Six- Documentaries

Proximities
Francisco Reyes Palma

On Moving
JD Medina

At times, the activity of self-expression such as we’ve come to recognize in or as art, in its contemporary form, can appear to dwell within the sphere of Desire. The desire to make art. The desire to be an artist. The desire for transcendence through art. While Desire seeks its own permanence, it sometimes undergoes a process of transformation in which it becomes Need, which, contrary to Desire, seeks its own extinction through satiation. Six Documentaries and a Film about Mexico City is a manifestation of Need. The Need to do a particular thing, whether or not it is art, whether or not one is, hence, an artist.
Six Documentaries finds its origin in the Need to Move of one specific individual; a Need which, in seeking its own extinction, generates a subsequent succession of Needs.
“Needing to Move”
Faced with immobility within his own city, an individual (Diego Gutierrez) needs to move beyond consented social boundaries; to move beyond the “otherness” which operates through mechanisms of fear, alienation, comfort, ignorance, cowardice, apprehension, all ingrained in the urban conscience.
“Needing a way”
In acknowledgement of the personal contrivances which enable his own immobility, this individual needs the assistance of others. He surrounds himself with collaborators foreign to Mexico City, and some foreign to the ‘art world’ on the whole. Individuals whose contextual detachment might enable for a dislocation of his self from the psychosocial obstacles that inhibit movement. Working to move together, the individual then takes on a different form, to become Collective. “I” becomes “we”. The video camera is the tool, the pretext, the instrument that will enable access to the otherwise inaccessible “other”.
“Needing a path”
The collective identifies persons/realities/situations deemed unapproachable. The first exercise is that of acknowledgment, of recognition: Who is the “other”? The naming of the facades, the assumptions, of what is seen from “here”, in order to then look beyond Oneself. Beyond one’s condolence toward the social “invisibility” of a domestic worker; beyond one’s concern for the repeatedly thwarted struggles of a sign-making shop; beyond one’s romanticism toward a physically-handicapped student and the will to overcome; beyond one’s judgement toward the ambitions of a young executive and his ties to the “political elite”; beyond one’s mysticism toward an ancient lakeside village and the myths around its community of proud rowers; beyond one’s fascination with the spectacle of nihilism and self-destruction of a Mexican middle-class youth.
“Needing courage”
Month to month, a collective, composed of three collaborators, come together in Mexico City. Each group designs a blueprint, a rough itinerary that they believe will best allow for movement-contact to be achieved. The group lives and works in a shared space, a strength/safety-in-numbers strategy which prevents the dilution of the power needed to begin movement, to swim upstream. The intense initial communication between collaborators serves as a means to name the Need, to begin to make it manifest, to bring it out of the realm of sentiment, and into that of shared direction.
“Needing action”
Having then gained the momentum afforded by co-operative direction, the collective stretches outward to make contact with the “other”; with the individuals who occupy the unknown, off-limits spaces, those who will open the doors to the inaccessible. The collective basically sits in on the lives of the people who have agreed to share their homes, work, families, friends, thoughts, cares. For several days, “protagonist” and “collaborator”, connected via the shared activity of creating a documentary, engage in an exchange enabled by the camera. An exchange which perhaps would not take place otherwise. The unapproachable abstracts, the hypothetical beings, now come into view as concrete, complex persons with pleasant or disagreeable personalities, with the power to discern and to choose and to act according to their own particular beliefs and opinions. In each case, a Person takes the place of the projected image. Tita takes the place of “the domestic worker”; Juan, Armando, Alejandro, Yolanda that of “the sign-makers”; Carlos that of the “physically-handicapped student”; Hernando that of “the young executive”; Oscar, the Vargas family, el Grillo, that of “the proud rowers”; and Jorge takes the place of “the middle-class youth”. This interaction is ultimately what attests to the recognition of this (other) place as different from that (previous) one. The collective has then experienced movement.
“Needing confirmation”
Up until this point, there exists an experience, although movement has yet to solidify as having occurred. The extremely intimate living-working situation of the collaborators enables the constant corroboration necessary to keep the experience alive. Given the fact that the movement experienced is improbable within the customary quotidian scenario of the city and, actually, the product of engineered circumstances, its vitality is fundamentally dependent on the resistance of the bond between members of the collective. The exchanges that have taken place exist absolutely, only within the memory of the collective, and thus risk fading if the collaborators disperse.
“Needing a body”
A body must then be created in order for the experience to come into existence as having occurred: the video-documentary is that body. It is here where the experience becomes a documented occurrence. The nature of this body, the shape, is undoubtedly affected by the choice to integrate all members of each group of collaborators, indistinctly, in all processes (the experience, the gathering of information, the filming, the editing). While no one collaborator is designated one fixed task, and not every collaborator participates uniformly in all tasks, all tasks are performed “in concert”. Consequently, it is the experience that comes to fruition in the construction of this body, and not isolated notions of aesthetics, composition or technique. The experience lives within all aspects of the process.
“Needing to move further”
Movement has occurred and lives within a body; a body that has the capacity for further movement. The video-documentaries are replicated for the purpose of their distribution, initially via the hands of those who collaborate on and appear in the films, and later through exhibition in public venues. These diffusion strategies facilitate the distribution of that body across the structures/boundaries which once impelled the inceptive Need.
Is the Need to move now a task accomplished, a Need satiated? Perhaps not. Perhaps, Six Documentaries and a Film about Mexico City will have incited others to Need to move.