Excluded Landscapes: Photographer Alice Miceli's project captures minefields in conflict zones
REVISTA ZUM, JULY 10, 2019
The exhibition In Depth (minefields), by Rio de Janeiro artist Alice Miceli, presents for the first time the complete series of photographs of her project, taken in minefields in Cambodia, Angola, Bosnia and Colombia, countries that recently suffered wars and armed conflicts and still contain mine-infested sites. According to Miceli, it is "an interesting challenge to think about the means of photography to look precisely at what cannot be seen, how our vision is given, how it is made, how it is mediated”.
An important part of Miceli's work, photographing "what can't be seen," was once the theme of Projeto Chernobyl, her previous work, in which she traveled to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Belarus/Ukraine to record the invisible contamination caused by gamma radiation. "In the case of my work across minefields, and even before that, in Chernobyl, I encountered problems about the limits of representation, how to try to look at what cannot be seen, and does not reveal itself. How to look at it, and through what?" asks Miceli.
In this interview, Alice Miceli details the methodology, concepts, and challenges of a project that led her to risky situations in the midst of minefields.
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CAMBODIAN SERIES
How did the idea for In Depth (minefields) come about? And why did you choose these four countries to photograph?
Alice Miceli: The idea of walking across minefields as a project began when I was on an artists' residency. I had just finished my work in Chernobyl, and I was thinking about the questions this work had raised, which I had first found during the development of Chernobyl, about problems of defining and representing landscapes in images, with a particular focus on spaces made impenetrable or inaccessible by human action. It is an interesting challenge to think about the medium of photography in order to consider what cannot be seen, how our vision is presented, how it is made and how it is mediated.
The four countries were chosen according to the intensity of contamination by landmines and other explosives left over from wars and conflicts that still exist in their territories today. The first series shows a minefield in the interior of Battambang province in Cambodia. It unfolds in eleven successive photographs that traverse the field in eleven steps. I worked with CMAC - Cambodian Mine Action Centre and Victim Assistance Authority, the government organization in Cambodia responsible for the national mine action program.
The second series focuses on mine contamination in Colombia. I traveled to affected areas in Antioquia, around Medelín, to regions once dominated by the FARC, who mined several areas as a defense mechanism against the army that was pursuing them. The series consists of seven images. I worked with the HALO Trust demining program in Colombia.
The third series examines mined areas in the European context, i.e. heavily affected regions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mine contamination caused by the armed conflict associated with the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The series was shot in nine stages in the municipality of Obudovac, in the municipality of Samac. I worked in cooperation with NPA BiH - Norwegian People's Aid - Humanitarian Disarmament Campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
For the fourth and final stage of the research, I planned to look at the problem of mine contamination in Angola, which remains one of the most affected countries on the planet due to more than 40 years of conflict and civil war, with various groups using mines throughout the Angolan territory. I developed this stage in collaboration with NPA Angola - Norwegian People's Aid - Humanitarian Disarmament Campaign in Angola.
DEPTH-OF-FIELD DIAGRAM (THE VERTIGO EFFECT)
The artistic approach of your work refers us to elements of land art and performance, and brings these practices to photography in an original way. There is also a rigor in conceptualizing the project, in the definition of a methodology for recording images. How does this happen in your creative process?
AM: Our (human) vision, our way of seeing what we see, is always a complex construction: physical (optical and geometric phenomena), but also physiological, neurological and cultural. And our "vision" is all the more mediated when a tool designed by humans intervenes in the creation of an image. This tool is already impregnated with someone's intention, attention and assumption of how it should be used, already moving in a predetermined direction, predisposed to create a certain type of image that already contains layers of history in the way it was conceived.
In the case of my work in the minefields, and even before that in Chernobyl, I encountered problems about the limits of representation, how to try to look at what cannot be seen, what does not reveal itself visually. How to look and through what? In Chernobyl, due to the fact that conventional photographic cameras could not see much in this particular environment, precisely because it is one dominated in an omnipresent way by a seemingly eternal "nothing" (the invisible contamination caused by gamma radiation), I then considered whether it would be possible to somehow touch this "nothing", this "invisibility" - to get closer to what it is. It became clear to me that it would be necessary to create my own tools, from scratch, to reveal this visual impenetrability.
After Chernobyl, I wanted to continue with this problem. I began to wonder what other kinds of impenetrability existed with us, on our planet. Looking at minefields was the next logical step in these questions, considering another situation that offered an interesting variation of the problem. In this case of fields occupied by landmines and other explosives remnants of war, impenetrability shifts from the problem of vision itself, as in Chernobyl, to the depths of space, which brings with it a whole new set of questions.
For example, I could have considered staying outside each minefield, at the entrance to the mined area, and pausing there to capture an image that extends through a horizon, a depth that in this case would only have been contemplated, but never reached.
I could have considered, for example, simply standing outside the field, at the entrance to the mined area, and staying there, capturing in the image a horizon, a depth that was only contemplated but never reached. This is what tragically happened to the photographer Robert Capa, who died stepping on a landmine in Indochina, seconds after capturing an image that extended to a horizon he himself never reached. I wanted to continue where Capa was interrupted.
This is the performative aspect of the work, in which my body, in the out-of-frame, not only looks at an impenetrable depth from the outside, but also moves through it, producing images from within the areas photographed, and considering in these crossings how this penetration takes place both in the physical space and in the visual outcome of the image.
The methodology of the work was developed from a diagram that functions like a musical score. Among several drawings and sketches from the beginning of this work, this was the first that made sense to me and helped me understand how to activate the intertwining of positioning, focal length, point of view, and magnification of an object projected in an image.
The focal length of a lens determines its angle of view, and thus how much of the object in the image is magnified from a given position. In the diagram, different focal lengths are represented in successive points of view on the same axis, to keep the object in the image at a constant magnification size, in order to precisely activate the question of positioning, gaze and the question of the photographer's body outside the frame, in the moment and place where the photograph is taken.
ANGOLAN SERIES
Your previous project, Chernobyl, was also about recording a landscape where the invisible is the threat that remains after the tragedy. Do you see other connections between Chernobyl and the project on the minefields?
AM: Yes. Unlike remote and opaque natural landscapes, both Chernobyl and the remaining minefields around the world are not only the result of traumatic facts of the past, but also spaces that remain in the present tense, urgent, and continue to occupy and negatively claim parts of our world ad infinitum.
BOSNIAN SERIES
Is there a difference between the four countries you chose to photograph? Did the different landscapes change the photographic outcome of the project?
AM: Yes. It's like different landscapes have different timbres. I think a lot in musical terms, because the work deals with interval problems. For example, first there is an equal and regular division of space, given by the diagram, as if it were the regular temporal division of a score into bars. These spaces are then activated, perceived and experienced through the possible path in each minefield, which depends on the topography and the specific contamination of the area crossed. In theoretical geometric terms, there would be infinite points of view aligned on the same axis between two given points in space. In fact, as I cross each minefield, the pattern of landmine contamination updates this infinite virtuality and reduces it to a limited number of points of view, creating a tension between the egalitarian division of space given by the diagram and the way my body is forced by the irregular patterns of contamination to cross each of these spaces. This is why the work exists as a series of photographs, not as individual images that can be presented separately. What I had to avoid and evade, where it was impossible to step, where it was impossible to photograph, that is, the space between each image, is as important as what appears to be captured in them.
COLOMBIAN SERIES
Do you already have a new project in mind? Does your interest in registering "invisible landscapes" continue?
AM: I continue to be interested in places that, even in our globalized time, seem to remain off the map. Places that remain in the sense that they continue to exist in the present, even if they have been forgotten. Let's see what the next destination will be.
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Alice Miceli (1980) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. From 1998 to 2002, she studied cinema at the School of Cinematographic Studies in Paris, and in 2005 she graduated in History of Art and Architecture at PUC RJ. She has participated in the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); the exhibition The Materiality of the Invisible, in Maastricht (2017); Basta! at Shiva Gallery in New York (2016); and the Cisneros Fontanals Grants & Comissions Award in Miami (2015), among others.