
How do you view cities today?
WODICZKO:
What are our cities? Are they
environments that are trying to say something to us? Are
they environments in which we communicate with each other?
Or are they perhaps the environments of things that we don’t
see, of silences, of the voices which we don’t, or
would rather not, hear. The places of all of those back alleys
where perhaps the real public space is, where the experiences
of which we should be speaking, where voices that we should
be listening to, are hidden in the shadows of monuments and
memorials. That’s where the city that interest me is—in
all of those places where we are even afraid to go, and all
of those places that we get to when we make a mistake, take
a wrong bus, a wrong subway line. One of the objectives behind
my projections is to bring to light all of those voices and
experiences, and to animate public space with them in a kind
of inspiring and provocative way—maybe in a way of protest.
I don’t know if this is political art. Or is this psychotherapeutic
art? Or is this an ethical proposition? I don’t know
who I am. Sometimes I’m thinking of myself as what
Derek Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, called a “good
enough mother,” someone who protects the process in
which others can develop and create something in an atmosphere
of trust, develop the ability to cope with life though often
damaged and wounded by their experiences. Perhaps projects
of the kind I’m working on help those who are ready
to take advantage of them to make that leap.
