HORIZON OF EXILE DUAL

Dual channel installation

“Standing between the two facing projections produces a sense of being caught between two mirrors, captured in a mise en abyme multiplying one’s perception to infinity… masterfully crafted.”
Marek Bartelik, Artforum International, NY, March 2009

"Rocamora's installation is truly impressive for its beauty, sensibility and content: its themes are exile, identity and loss."
Marga Perera, Tendencias del Mercado del Arte Magazine, Spain, June 2008

“In this work the female condition is what configures the argument and stuctures the image. Unfolding against stereotype and using the screen diptych to elaborate a discourse of clear conceptual duality, the work is capable of transmitting deep emotions through the aesthetics of the desert, its characters and its light; while poetically broaching, through stories of female exile, both the possibility of public condemnation and the need for ethical commitment.”
Ricard Silvestre, Bonart Magazine, Spain, November 2008


ARTIST STATEMENT

Horizon of exile is a 21 minute dual channel installation which considers issues of female identity in the journey of exile. The film particularly looks at the female condition echoing contexts where woman is forced to leave her country in order to salvage her sense of self. In this way Horizon strongly references Middle Eastern cultures while wishing to treat universal questions surrounding self-image, belonging and effacement.

Aesthetics of representation
Today recurring images of covered or endangered Middle Eastern women indent themselves in our consciousness daily. Framed by the media, these images are presented to the West as ‘icons’ of otherness. Horizon is born out of the impulse to get close to the human behind the icon. Underneath this iconography of effacement and imprisonment lie many stories of conflicting journeys towards freedom and self-perception: stories of female exile. These resonant narratives awake a personal desire to treat complex feelings surrounding my own story of exile and self-finding at the age of eighteen (Spain - U.K). While reflecting female Middle Eastern experience of exile and drawing an understanding from my own autobiographical material, Horizon is foremost an installation about woman and identity.

Filmic language
Positioning itself between the cinematic, the real and the performative the work sits somewhere between representation and metaphor. Testimonies of Kurdish and central Iraqi women, today living in London, inform the unfolding of the film alongside two older women, also exiles, now local to the landscapes of the Atacama desert, Chile (where the film was shot, see ‘Place’). This chorus of voices carries, on the one hand strong memories of female circumscision, erasure and escape, and on the other fragments of a distant childhood home, therefore alluding to a broader notion of exile.

Fiction is used to construct allegorical characters that at once suggest a portrayal of real life accounts while offering a metaphorical presence of woman. The performative body is employed to explore a scape of emotion which may often belong to pre or post-linguistic experience. In this way physical gesture transcends the limitations of the conscious by either by-passing or working with/against the verbal. The performative allows for a language which is one step removed from the illustrative, therefore broadening the reading of the work.

The body
The journey across timeless, arid landscapes is embodied in ‘anti-gravity choreography’ manifest in the rolling bodies of the protagonists. The anti-gravity body moves through space, travelling as though it encountered no resistance, as if the matter of the body itself was no different from the air that is is moving in, as if it were rising and descending at one and the same time. This gravity pull from all directions depicts a human who, faced with the void of uncertainty, is equally nostalgic of the past as hopeful for the future. A more primitive energy drives a scene with two women sitting and falling in a vast scape. Here, in archetypal form, feelings of rebellion are expelled from the once silenced bodies in an expression of irrepressible primal gesture.

Place
Paramount to Horizon is the presence of place. The location was researched in Jordan (Petra, Amman) and due to events in the region (the Lebanon/ Israel breakout last July) the film was subsequently shot in Chile (Atacama, Santiago). This change was embraced as a further broadening of the work’s context by connecting two desert cultures of passage.
The role of location is twofold: it is used as a setting for the fictive/ performative narratives, a setting which may well revert us to a Middle Eastern aesthetic, and at a particular moment (in the exact centre of the film) the location is revealed as place, the Atacama desert, by introducing portraits of two elder exiles, now inhabiting these landscapes. This interlude then acts as a ‘mise en abyme’ to take us out of the fictive landscape for a moment and root us in its reality.

Shot on super 16 mm film, the photography captures the epic nature of the landscapes, bringing to the fore a beauty which often sits uncomfortably with the emotive subconscious of the work.

Immersive Duality
The dual image format is used as a physically immersive as well as emotionally dialectic device. To human scale, the widescreen dyptich physically envelops the viewer in a material, epidermic world aided by the crisp, hyperpresent sounds of body and environment. In this way the presence of the landscape and that of the human within the frame invites reception on an ontological level; as that which simply ‘is’. In parallel, the synchronous image format opens up a space for the co-existence of the immersive with the dialectic by juxtaposing two opposing scenes. An example would be the salt-marsh journey versus the covering of the face sequence. The first a release of the past and a travelling towards a future of self-perception, the second a strong memory of effacement. The dialectic is here created by appealing at once to an expansive, even sub-conscious experience while also inviting a socio-political conscious one.

The dual screen architecture offers a particular cutting language which provides the viewer with a certain degree of authorship to re-edit the work within their own viewing experience.


HORIZON is presented in two versions: dual channel installation for the gallery and single screen for cinemas/ art broadcast.

Exhibition premiere: 7 - 30 May, Espai 2NOU2 Galeria Senda, Barcelona, Spain

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