The becoming-image: about the films of Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela

Image credits: Still image from the film Corpo-Aéreo (AeriaL-Body, film 16mm, 2’’, loop), by Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela. Courtesy of the artists.

At the beginning of A Trama e o Círculo (The Mesh and The Circle, 2014, 34’30’’), by the artist duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, (1) someone (of which we only see the hands but that we can consider as the ones that represent the artist duo) writes in a blank notebook the words quoted above (valid for their several films/videos), immediately unravelling the preconceived idea that a film tells a story or follows a narrative. From dreams, enchantments or hauntings, the film is a collection of images, necessarily with a fragmentary and heterogeneous character, in which the images embody a matter that the artists tell us is likely to be transformed. In A Trama e o Círculo, the images, which are the substance of the film, find in the hands their substance – the hands that write, the hands that work, the hands that massage – which in turn are equally the substance of the film: hands that think, hands that are thinkers, hands that shape ideas, thought-hands, hands that show us, hands that see, hands that concede access to reality, to the world and, specifically, to the world of crafts, those that have hands as moulds. But hands can be, in this film, a metaphor for the images, if we remember cinema’s own origin: the camera as extension of the eye, as well as the hand, whereby the expression of the image is, many times, inseparable of that which is manual, as, on the other hand, we know the world (and we form images-movement, thinking like Bergson that our natural perception triggers “a kind of inner cinematographer”) through our hands.

When referring to, simultaneously (even if in a subjacent and ambiguous form), images and hands, the artists juxtapose two ideas that throughout the film will suffer different transformations (mainly when the circular movement – of the film itself and of some objects represented in the images – starts to insinuate itself with more preeminence, “jumping” from the mesh or the web in the moment it searches for the infinite, held in the variation or in the natural elements like fire and water): they are interested in thinking about the condition of the cinematographic image (its expression, matter, composition, duration, resorting also to different image dimensions, as for instance, the fixed or static image to which is made the donation of a duration, the light-image that is projection and, also, the movement-image) and gather images of different activities and crafts that depend on hand labour, as well as several objects made by hand (more than by thought), because in them, in their contours, we find the absent hand, appealing to the touch, to a soft touch of the fingers. “We read somewhere about the importance of training the fingers to understand the unity of things, that when we touch the surface of reality, we draw a subjective tapestry in the multidimensional loom of our head. That the brain is hand and the hand is brain” (Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, A Trama e o Círculo, 2014).

The images of the hands and the different activities and objects are, in the film, the expression of that subjective and empiric experience with which the artists grasp the world, appearing interspersed by a drawing with a geometric pattern in black and white, whose lines are, sometimes, traced by their fingers. The abstraction – of which the geometric form is one of the visible expressions (appearing in several films of the duo) – is equally a model of understanding the world, in which nevertheless the expected opposite doesn’t oppose the hand or the gestures but suggests a limit that will always be surmountable by the body (of which the hand and the gesture are a wonderful synthesis), as on the other hand, the gestures and expressions of the body (and in the body of objects and in the body of animals) we can find a hidden geometry (which the film ends up revealing). This geometry doesn’t have however any intention to be universal: the film recovers its labyrinth-like quality and circular movement at the end, swallowing us all, the world passing above our heads, like when we dive and forget everything: for seconds we will only be one with prime matter (the one that in the course of the film shows up also under infinite transformations, as is the case of the fire).

Caló and Queimadela have a special interest in this kind of subjective confluence between culture and nature, that work in a mysterious and seductive way, introducing elements that come from research similar to the ethnographic and anthropologic, as well as profound desires or magical revelations outside of the spectrum of tangible reality. The film can be, also, a dream (a surrealist experience?), as another work in which the virtual body in itself, or soul body, is released and contemplates its other body, inanimate laying on the grass, leaving it so for a few moments – the time of a lap – to return to itself (Corpo-Aéreo, film 16mm, 2’’, loop).

During that lap, all kind of thoughts that are hovering above us seem to appear in the image but that impression belongs only to the one that is viewing the film, even though it is there in the form of desire: how many of us have not desired to one day leap out of their bodies, and stroll around our ideas, through the darkest or most frivolous, at the same time that we contemplate ourselves lifeless?

The film can also be a rehearsal that sometimes has its origin in a similar fieldwork to one of social and human sciences, through the travelling and exploration of the artists in natural and human landscapes and subsequent creation of film recordings, imagery, or also oral, many times directed by literary references (worthy of note are the influences of André Leroi-Gourhan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Jorge Luis Borges, Henri Michaux, Georges Bataille, Gaston Bachelard, amongst others of so many different times and contexts). Nevertheless, the chosen material is reorganised, manipulated and transformed with the intuition and sensibility of the artists and the aesthetic experimentation expected in the artistic process, in which there is always some element that comes from outside, a doubt, a perplexity, a crazy thought, an enchantment, that places the film in the threshold between dream and relative knowledge. In Efeito Orla (Edge Effect, 2013, installation composed of two synchronous and juxtaposed HD projection, colour, sound, 14’40’’), for instance, the artists explore the landscapes where the Iberian lynx was once spotted, producing a mirage of the animal: we see the lynx going through and inhabiting those places without ever seeing it, enchanted by the continuous movement of the optical disks and the voice that recounts the descriptions of the apparitions of the animal (skilfully, the artists use in this film a cinematographic artifice used many times by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huille, resorting to the disjunction between what we see in the image and what we hear to create the illusion of the lynx in our imagination). The film (in Caló and Queimadela works) operates a transduction of hidden forces found in reality, in the empiric experience, in magical forces, which start to inhabit the aesthetic and artistic elements, appropriating a José Gil idea that we heard in Sombra Luminosa (Luminous Shadow, 2018, HD video and 16mm transfered to Hd video, 3:2, colour, sound, 22’09’’).

This film began with research in the archives of the International Arts Centre José de Guimarães (during an artistic residency) and in the selection of materials that came from exhibitions and conferences taking place there, as well as catalogues published by the museum. The method is similar to what previously has been defined: the elements are reorganised in an intense sequence that allows us, quoting philosopher José Gil, “to pass to another dimension, beyond space and time.” During the film, we hear excerpts of the conference “Art Object Magical Object” by Gil, and at the same time the film induces us to a state of semi-conscience, in which images slowly free themselves of their first meanings (that we can either understand as the representational model that births them, as well as their (ex)position in the museological space) and creates a cadence close to a trance that the images themselves represent. As in other films by this artist duo, the image doesn’t only take us to the represented thing or what is represented, as it wishes to be confused with it, but it receives from it proprieties (as in the beautiful final sequence of the rise of the ashes of the masks – of all masks – that have burned, which is also the possibility of the existence of some redemption for the artistic act that erases all), activating one of the artifices that allows us to “enter” into the film or that allows us to become, using the concept that we hear José Gil explain at the beginning of the film: “It is a body amongst all bodies of all the animals and minerals and vegetables, the one that has the capacity of ceasing to exist, to become, to stop being human, only. It is a body that has that capacity; it is a body magical in itself because it has that capacity of going further, of becoming another, of becoming a cosmic body, of becoming a vegetable body, of becoming a mineral body, etc.”

The work of art as a magical object allows the human being to become – become-cosmos, become-animal, become-vegetable, become-mineral. What we become is not the result of a process of mimicry or make-believe but it comes with the creation of an irreducible singularity to both parts that become (the man that becomes animal in the moment that the animal becomes human: we only see the lynx in those landscapes if we inhabit them as animals, close to the humid earth and with our senses alert and attentive). In the instants prior to José Gil’s explanation, we see the reflection of a human face overlapping the mask-face of a primitive statue, composing for brief instants when living eyes meet the inert eyes of sculpture, a being that is born from the darkness of time, of the inside of sculpture (which also belongs to another crystallised time). The human face disappears, composing an indiscernible face with the mask, where meanings and codes are shuffled and swapped. Certain old beings, like certain indigenous tribes, especially their shamans (in the film, we can read an excerpt of a book that explains the process of the trance of an Eskimo shaman) know very well this process of becoming, of activating animal forces, for instance, in the body of a man. The masks (that we see in the final sequence, cut and placed over the faces of the human figures) are many times gimmicks of the passage from one state to the other, enabling the process of becoming.

In the several declinations of the meeting of nature and culture in Caló and Queimadela’s oeuvre, many times it seems that the creation of this indiscernible area between man and animal, between man and vegetable, or even between man and mineral, is a result of these processes of becoming. But who will become, the artists or the viewers? Does the work hold this extraordinary capacity of placing us on the edge of things, on the edge of matter, transforming our body in a field of fresh grass beneath the moonlight or in the skin, in the gaze, in the animal? In Animal Vegetal Mineral (an installation composed by a six channel projection that includes interstitial parts of the films Sombra Luminosa and Dança do Cipreste), we are captured by the inebriating sequences in a slow movement like the one of the starfish, when the desire is loose pursuing the image and we see ourselves, also, caressing a sea plant in a puddle of water, feeling its wet leafs, or jumping through the fields, even if the movement is still slow (as almost always is the case in Caló and Queimadela’s films, or taking the title of one of the chapters of Gradações de Tempo sobre um Plano / Gradations of Time over a Plane, a “slow time, suspended moment”), like when we are falling asleep or hearing the wind going through our face.

The installations that they did for the simultaneous projection of films/videos, allow the artists to build an environment that prepares the body of the viewer, not only through images in the rhythm that goes through the several mismatched shots or the cadence of the projection machines, as well as the sound, or still, the colour, surrounding the body and little by little dilating every sense for the orchestral composition. We know we are inside the image-movement when we pass the threshold of consciousness and all starts being understood by the velocity, always in a subtle gradation, by vibration, by reverberation, by intensity. We abandoned the kingdom of representations: the films of Caló and Queimadela demand things of our bodies, of the attention of our senses, of the transformation of our colours, of our matter, of our muscles.

In their most recent installation, Meia-noite (Midnight, 2019), we are forced to regulate our vision after the first eyelid contraction and the gradual adaptation to darkness when we rediscover our gaze in the gaze of an animal, and another and another. Wolves, fallow deer, deer, Eurasian eagle-owls, foxes and common genets, amongst others, wait for us and stare back at us, returning to us (because it comes from that ancient time) what of animal exists in our gaze (that is the power of becoming), when we start contemplating animals as beings in captivity, arrested and fragile, elusive, before the uncertainty of destiny and forced domestication. Our gazes get more and more used to the light, and we start discovering other parts of the installation. Images of plants, flowers, small branches and bones pass slowly and continuously on six large panels placed vertically, opposing the horizontal plan of the cinema screen – it isn’t a rare movement in the film composition of the artists, if we remember, for instance, the rising of the ashes in Sombra Luminosa. It reminds us of Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes and they reveal the resonance between the two groups of projections: capturing through film the animals with infrared surveillance cameras and the fixation on the blue of the images through ultraviolet exposure and transferred, afterwards, to negative, creating the illusion that we see their shadows in the movement, opposite to what binds us to earth. From earth we are released, continuously, whether in a dream that seems too real (because it reveals itself close to our darkest desires, sometimes), whether by the abstract constructions that we find, similarly, in nature.

Caló and Queimadela’s films, rarely, could be seen as isolated. Their magic comes from the composition of heterogeneous elements, combining often the moving image (itself understood in its specificity and in relation with time, as we have seen) with painting, photography, drawing, sculpture or even the written word, in a carefully designed space, resorting to light and sound as expressive materials and enchantment devices, which manipulate our perception and sensitivity. Their films are not to be apprehended merely by the gaze, nor are they exclusively in the realm of the visual, but they summon the whole body and demand the creation of that other body, the magical body. (2)

Notes

1. Mariana Caló (Viana do Castelo, 1984) and Francisco Queimadela (Coimbra, 1985) studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Univer- sity of Porto and started their work together in 2010 with Gradações de Tempo sobre um Plano [Gradations of Time over a Plane]. Their practice is developed through a privileged use of cinema and image-movement, intersecting environments of installation and site-specific but also drawing, painting, photography and sculpture.

2. Implicitly in José Gil’s quoted sentence and in what the philosopher defines as the capacity of becoming of the body, is the Deleuzian practice of the construction of a body without organs. The body without organs is the result of the transformation of the body itself (or empirical body) in an intensive body (which is populated by sensations). Becoming implies always the creation of a body with no organs (or magical body).