revision COMPLETE scheduled for publication
Tabita Rezaire
Tabita Rezaire An artist's statement
Using filmmaking to socially engage, Tabita Rezaire explores the relationship between body
politics and geographies, seeking to deconstruct cultural archetypes and normalising social structures. Through an understanding of the screen as a site for social and political engagement, her works often address non-
This method highlights the dynamics between the camera and a given place and its community. Both uninvited intruder and postcolonial-techno warrior, her work and its mode of production rely on the spontaneous encounter; placing emphasis on the performative, productive nature of confrontation. By engaging in a critical, playful resistance - filmmaker as agitator -the camera acts as a trigger for social interactions in the urban environment. Nurturing a philosophy of displacement, her place as an artist/camera(wo)man/outsider/tourist is acknowledged within the work, confronting the audience to their own layered spectatorship. The images often enter a process of alienation where the text, sound and footage are in conflict creating a visual discord. Her anti-narrative, pop choreographic approach aims to challenge dominant documentary discourses. Video becomes a medium for active social resistance, a space where politics, social sciences and art history combine to question the role of ethics in artistic practice. Directly confronting the power of the image and its historical precedence - who controls images controls history - her works aim to provide alternative narratives that challenge occidental hegemony.
www.tabitarezaire.com
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hetero normative sexuality, gender issues or postcolonial identity within the fringes of society, emphasizing urban marginality. Tabita engages with her subjects through cinemythogeographic expeditions.
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An interview with
Tabita Rezaire In your works you focus on the relationships between the camera and the community: to explain your method, you use the stunning definitions cinemythogeographic expeditions and artist/camera(wo)man/outsider/tourist: the camera in your hands has a destabilizing role, it is an active element stimulating the viewer, reversing the classical passive role of the cameramen. How did you develop this peculiar method? Cinemythogeographic expeditions are about choosing an (un)known destination, getting lost, talking to stranger, seeking surprises, provoking interactions, confronting encounters and filming the reactions created by this setting. Method
certified @MALAXA - the duo I am in with the artist Alicia Mersy. We developed this method after we got into mythogeography, an alternative way of walking, thinking and visiting a place. Political tourism. Walking becomes a means to explore the geopolitical dynamics of a place, transforming the simple act of walking into a conscious and proactive experience. You add filming to this and you have cinemythogeography. The camera acts a trigger for interactions with the communities involved in the environments we go through. By doing so, you’re confronted to ethics as an uninvited intruder, simultaneously outsider, tourist, agitator, and voyeur. Being a woman behind the camera also affects the kind of relationships created with the encounters. This tricky position
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is acknowledged and performed within the works produced and do definitely challenge the traditional passivity of the cameramen. Here the camera is intrusive, provokes, confronts and creates a stage, while at the same time protects like a shield. To live through the camera, for the camera, thanks to the camera. What it is… genuine interest in people… people not like me. Your method reminds us the revolutionary approach to filmmaking of the French cineantropologist Jean Rouch. Have other artists influenced your shooting style? Jean Rouch is my man! I respect his work and admire his protocols and methods. Cinéma Verité and Direct Cinema have influenced my practice a lot. I like it raw. The drive is definitely anthropological; I’m fascinated by group
dynamics, exploring how people engage with each other and their cultural environments through their social constructs. Even more so fascinating/worrying is to see how the media portrays different social groups and the consequences it has on our collective thinking. 1 billion $ issue r-e-p-r-e-n-s-e-n-t-a-t-i-o-n AKA s-t-i-g-m-a-t-i-z-a-t-i-o-n! When digging into marginal social and cultural phenomena especially with a camera, you have to be careful, it’s slippery. The risk is to fall in the portrayal of the exotic, to glamorise otherness. An image creates thought. It’s power. It’s dangerous. A recurrent characteristic of many of your artworks is experience as starting point of
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artistic production: in your opinion, is experience an absolutely necessary part of creative process? Not really. Everyone digs in his own thing. But personally it’s all about living things through. My works most of the time rely on encounters, on a situation that is lived in front of the camera, so it becomes about the experience. I have to engage and feel concerned personally about a subject to make work. I remember once I was arguing with someone in Mozambique and the guy clashed me by saying ‘for you occidentals it’s just about having new experiences!’ It’s still on my mind… We really appreciate the metafilmic exploration, which is so evident in all of your works, could you introduce our readers to this concept? Wikipedia - ‘metacinema is a style of filmmaking in which the film is presented as a story about its own production.’ It’s something I’ve always liked in films, like those of Abbas Kiarostami, although it’s the usual author film subject: a film
about a film - mise en abyme conceptual wanking. In my work it is that the process of the making of the film is the film, there is no writing, no acting… A situation and a camera trying to record it, it’s intuitive, the one take has to be the one. So often my work is me trying to make a film out of a furtive encounter or filming a building relationship. Constant stage of inprocess-ness. The films get written by the subjects as they speak. What is really funny is when people are like why are you filming this? Or that’s not a real film!
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COMB THROUGH is the work we have selected for this year's Videofocus Edition. Could you tell us a particular episode, which has helped the birth of this project, or simply an epiphany, a sudden illumination? I travelled to Mozambique last year, and during a bus ride in Maputo, a woman sitting next to me begged me to sell her my hair. She went on about my hair and all of the sudden all the bus got involved in the conversation, some arguing against the woman that I should never cut my hair, other reaching out to touch my head, or blaming the woman for not accepting her natural hair. It got very intense in there. Few weeks later I got braids in Johannesburg and the same debate happened, women in the salon screaming at me: ‘Why are you getting braids’, ‘You are crazy!’ and so on.
Black women and their hair is a serious issue that may seem superficial, yet underlies heavy and complex socio-historical constructions. It’s not just about hair, but race, power relation, identity construction, mainstream canon of beauty and black representation in media, going back to slavery when someone with straighter hair had usually better living condition. I started cruising on YouTube for videos about girls talking and complaining about their hair and found a myriad of them, so I made up mine. COMB THROUGH is a video about all of this. Your video production is very miscellaneous: how has your production processes changed over the years? Macbook dictionary - miscellaneous: of various types or from different sources, from Latin ‘mixed’. I’m mixed, my background is, my
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interests, so I guess my work reflects this. Though the content of my videos is not as wavy, rather always evolves around questions of social resistance, identity construction, or urban marginalisation.
I’m indeed experimenting with the forms, drifting from a documentarian approach. I am more and more influenced by technology as I engage with it constantly, and being involved with the Internet culture has contaminated my works recently, thinking of online format of
shifting, drifting over time. I think I just spend too much time on the Internet. Just cruising the wild wild web. Google image I love you. In your work we can recognize a deep introspection: do you think art’s purpose is simply to provide a platform for an artist’s expression? Do you think that art could play an important role in facing social questions? Could art steer or even change people's behavior? My works often reflect on my position as a filmmaker, questioning the ethics of the practice itself, so my videos can be seen as self-reflective. I struggle to have any distance with my footage. Art is funny, sometimes you feel like it’s the response to the world crumbling and at times you think that it’s a disgusting joke. But Art is definitely a platform for expression, whether only for artist, hopefully not. Art suffers from artists’ self involvedness: art that talks about art, artists talking to other artists, galleries exhibiting the same people over and over, it feels sometimes like a small elitist circle and it sucks. We need to burst that bubble uh oh! I believe or I want to believe that art can have a social impact, that someone’s engagement can have an influence. Art is definitely a medium that can carry social and political engagement, because there is an audience. What makes you angry or what you want to see changed needs to be addressed, discussed and spread. It’s worth trying. I see my filmmaking as a social gesture. From screen to screens it might reach you. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Tabita. What's next for Tabita Rezaire? What are your next projects?
dissemination, interactive ways of display, digital imaging, which usually doesn’t pair up with documentary. I am trying to juggle between the raw aesthetic of my footage and the artifice of the platform supporting them, even in term of editing. This balance is
Going south! I am moving to Johannesburg next month. HEAT, SWEAT, DANCE and LOVE is what’s next on my list! That among some cool stuff: the release of my online exhibition URBAN SAFARI www.urbansafari.tv, a workshop with A Maze Festival in Johannesburg, the launch of a digital magazine, a new film release with Malaxa www.malaxa.net and the next edition of 35A Moving Image Festival to curate www.35acollective.com … www.tabitarezaire.com