The following is a conversation between Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo and Alejandro A. Barbosa about Barbosa’s piece Somatics of the Self as Citational Form (2020) on view at one sentence too many, one word too few: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition 2020 (July 17-August 16, 2020).

 

First, I would like to acknowledge that I am writing from, and live, create and learn on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I would also like to express my full support for the Black Trans Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter movements, and that I stand by all BIPOC communities, particularly the Queer Latinx community of which I am part.

 

Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo and I met in Montreal while she was in residence at Fonderie Darling in 2018. We have stayed in touch since then and have consistently held conversations about our artistic practices, writing, contemporary art, and what existing as ourselves entails in our respective contexts. Alejandra generously wrote the text about my work in the catalogue of the exhibition.

 

Alejandro: Thank you Alejandra for accepting my invitation to participate in this written conversation.

 

Alejandra: Thank you Ale, as you know I am always honoured and pleased to create these explorations together.

 

Thinking about your practice, I see an insistence on exploring the possibilities of your materials and this resembles some gestures you perform in your video. In the staged action your body is subjected to an extreme situation (not explicit but implicit) and I suspect the actions that took place during the process were not far from that. I see your relationship to your materials (body, concept, or objects) working similarly in that your operations on them push both the material itself and your understanding of them to the limit. Intuitively, I connect this with something you once told me about how you like to play with literality in your work. Do you feel literality played a part in this process? And could your investment in it have somehow changed along the way?

 

The piece in the show truly came from a deep need to inhabit as literally as possible the categories that wrap me in the social. I was feeling anger and frustration at the time. I was struggling with my own demands to make work relevant to the current moment while feeling a lot of pressure to stand my ground not only as a white-male-passing queer person of colour but also as a white-male-passing queer artist of colour. Describing this context for how the work was produced connects to your comment about how I engage my materials. In the case of Somatics of the Self as Citational Form (2020), the main material is the raw footage. And this is very much related to my interest in the image and its literality. For a long time I thought of the photographic image as a document of what the camera finds, as if weirdly assuming nothingness prior to the optical record of the photographic image. Even though I think this would not prevent the medium from metaphorical potential, in my case it favoured certain processes and explorations that did only so much for my interests. Exploring the possibilities of video helped me connect differently with my practice. The piece in the show is an example of this shift. In having to pre-produce the shoot I established interests and connections with the visual elements of the work in a way I never had before. All of a sudden, intention made room in my process for uncertainty. In hindsight I see that I had been craving an escape from the crystallizing effect of that photographic tradition I described above, and video as a medium opened up that new space for me while still keeping some of the literality I was familiar with. In short, yes, the visual description of the figure in Somatics… (2020) is quite literal and possibly stereotyped, yet I believe the artwork as a whole aims for uncertainty.

In this sense, I also aim at the codes through which the work operates within representation  literally. The moving image of the performance is the key to not only manifesting the categories that determine my existence in my context, but to also own them. In operating this way, my hope is that the work’s efforts are somehow directed towards the exhaustion of those codes by way of the spectator. Whereas some viewers see the direct references to other male contemporary artists, others engage the piece through what they perceive as an incomplete story.

 

Alejandra: This brings me to ask if you have ever been interested in proposing your work as a narrative in which you appear somehow as a character? I feel deeply attracted to that strategy, and sometimes I believe we have no choice but to operate from there, even when our works are not self referential and we want to keep some distance from our investigations.

 

Alejandro: Thinking of myself performing in the video as a character makes sense. It is probably unavoidable. Yet I tend to see myself in the video. His emotions were my emotions, he is wearing my clothes and carries my physical features. And, yes, there is definitely an underlying narrative throughout the work. But I did not aim for it intentionally. I was more concerned with protecting the character’s agency as much as possible. This intention comes from my experience in attempting to exist in the social through representation in its many forms. What I encountered was a site of troubling negotiations with invisible power structures, a force that imposes the rules through which to shape a sense of existence. In this sense, seeing the character as an agential actor allows me to think of the inclusion of the uncertain in the work as an escape from this unforgiving force of representation. An escape back to a positive space that is not compromised and whose representation is complicated. And, to be honest, I also tend to be sentimental about this aspect of the work. I like to think that this escape is also a gift, a loving gesture from me to the me as character in the work.

 

Alejandra: Even when the video demands from you as a creator a different approach, in which there are some steps between the main situation (the pressure transformed in frustration and anger) and the final action performed in front of the camera, the whole device comes from the necessity of condensing poetically and productively -in the best sense- the struggles of being immersed in a system that places (both the character and the creator) in daily battlefields. Could a metaphorical or narrative strategy be here at work making the piece operate as a document as well?

 

Alejandro: While working on the piece, I never envisioned an explicit connection with documentary practices. In fact, I had never thought of that possibility until now. I think of the document as the evidence of something different than what any specific document is materially in itself. A kind of counterpart of the real that accounts for it while allowing for the production of discourse about that given event and its circumstances. In the case of Somatics of the Self as Citational Form (2020), everything in the work is staged except for the sounds coming from the body. Perhaps that is the more documentary aspect of the work: what my body sounds like when forced to exert itself. But staging goes against my more traditional understanding of the document. Yet, I must admit, I am drawn to the thought of the documentary potential of narratives and metaphors that can function as testimonies of marginalized ways of existing. I am unsure whether Somatics of the Self as Citational Form (2020) can do this. Still, document or not, my hope is that the work creates resistance against the processes of signification and consumption of othering. That is why the sound is key to the work opening up to the spectator, because the sound playing uninterrupted points to that other space that cannot be accessed visually but remains active in the imagination of the viewer. That other space, for me, is a queer space: ever-existent, hopeful, and excessive.