ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #10

Marine Hugonnier @ Chisenhale Gallery and MW projects

Ariana, 2003
Still from S16mm film transferred to DVD with sound (duration: 18 m. 38 s.)

Ariana is Marine Hugonnier's first solo show in a public gallery in the UK. After its six week run Ariana tours to Sapcex Gallery, Exeter in May-July and will be included in Utopia Station, at the 50th Venice Biennale in June.

Daniel McClean: Why did you go to Afghanistan?

Marine Hugonnier: It was an investigation as an anthropologist would say: a research investigation into a country going through a period of post-utopian optimism and falling into another kind of political optimism. After 23 years of war and the experience of two failed revolutionary utopias (communism and fundamentalism) it was the perfect place to investigate and search for traces of a possible future. I went out there with a long series of questions rather than a proper "project".

DMCC: What were these questions?

MH: These questions originated in a feeling: I felt like many others, I suppose, that I had to question the foreign policies of the West. We are told that democracy has to be exported as if it is the ultimate political model. If that it so, then how does this model alter when it is exported? How does it appear when you look back into the windscreen?

DMCC: You travelled to the Pandsjher valley in the north west of the country.

MH: This 2,700m high valley in Afghanistan has been the stronghold of the resistance. I looked into these 6,000m high mountains for their possibility of changing social conditions. In Afghanistan mountains are the core of the culture; they fascinated me as they had no name, only the path that would lead from one point to another would be named.

DMCC: This is how your film Ariana starts.

MH: The film Ariana recalls our trip.The film focuses on the fact that we were not able to make an image from the highest point of the valley. To film the panorama would have enabled us to understand at a glance how this landscape had made the history of this place and the resistance movement possible. In the light of possible fighting the importance of a high viewpoint offering a panorama is tremendous in a mountain landscape; it becomes a means of control. The film plays with words, between a panorama which is a point of view and the panoramic shot itself. The continuity of the panoramic shot makes any reality look too perfect, unified and even. It is a perfect tool of propaganda as it makes everything look homogeneous.

DMCC: Yes, the panoramic shot is both functional and utopian. It is functional in the sense that it enables people and places to be mapped, but it is also utopian in that it produces the illusion that reality can be visualised and captured in an image. It is this that it makes it a tool of propaganda. What I like about your film is the tension that runs through it between your desire to see and film the panorama and the refusal to do just this, the realisation of the dangers of the panorama.

MH: The film thinks about the medium itself. The panorama was a precursor of the cinema and was one of the main forms of spectacle to emerge in the industrial cities of the 19th century. The first panorama was constructed in London in Leicester Square. Panoramas were paintings projected onto curved walls at either 180 or 360 degrees creating the illusion of space. Panoramas consisted typically of war scenes, exotic cities or urban landscapes. They were contemporaneous with the beginnings of colonialism. When I am standing on the television hill with finally an authorisation to film this panoramic view I feel so incredibly impovered by the view that I refused to film it.

DMCC: You told me that you originally wanted to write the film as a love letter?

MH: That was my original idea. Love letters are central to Persian culture. In Sufism, desire is a way to relate to the idea of the absolute. Nature is the face of the loved one who always fades away in front of you. I spent a long time looking at landscape in Afghanistan. I didn't write the film as a love letter but the intimacy of the voice-over creates that closeness that one would expect in a love letter.

Daniel McClean is at Mishcon de Reya, Solicitors, London. He is a free-lance curator and specialises in art and copyright law. He is commissioner and co-editor of Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture published by the ICA and Ridinghouse.

Ariana, is on view until 18 May, 2003
Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3, 020.8981.4518

In conjunction with the Chisenhale show MW projects is holding an exhibition of photographs. MW projects, 43B Mitchell Street, London EC1, 020.7251.3194

Image © the artist, courtesy, MW projects, London