Page 227 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

JUMPING OVER WALLS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN FRANCESCO CARERI AND JORDI COLOMER 227
although it is a field I would very much like to explore. If I must tell you the truth, I still believe that Stalker’s most coherent artistic product is the collective experience, not its representation.
When I think of your works, the first thing that strikes me is that you really do believe in representation, that your work is always on the border between reality and fiction. You do not escape from fiction: you accept its rules of the spectacle, in order to move to the most classic of representations, to the theatre. In your career you have also started with videos constructed as fictions and then you have gone on to operate in real space, but always activating a fiction, always avoiding the “documentary”, always performing, in one way or another, expressly realising urban or architectural sets.
JC: Look, I
because what it raises, as you suggest, is the question of the distance between a “real” experience and how we can recount it later. The question of truth also raises its opposite. Declaring that one speaks from fiction is to recognise that the more false it is, the more true it can be. In this sense I think that organising a fiction can be a perfect excuse for creating a real experience. That is to say, it is a great excuse to be able to interact with the “real”, being carried away by the events. Any situation has that potential of fiction. We spoke before of Uccellacci e Uccellini. It is an avowed fiction, in which two actors who act, overact so much that they do nothing but interpret their own characters, Totò and Ninetto, they are nothing more than what they represent ... And how much truth there is in that film, one has the impression of watching a documentary, they are “telling” you a documentary ... fiction is not a “separate” thing, out of this world; rather, it is a way of being able to delve into reality. Marcel Broodthaers said that fiction “allows you to grasp reality and what it hides.”
In every representation there are tricks, of course. One of them and the most remarkable, I think, is to be open to improvisation, to incorporate the things that happen, that occur. There is something of walking in creating a fiction, things find their place in time. But you have to keep in mind that, in the end, and in any case, you will adopt a point of view to recount. It seems to me that neither neutrality nor the pure document exists, nor that this is an issue that can be avoided or ignored. Undoubtedly, the pure event exists, as you point out, and in reality it would be necessary to radically renounce every document. It’s difficult. Any document, from the moment someone is there to look at it, is a fiction. History – the story of events – is itself a fiction. But I would like to point out that fiction and spectacle are not synonymous. And in that sense I perfectly understand your aversion to editing, and the awareness of that danger of betraying something that happened to make it spectacular, into something else. I think we share a sympathy for the Situationists and their warnings. It seems to me that to avoid reducing something to the spectacular, it is necessary to name the elements that make it possible, and be conscious from the beginning. And also at the end: How things are shown and what relationships are established. We must be very aware of the means used to tell what we want to tell.
FC: I have seen the project for the installation for the Venice Biennale and it has made me think about many things. The history of this mobile city, a new itinerant Babylon, a nomadic tribe that moves through different parts of the world, will occupy the Spanish Pavilion, itself transformed into a strange labyrinthine theatrical space built with
think that the problem of representation, that aversion to it, can also be taken inversely,