How can you make something that is silent and faded appear on the materials? This is perhaps the question that permeates the work of Ginan Seidl. By layering long, contemplative framings Seidl’s camera observes without lapsing into the continuity of a cinéma du réel. The evocation of travel in her open horizons should not be confused with the hasty gaze of tourism. On the contrary, for Seidl travel seems to come from memory. We get the feeling of returning to a place rather than entering it for the first time.
But this is no static gaze observing the passage of time. The layering of voices, the introduction of elements from the cultural contexts from which the images originate, articulate a precise gesture. All the elements touch on the boundary between the intelligible and the unintelligible, the poetic and the categorical, the image and the word. There is no trace of any ethnographic work in the sense of documentary language. The materials play between the cinematic and the sonorous.
The tranquility evoked by Seidl’s images is fragile. Woven into it is the connection between space and history, between violence and the passing of time.
Seidl works with compositions, with triptychs and fragmentations of visual space. This orients her to a perception in which the acoustic and the visual neither mirror one another nor complement one another in a continuity in order to show things “as they are.” This play allows for a word to appear on the horizon through its composition, allows the sense of the word jinn to appear along the texture so that it acquires meaning. From the horizon we reach the body of this word, in which it echoes and exists.
This is a material cinematic philology, in which the body is no predetermined vessel of meaning. The body is the medium in which not only horizon and language flow together and are expressed, but in which the word, which becomes sound, exists – and is more than landscape. We can recognize the traces of war and power on it and its horizon. The tranquility evoked by Seidl’s images is fragile. Woven into it is the connection between space and history, between violence and the passing of time.
It is in this border language that the mythological figures of the jinn turn up–but their appearance is not an act of translation, but touches the membranes that seem to separate word from space.
Daniel Moreno
