Niyati Dave (ND): What led you into your current practice, which I see as spatially rooted, a nearly stratigraphic unearthing of histories from place and time?
Johannes Gierlinger (JG): There has always been a great deal of interest in history, especially in the history of the 20th century. As I started to make art and work intensively with film, this interest in the impact of historical events on the present solidified - a kind of digging in the sense of archeology, although this excavation must be understood through the camera, through the montage, the interweaving of archives with current images. My work strongly deals with struggles and forms of resistance and works around themes like collective memory and remembrance. It is also strongly influenced by writings such as On Collective Memory by Maurice Halbwachs as well as Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History.
ND: Can you talk a little more about your process? In your work everything is imbued with a trace of the past. Do you begin from events or archives or do you begin from space and place? The reason I ask is because of how wonderfully tactile so much of your footage seems (for example in Past Futures) - it is very embodied and very much of place. Can we then talk of your process as you enter into a new idea - what it begins with and how it unfolds?
JG: Every entering is relatively different. For my last film project, Past Futures, I filmed protests in Vienna for years, initially without knowing where this material will ever find a place. As I got interested in the March Revolution of 1848, the film project became a kind of starting point from which the various questions and topics arose. For this purpose, archives were interfaces that linked events, achievements, and ideas of this past revolution with the present. For this revolution, we looked at archives, outlines of a time, lithographs or texts that were created without a camera. I wanted to connect this photography-less past with the present. The ideas, developments, breaks and tendencies were in the foreground for me. If there is something tactile about it, so much the better.
ND: I am also interested in your articulation of your practice as “essayistic.” To me, this brings forth many questions about form - cinematic form, a narrative form, but also the manner in which your installation and film practices speak to each other and how the “essayistic” manifests itself in both.
JG: I think the form of the essay allows other questions to be asked, topics to be viewed differently and the incorporation of 'examining', 'trying out' and 'weighing up', with awareness of the personal perspective. And this personal perspective should perhaps not be confused with a 'private' one. As Hanno Möbius writes in Das Abenteuer "Essayfilm", without factual argumentation and without consistent action, this attempt becomes an adventure of the spirit in the world of the senses that is accessible to viewers through their eyes and ears. This adventure opens up many artistic possibilities, as my sometimes documentary approach shifts to fictional forms and vice versa. For me, filmic work is the starting point from which I deal with a wide variety of other forms ranging from video installations and photography to collage-like works.
ND: In many of your works there is a frisson between the image onscreen and the words that accompany it. I am curious about what work the image does for you in this regard.
JG: Perhaps the question follows on from the previous ones. The diversity of the essay film also allows language(s) to be used differently. The spoken word is definitely of enormous importance for my films, especially because I can use it to relate documentary and fictional things, or break documentary conventions with poetic means. In my work, however, I see different languages such as sound, montage, collage and voice-over that interlock, complement each other and also go in opposite directions.
ND: In a moment when time and space seem warped by the hyper-archive of the internet and an increasingly fragmenting notion of shared reality, with social media echo chambers creating isolated bubbles of information and relationalities, how do you situate your work into unpacking memory and resistance?
JG: Social media, with its flood of information, and the internet itself as a constantly changing hyper-archive are naturally ambiguous achievements, as successful as their history is, as useful as they are, these platforms can also turn quickly. The current situation around the corona crisis illustrates that very well. The chance for artists is to deal with this paradox, to ask about the form of content, narrative forms, but perhaps also about what an archive should be able to do, for whom it is accessible, for whom it isn't.
For me, my work is about creating a narration from the flood of archives, recordings, images, texts, etc., finding a form, creating a narration, steering a direction, sorting it out for a topic and visualizing it. In the end, the artistic work may not become a hype on social media, but rather reaches its audience in a cinema, at a festival or in an exhibition. In any case, I am more interested in the attention tension of cinemas, exhibitions and any other physical spaces.
ND: There is a certain ambulatory feeling to your work - where the street is still an important site for remembering, experiencing, formulating collective memories and experience. I would just like to know more about this.
JG: You may come back to the question of what a virtual space and a physical one can do. I still see the street as a place of protest that makes things more visible. This first visibility can be sure to reach further ones via virtual paths. In my latest film I was also interested in the question of how a protest is formed, what a mass can do, what it visualizes, which dynamics unfold, which images arise, which groups meet, which concept of the enemy emerges. A current case in India shows what protests can do. In the end, the peasant protests were successful and the agrarian reform was withdrawn. Of course, negotiations took place in backrooms, but without the pressure from the farmers blocking the streets for almost a year that would certainly not have happened. Currently I work on a video installation that includes 3D renderings, a work that also revolves around the March Revolution.