03 Miceli - Alice PRESS InDepth Contemporanea Mag2022 PDF

Contemporary — Conversation with Alice Miceli and Luiz Camillo Osório 27/10/22 18:28
Ed. 04-05-06 / 2022

(https://contemporanea.pt/) (https://contemporanea.pt/edicoes/04-05-06-2022)
Conversation with Alice Miceli and

Luiz Camillo Osório
— por Ana Sophie Salazar
Alice Miceli: In Depth [mining fields]: Angola and Bosnia

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https://contemporanea.pt/edicoes/04-05-06-2022/conversa-com-alice-miceli-e-luiz-camillo-osorio Page 1 of 14
In the work of artist Alice Miceli, the investigation of traumatized territories

began with her Chernobyl project in 2010, and expanded with the development of
the photographic series In Depth [mining camps] that she carried out between
2014 and 2019. In his photographs, the camouflaged threat of mines that are not
noticeable by the look, gains a new dimension. The captured landscapes are
those that remain from bloody conflicts, where the underground mines continue
to explode inadvertently, even after the peace has been declared. The artist had
access to contaminated fields of unexploded mines in Cambodia, Colombia,
Bosnia and Angola, now presenting the chapters of Bosnia and Angola at the
School of Arts of the Catholic University of Porto.
The process of transforming the invisibility of danger

into an image involves questions about the nature of
photography itself, as well as its political effects and
limitations in a world "saturated by
spectacularization".
It is necessary to look at the images very carefully to grasp the details, since a
quick look cannot capture the subtle and sinister reality they present. The artist's
interest in these territories implies a deep study of both the form and the content
of his work - photography as a tool for questioning and minefields as marks of
unspearable horrors and stories of death and suffering that continue to be part of
individual and collective traumas still in process.
Cooperating with agencies and demining organizations, the artist manages to

step back on the land that for decades remained fatally hostile, thus pointing to a
gradual path towards a possible recovery. In this conversation recorded the day
before the opening of the exhibition, the artist Alice Miceli and curator Luiz
Camillo Osório unfold the work, unveiling their conceptual and logistical process
and thinking about the concept of depth as a multiple metaphor in time and
space that characterizes the remaining landscapes.
Ana Sophie Salazar (AS): Alice, could you describe the project and the related
research a little? When did it start and how did it develop over time?
Alice Miceli (AM): It's a long project. The complete project was carried out on four
different continents where the problem of territories taken by mines, by
explosives remaining from conflicts, wars and different types of conflict persists.
I started in 2014. The complete work looks at spaces in Cambodia, Colombia,
Bosnia and Angola. In 2014 it was the beginning and the first place I had access
to was in Cambodia, then it was Colombia, then Bosnia and later Angola. As it is a
complex pre-production work to be able to access and then plan what you
needed to do in each of these places, it took a long time of production, pre-
production and then even production right in place. It ended up being from 2014
to 2018 to make all the trips.
AS: Luiz, how did you know Alice's work and when did your collaboration begin?
How did this exhibition come about in Porto?
LCO: I met Alice's work at the time of the 2010 São Paulo Biennial, when she first
presented the Chernobyl project. I already knew the person, but I didn't know the
work. I met the work even in the Chernobyl project in 2010. In 2014, at the time I
was the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and we had a
partner with the PIPA Institute that held there the PIPA prize for contemporary art
—an important award in Brazil and Alice was one of the finalists, of the
shortlisted, with the first part of the mined fields that was Cambodia. She ended
up being the award-winning artist. I found the work at the same time insightful,
intriguing and interesting. Then I left the Museum and went to the PIPA Institute
as a curator and, talking to Alice, we then continued talking, she needed to do
the part of Angola and the Institute then commissioned this last part for her to go
to Angola. There in 2019, after completing the four stages on the four continents,
we held an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro with the four parts of the minefields—
Cambodia, Colombia, Bosnia and Angola. At this point I had already been
collaborating with the School of Arts here in Porto, with Nuno Crespo, and we put
ourselves at this idea: Let's also do the minefields here, thinking about this
project not only as an exhibition, but a slightly broader project that would imply a
participation of Alice in the School with a workshop (which she has already done,
was a success) The idea was to do this in 2020/21, with the pandemic did not
happen, the financing did not roll either, we shortened and we are doing it now
and we decided to choose only two parts, because it didn't fit all. We think that
Angola, for obvious reasons, was important to show in Portugal, and Bosnia even
for the issue of European geography and also the presence of mines, would be
interesting. And after all, it turned out to be an unfortunate coincidence that this
is happening along with the war in Ukraine, as we realize that it is a problem that
is back. The wars, all these wars are over and these mines [are] the remnant of a
war that does not end, of a territory that is traumatized and is still subject to this
kind of violence with the unexploded mines. And now there is again in Europe,
again here in the surroundings, this armed conflict so violent.
AS: This already answers a little bit to my next question, which was, how did you
think about the exhibition here and the experience of the public considering the
Portuguese context?
AM: As we had to adapt in terms of size, because the project is big in the end.
They are series, some longer than the others, but long, so they occupy a certain
space, we had to make this decision. Just adding to what Camillo said, Angola
obviously we wanted to show here in Portugal. It has always been a curiosity of
mine, because I also never, anyway, extrinsic to work because I didn't know any
other former colony of Portugal besides Brazil, and that was a decision that we
obviously wanted to show here. And Bosnia is a matter of the European context.
Where in Europe is there a serious problem of contamination by this type of
explosive? And the place with the densest presence of this problem is in Bosnia,
as a result of the war in Yugoslavia. Anyway, now adding this sad coincidence
that we have a war going on at a time when Russia, it seems, is again employing
this type of weaponry in Ukraine.
In relation to the public, the exhibition is open to the public, to the whole public,
it is a general invitation. But I think a large part of the audience that comes here
are students of the School or people who are on campus. So I think here it will be
interesting to have the people of the cinema, of photography, the people directly
involved in thinking and making these images, looking at work. I keep thinking
that this should be what happens most often. But anyway, everyone is invited.
AS: The research of mines involves, as you said before, a lot of pre-production,
and is, in itself, a dangerous process. Gathering all the material and overcoming
all the logistical obstacles to do the research and undertake the necessary trips
is also part of the work. Are these elements also visible in any way? And how do
you both think this gesture of making visible something that the eyes do not see
and the lens cannot capture? How does the minada landscape itself that
represents a threat and an imminent danger become more visible?
AM: The creative process of this work, I think it's better than talking about "my
process" because the process changes, it depends a lot on what is the specific
problem of each work, of each project. In this case, all this part of pre-production
is an active part of the creation of the work, it is a collaborative instance,
because it is obvious that having limited choices in such a place, depending on
the type of access, this will build the raw material from which I will work. This pre-
production, even if invisible, when we are looking at the work, it is present all the
time in terms of the choices that were made there, in terms of what was finally
framed by the camera.
I will relate a little to my work in Chernobyl, because they are different types of
invisibility. I started thinking and considering these issues soon after I finished
Chernobyl. I didn't start the project exactly after, but I already had these issues.
Chernobyl is then this work that tried to look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone, on
the border between Ukraine and Belarus, nowadays, which is this theoretically
empty space, but taken by an invisible energy and that we do not experience in
any way, but that alters matter in terms of the substance that occupies
throughout that space and that on top of that is eternal, if we consider the human
scale of Located, obviously it has an origin, a date in the past, but it is global in
terms of time, in terms of duration. Once this is over, I wanted to keep looking,
wondering what other impenetrable landscapes exist out there to be considered
on the surface of the Earth. So looking at this space of the minefields was the
next step for me. Very intriguing for me was the following consideration, because
if before it was a question of the invisibility of the matter that I wanted to capture
in Chernobyl, then the poetic operation of the work was in this capture on the
negative. In the matter of mined fields, what is impenetrable then moves to the
literal depth of the space to be captured two-dimensionally in the image. We can
see that. It is not exactly the same type of invisibility regime because radiation is
physically invisible. Mines, on the other hand, are objects that exist, which can be
in different situations more or less disguised. In the case of work, we can also
perceive through the crawls that are placed in the landscape in the process of
demining, which was the kind of collaboration I got with agencies and agencies
that do this work to precisely to be able to have specific access to these
minefields at the time when the explosives that still reside there are already, as
far as possible, completely mapped.
LCO: I can add a data there from what Alice commented. In the case of Chernobyl,
there was a composition between this impregnation of gamma radiation in the
photographic material, trying to reveal this invisible, this unrepresentable of
radioactive energy and a set of other more documentary material of this territory
of Chernobyl exclusion. So it is a composition of an abstract photographic
material and a documentary photographic material. When you move to the
minefields, for this next project, there is a confluence of these two parts in the
same photographic material in which a seemingly bucolic, innocent landscape
itself is impregnated with explosive, fatal material, which is a remnant of human
violence over the territory, and on nature, and on living species and human
beings, but that if you do not look, you Of course, the markings that are in the
images - you see in the "danger", "mines" ribbons - but the landscape is there. It
is a landscape photograph, with elements that are repeated very important too,
the narrative record from the sequencing of the images in which it is the same
landscape with the penetration of Alice within the territory building this
movement and keeping the landscape let's say stable. Stable and moving. It is
difficult to talk about what is happening in the images and I think this difficulty is
the intriguing and is a challenge for those who look. If you want to look, you just
look at a landscape. But within this landscape you can also begin to unravel the
hidden element, the invisibility that is in this image, which is an operational
mode, the procedure it created to cross the minefield, putting itself at risk. To put
yourself at risk here it is also important this relationship with the demining
technicians who have already made the markings, who are already more or less
mapped, and who allow a certain safety control in this to penetrate the
impenetrability of the minefield, and the risk is more or less under control. It is at
the same time an abstract and documentary landscape. Because it is abstract
because you do not realize the imminent risk there, but at the same time you can
declog with the narrative path, in the case of Angola of the 15 images that are
constituted, and in a way remaking the mine object that is hidden there. I find it
interesting that these two things are completed in the same image that is neither
documentary nor abstract. In Chernobyl I still had a certain relationship, I don't
know if Alice agrees, but that's how I see this movement from one to the other. It
is the same question, it is the same restlessness: how to deal with the invisibility
of danger and at the same time different procedures because they are distinct
invisibilities and different dangers. So they require a distinct procedure and end
up also constituting a distinct result.
AM: Invisibility that make these spaces impenetrable in various ways. One
visually and the other literally in terms of the depth of crossing the territory.
AS: The title In Depth is like a word game that brings together both form and
content. The content would be the mines, which are under the ground, soon in
depth, and the form would be photography, which plays with the depth of field,
putting emphasis on the landscape as a whole. Can you talk a little about this
notion of depth and how the landscapes themselves, which contain the mines,
lend themselves to being represented in this depth?
AM: It's a two-dimensional title. It plays in two different depths. In depth, in terms
of the relationship of this concept with photographic practice. Each and every
image is based on a relationship, or until very recently it was always based on a
relationship, which occurs in three points: Where you step, what kind of
instrument, with what focal length, you are holding, and what you see. They are
the three founding elements of any and every image with one more, which is
deducted from these, which is how close or how far you are from the object to be
captured. Nowadays, finally, technology always advances, sometimes even very
fast, this coincidence of location and image capture can already be disconnected
—if we see remote images, drone images, which does not mean that we do not
have an agency, an action and an intention in this shot. So these elements are in
all images, but in this work, what happens is that I was looking at them actively.
They are specifically activated through a specific organization, a specific formal
technical organization that we can then develop, in each image to be activated
precisely in terms of the relationship of these three points with the issue of
positioning. In this territory, where position, literally where you step on the
ground, is the most critical element, because from here to there it can be the
difference between life and death. The formal, conceptual exploration, which in
the end will give in the type of image we are seeing here, but it is the result of this
process. What we see here is that. This is what this type of formal, conceptual
proposal and then the organization that this demanded from me once in space,
which this entails for the image. That's what we see in the exhibition.
LCO: I think there is also an interesting element in the idea of depth, and that has
a lot to do with what Alice is commenting and explaining, which is this
relationship of the look and the landscape with a relationship of exteriority.
Interestingly, at work, the question is how to insert the body inside a territory, of
a landscape, a landscape that is a minefield, and at the same time you explain
penetration, which therefore implies a walk inside a landscape, there is an
element of the landscape itself that does not walk, which is the fixed point, which
is the look of escape from the depth. So there is an element that it fixes, which is
like the exteriority of a movement, and everything else walks with the path it is
performing there inside. Then you will notice a landscape that walks and a
landscape inside this landscape that settles, which is a point, because it changes
the lens, it sticks to the background of the landscape. But everything else is
walking. So you keep dealing with the inside and outside, the penetrating and the
impenetrable, which is very interesting from the point of view even of what led to
a certain objectification of nature from an anthropocentric view that you are
outside nature to be able to dominate it. But at the same time that you are
outside you are inside and you are committed to nature and nature re-engages
you because it is your living space, it is not an object of knowledge. It is an object
of knowledge and is a living space. So it's a point in the landscape and it's a
mined territory. I walk there to photograph the landscape, I am exposing myself
to the risk of that landscape to liquidate myself. So it's a constant game between
this look that is always outside the landscape and a landscape that summons
you.
AM: Between here and here and in what steps are possible at how many intervals.
And with one more layer in the sense that all photography is also always a
relationship between two-dimensionality and a representative illusion of depth,
which are precisely the elements of the work.
AS: When the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, the Zapatista National
Liberation Army in Mexico issued a statement that said "there will be no
landscape after the battle". I think this set of works deals exactly with this, with
the landscape that then remains, a contaminated landscape where thousands of
anti-personnel mines and other unexploded bombs continue to cause death and
injury, even decades after the wars have happened. Can you comment on this
sentence?
AM: I will comment on this in relation to a comment you just made, that there is
always the landscape that remains. I think this "what's left", which is the X of the
question, and that's what is being questioned here. In the case of these my last
works, in both, in the sense that precisely the radioactive contamination in
Chernobyl and this problem of contamination by explosives remaining from wars
and conflicts, all have an origin in the past, but they are precisely what remains.
Even thinking "What's left of Auschwitz", Agamben's book. Specifically we can
also look at what remains of the Cambodian genocide: there is a trauma left,
there is a lot left, but that is perhaps imbued in the history of people, in inherited
traumas. In the case of Chernobyl and the minefields, all this dimension of the
experience of the trauma, and more than that, the rest presented, in fact present,
and lasting, of these interventions, of these wars. So it remains, there is a lot of
landscape to be questioned and what ends up being recurrent in my work is how,
how, and how do we look at it and through what.
LCO: After you asked the question from the Zapatista statement of a landscape
that will be somehow liquidated, I remembered a text by Rilke, the poet, which is
called "About the Landscape". He says something by comparing a world without a
landscape, which for him would be a medieval world, and the world that conquers
the landscape in the Renaissance, and he says that one thing was fundamental
to make this passage, that it was the human representation touch the earth,
which did not touch the medieval figure - the representation was kind of ethereal
- and that from Giotto to Leonardo And it is curious because the minefield is a
place where stepping is increasingly risky. And if we are also going to think about
the call for example Bruno Latour for our need to land it is like stepping on it
again. This tension between the Renaissance painting that treads and a certain
science that is contemporary from the Renaissance, thinking about the
contemporaneity of Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, who leaves the Earth, who
leaves the Earth at least symbolically to think of a technical domain over the
Earth. And now we have to relearn how to step, because the Earth is undermined.
I think the symbolic element of this work is how much we, with an impressive
extractivist violence, have made the earth a mined territory and how we learn to
step again, after the catastrophe.
Then the landscape ends, but what we have left is to relearn how to step in order
to somehow resume contact with life and not with death.
School of Arts of the Catholic University of Porto (https://artes.porto.ucp.pt/pt/central-eventos/alice-miceli-

profundidade-campos-minados-angola-e-bosnia)
This text was written in Brazilian Portuguese

Alice Miceli (https://nararoesler.art/artists/30-alice-
miceli/)[Rio de Janeiro, 1980], her work is
characterized by alternating between video and
photography, often starting from the investigation of
historical events and exploratory trips, through which
the artist reconstructs cultural and physical traits of
past traumas inflicted in social and natural
landscapes. His work is part of important collections
at international level such as those of the Museum of
Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro [Brazil], Cisneros
Fontanals Art Foundation [USA] and Moscow Biennale
Art Foundation [Russia]. Recently, he held solo
exhibitions at the Americas Society in New York and
at the PIPA Institute in Rio de Janeiro, as well as
several collective exhibitions and art fairs in the
United States, Brazil and Europe. In 2022, his work
will be presented at the next edition of the 17th
Istanbul Biennial.

Luiz Camillo Osório, Director of the Department of
Philosophy of PUC-Rio; member of the GT of
aesthetics of the CNPQ, PQ CNPq fellow [level 2].
Doctor of Philosophy, PUC-Rio [1998]. He works in the
area of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Its main
focuses of interest in research are: The articulations
between art, aesthetics and politics; Autonomy and
engagement; Theories of genius, disinterest and

sublime; History of the avant-gardes; The actuality of
judgment and the critical power of art in the
contemporary world; curatorship, criticism and
history of art; The relations between art, museum and
market.
Parallel to academic research, he acts as a critic and
curator. He was curator of the Museum of Modern Art
of Rio de Janeiro between 2009 and 2015 and curator
of the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of
2015. It was on the curatorship board of MAM-SP
between 2005 and 2009. He signed an art criticism
column in the newspapers O Globo [1998/2000 and
2003/2006] and Jornal do Brasil [2001] and in the
Spanish magazine EXIT Express [2006/2007].
Member of the Research group registered in the CNPQ
- Art, Autonomy and Politics - with professors Pedro
Duarte [Philosophy PUC-Rio] and Sergio Martins
[History PUC-Rio].

Ana Sophie Salazar [1990] is curator at the Ludwig
Forum for International Art, Aachen, writer and
initiator of the para-institution Museum for the
Displaced. It explores nomadic, poly-linguistic and
transcultural subjectivities, proposing inventive
questions of hegemonic geopolitical mappings. From
2016 to 2020, she was Assistant Curator of
Exhibitions at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art
Singapore. She participated in the Shanghai Curators
Lab [2018], in the Project Anywhere mentoring
program [2020-21], and was a curator-in-residency
[2021-22] at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral,
Germany. Ana has a master's degree in Curatorial
Practices from the School of Visual Arts, New York,
and a degree in Piano from the Lisbon School of
Music.

Alice Miceli, In depth [mining camps]: Angola and Bosnia, Gallery of the School of Arts of the Catholic
University, Porto. Photography: Luísa Fernandes. Courtesy of the Artist and the School of Arts of the Catholic
University.

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Contemporary — Conversation with Alice Miceli and Luiz Camillo Osório 27/10/22 18:28

Ed. 04-05-06 / 2022

Conversation with Alice Miceli and

— por Ana Sophie Salazar

Alice Miceli: In Depth [mining fields]: Angola and Bosnia

In the work of artist Alice Miceli, the investigation of traumatized territories

The process of transforming the invisibility of danger

Cooperating with agencies and demining organizations, the artist manages to

School of Arts of the Catholic University of Porto (https://artes.porto.ucp.pt/pt/central-eventos/alice-miceli-

This text was written in Brazilian Portuguese

engagement; Theories of genius, disinterest and

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