Filming the ‘facts’: where art meets politics

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How are filmmakers bridging the gap between fact and fiction to depict the lives of the migrant, the refugee and the dispossessed?

We know that so-called documentary photography and film have always been orchestrated, edited, and manipulated (think of the now known-to-be staged Spanish Civil War photograph by Robert Capa, Republican Militiaman Meets His Death).  The way ‘facts’ are presented is ideologically driven.

The intentional exploration of the space between fact and fiction is a central theme in these two books by T.J. Demos (as well as in his exhibition ‘Zones of Conflict’(Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2009). The Migrant Image looks in detail at ‘how contemporary artists have investigated mobile lives (of refugees and migrants, the stateless and politically dispossessed) by reinventing the conditions of moving images in the documentary art of photography, film, and video’. In other words, intentionally experimenting with ‘factual’ media conveys the uncertainties of the migrant condition.

But Demos goes further, he explores the artists’ intention to ‘intervene in the cultural politics of globalization’. He believes that politically conscious creative acts can not only present, but eloquently speak in opposition to the global conditions that are causing the stateless condition of a refugee.

In The Migrant Image, Demos analyses the radical techniques that impart political content in films by Steve McQueen (now known to everyone as director of 12 Years a Slave, an overt example of an intense exploration of ‘fact’ through ‘fiction’); the temporal sci-fi distortions of the Otolith Group; Hito Steyerl’s exploration of the fictional/documentary format; the Swiss geographer/ethnographer Ursula Biemann’s politicized video essays, the fractured photo-conceptual work by adroit Beirut-based artists; Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli, artists working in the midst of the lethal fabrications produced in Israel/Palestine; and, finally, the multimedia project Camp Campaign by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, spurred by the continued existence of the detention camp in Guantánamo (and more timely than ever in the midst of the current US obsession with detention and deportation).

Demos analyses this tight selection of artists working in the space between fact and fiction from as many perspectives as possible. But the larger purpose of both the work and these books is to elucidate the ways in which political engagement is enabled and empowered by experiments with media operating in that space.

The book itself evokes a journey, with sections titled ‘Check-in’ ‘Departure’ and ‘Transit’. The ‘Departure’ segments discuss the art, ‘Transit’ offers theoretical frames. ‘Destination’ finally declares ‘The Politics of Aesthetics During Global Crisis.’ In renegotiating the terrain between fact and fiction, Demos has found new ways to explore ‘the activism of artists and the visual culture of social movements’.

Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art explores the work of artists who are specifically addressing the forces driving migration. Those forces are aptly called the ‘specters’ of the colonial era and their descendants, the perpetrators of neoliberalism and economic colonization.

All but one of these artists are European-based filmmakers: Dutch artist Renzo Martens’ project is based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Belgian artist Vincent Meessen is filming in Senegal. Of South Asian heritage, Zarina Bhimji lives in London, displaced from Uganda as an 11-year-old, after Idi Amin forced all Asians with British passports to leave in 1972. Her films of Uganda and the community in India, from which her father came to Africa, are filled with ghosts of the past materialized in architecture. As a white South African Pieter Hugo photographs the margins of the mainstream.

The most surprising colonial spectres appear in Vincent Meessen’s Vita Nova. His starting point is a 1955 photograph of a young cadet from Dakar, in Paris as part of a military pageant recorded by Paris Match. The philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–80) wrote about this same photograph in his book Mythologies (1957); for Barthes it was a manifestation of the ideology of colonialism. The artist went in search of the cadet and discovered layers of colonialism, including the fact that Barthes’ own grandfather was a leader in African exploitation. Spectres indeed.

Episode III (Enjoy Poverty) by Renzo Martens addresses the exploitation of poverty by human rights organizations, particularly through their victim-driven photographs used in fundraising.  Martens unusual approach was to train a group of Congolese photographers in how to take this type of image in order to make money, and offers their services to the NGOs, who turn them down. Such an act is filled with layers of spectral colonialism and the ways in which conflict and NGO organizations are both manifestations of commodity capitalism.

In both these books, T.J. Demos elucidates the crucial relationship between experiment in form and the disintegration of long accepted ‘truths’ (both material and ideological).  Without those (false) landmarks, we must find a way forward to continue to believe that we have agency.  Demos and the artists that he discusses suggest that creatively exploiting the space opened up by a world of contingent truth is one possibility. 

The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis by T.J. Demos is published by Duke University Press, 2013. 368 pp., 17 colour/76 mono illus. ISBN 978 -0-8223-5340-9 pbk; 978-0-8223-5326-3 hbk

Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art by T.J. Demos is published by Sternberg Press, 2013. 176 pp., 53 colour illus. ISBN 978-3-943365-42-9