Interval II: Interview with Graham Gussin

GG: I was thinking about your film work. The architecture featured in this is quite particular, the pier and the circular dwelling, how important or how central do you think this is to the piece?

SC: They’re important because they offer contrasting ways to understand our relationship with nature and the environment. The pier is a social space where we can marvel at nature, it brings us closer towards its forces- the wind, the rain, the sounds of the waves. It’s also about adventure and entertainment and projects optimistically outwards towards the horizon. The focus is different with the circular dwelling. It is a refuge from nature where we can escape from the elements and take shelter. The fortress-like structure is about enclosure, as if nature (and the outside world) is a possible threat. It seems to strive towards a particular vision for community solidarity.

GG: So there is a contrast here between exposure and shelter, I suppose this is also about nomadic and sedentary modes of being and this is extended in the images of birds migrating. Was the work always to be multi screen? How does this add to the viewers’ sense of place?

SC: I originally conceived of the piece as multi-screen. At the time I had just published a small concertina book with photos of the starlings in flight. You could read the images in sequence by turning the pages conventionally- or if you opened it out flat, the images come together forming one very long panoramic image.  I was interested in the juxtaposition of different instances of the same subject, for me it conveyed a sense of becoming rather than an absolute. In Interval II, sometimes the scenes are composed of three separate sequences, recorded at different times, sometimes with different lens, angles, distances and intervals. When you bring them together as a multi-screen, something disorientating happens. The repetition intensifies our experience of each of the scenes. We get absorbed into the fluctuations of light across the curtains. With the pan across the girders, the image becomes quite abstract. Yet with the final bird scene, the horizon appears all the more infinite. There is an aspect of being immersed, which I think is in the work anyway, but perhaps you are made more aware of the manipulation. What are your thoughts?

GG: I don't think the viewer is manipulated by the way you employ distances and repetition in order to disorientate, this seems so much the subject of the work, that you intend this to happen and the viewer is aware of it as a process and an atmosphere, part of the work and not an 'effect'. This sense of instability, the idea that we might see something from two different distances is very strong in the work I think, it plays with the viewers sense of location. The overall mood of the work, the way it wants to seduce us or immerse us, is more, perhaps, where any 'manipulative' aspect might be found. The tempo of camera movement and of editing does kind of hypnotize as we watch.

SC: The aesthetics are intended to seduce. I wanted to transport the viewer to an elsewhere, one step removed from real life. The places have their roots in reality - the buildings and the landscape exists, but you wouldn’t experience it in the same way if you went there for yourself. It was important for me to spend a lot of time in each of the places. I visited that particular stretch of coast over a number of years and lived in the Hakka house for short periods of time. You come to realize that some moments are unrepeatable because everything changes. 

GG: Your places are unpopulated, as if they exist outside a specific time and place, they become quite fantastic in this respect, as if we are visiting something long deserted, perhaps a relic of some kind. Can you say something about this sense of the uncanny achieved by this?

SC: I think the uncanny is achieved by a combination of factors: the dominance of shadows, the lack of people and the lack of colour, which sets it apart from places which are normally perceived as being ‘real life.’ It’s like going to a fairground out of season, there is something unreal and un-natural about the stillness in such a place - they ought to be colourful and bustling with life. In Interval 2, there is no movement that we might associate with human activity. All the movements that we observe are from nature. Yet the buildings have come about from human endeavours, so they are a relic of sort. We can see that the spaces were once populated, there is no explanation as to why the people have departed but the piece seems melancholic of their departure. I’m interested in the way that C18th and C19th European painters depicted the landscape - there is always some human activity, whether it’s through the presence of a small house or a railway track, there seems to be an act of belonging or exploration of the world. In contrast to Sugimoto’s work, whose seascapes seem to convey a silence before movement, before humans - a primordial time, I’m interested in a time after the humans have gone.

GG: This brings in a science-fiction element and a deeply romantic tone, the notion of still being able to witness this kind of landscape when others are vanquished is found in HG Well's The Time Machine and is a powerful element in the genre throughout. Ballard also writes about this, a landscape that is overcome through some huge shift, turning cities into deserts and deserts into lakes, leaving humans to wander through them as if for the first time. Ruins are of course a key aspect of some of the paintings you speak of...

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