3 April 2012 - Moira Roth’s journal
Reflecting on the themes and concerns of Sarah Vanagt, I think about what I call ‘obdurate history’ – a history that stubbornly, and insistently (often painfully) returns to confront us. [I discussed this concept in a 2001 article about the Vietnam War: ‘Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Le, the Vietnam War, Photography and Memory.’]
Born in 1976 in Belgium, Vanagt studied history there and in England, and later attended the National Film and Television School graduate program in London, England. In 2003, as part of her graduate work, Vanagt made a 36 minute documentary film called After Years of Walking.
Vanagt’s major media are film, video and installation through which she explores ‘obdurate’ history - be it in areas of what was once the Belgian African Empire (Rwanda and the Congo) or in Europe.
Poetically and poignantly, Vanagt often shows how children in different parts of the world are taught (or not) about history, and also how they themselves imaginatively reach out to learn about the world and its histories.
In 2007, when cemeteries and graves began to enter Vanagt’s work, she created Ash Tree, a video installation based on Mary Shelley’s childhood, in which a five-year-old girl in a London graveyard touches the tombstones.
‘Her hand glides over the letters, the carved inscriptions. Can she read death, can she see death? In Ash Tree, the beginning of all knowledge, the alphabet, mingles with the end of all knowledge, death.’
Ash Tree on the Balthasar website
Sarah Vanagt, Ash Tree, 2007 (installation view)
Vanagt not only travels to other places - Rwanda and England - to find past and present histories, but also, literally, finds past and present history at home in Brussels where she lives.
Her Little Figures (2003) presents immigrant children in Brussels trying their hand at the role-playing of three medieval public statues of a king, queen and knight.
Sarah Vanagt, Little Figures, 2003
The setting of her 2010 film Boulevard d’Ypres is her own neighbourhood, an area that is being rapidly and dramatically transformed by gentrification and urban development, which, as Vanagt explains on the Biennale of Sydney website ‘is driving out shops that sell couscous, dates and olives.’
Sarah Vanagt, Boulevard d’Ypres, 2010
In order to make this film, she temporarily created a studio in one of the neighbourhood empty stores, where she invited her neighbours ‘a mix of new inhabitants, undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and shopkeepers – to come and tell a story, a fairy tale… Before the street changes into something new it functions as a place of memory. The shop, the street and the storytellers find themselves at a point zero of history.’
The name of the street on which Vanagt lives, Boulevard of Ypres, conjures up for so many Europeans, a famous episode in World War I (1914–18) - the battle between the German and Allied forces that took place in the Flemish city of Ypres. Thus Vanagt was inspired to weave into her film ‘sound recordings and archive images of the so-called “colonial soldiers” who fought in the trenches in and around Ypres.’
This Boulevard d’Ypres film and another, The Wave - a 2011–12 collaboration between Vanagt and Belgian photographer Katrien Vermeire - will be shown in the Sydney Biennale in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Read Katrien Vermeire’s Artist Statement
The subject of The Wave is the recent excavation of a Spanish Civil War (1936–39) grave, some 400 kilometers south of Madrid - a grave that contained nine skeletons and eight skulls of the men killed there on 3 July, 1939. The film will be accompanied by a ‘photo wall’ of some 30 of Vermeire’s photographs of newspapers on which the bones, skulls and found objects were placed temporarily before being sent to the lab for analysis.
Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire, The Wave, 2011–12
4 April, 2012 – Email from Moira Roth to Sarah Vanagt
I have greatly enjoyed the book you sent me (Sarah Vanagt, film and video works, 2003-2010) that begins with Anke Bangma’s brilliantly insightful introduction.
In it, she stresses that the histories that you focus on…
‘… cannot be approached directly, as they vanish in the sharp light of reportage or the explanatory narratives of historiography. Her [Vanagt’s] film becomes a medium that can accommodate histories that need the shelter of darkness, the transformation into legend or fantasy, the density of images, or even the wordless space of sensory memory, to become tangible.’
What do you think has driven you to return again and again to this in your work?
6 April, 2012 - Email from Sarah Vanagt to Moira Roth, Part 1
About a year ago, Lore Colaert, a Belgian historian, wrote to me about her current research in Spain. She has been following the recent ‘wave’ of exhumations of mass graves from the Franco era all over the country. I was immediately very interested because I think that in all my work I search for those moments, those places where history is being tested, shaped, formed, narrated for the very first time — be it in the Congo, in Rwanda, or in places nearer to home, in Europe.
So it was not so much the Spanish Civil War in itself that drove me to go and film the exhumation, but rather the way in which later generations (my generation) deal with such traumatic events.
In my earlier films, I focused mostly on the spoken word but recently I’ve become more and more interested in ‘tactile’ forms of historiography (and tactile forms of cinema).
Who else ‘touches’ the past more literally than archaeologists?
It is exactly this physical contact between the past and the present, between the archaeologist and the bones, that I find so strong, and that I wanted to document from nearby.
Katrien Vermeire and I followed the entire excavation process over the course of 21 days of this particular Spanish Civil War grave with two photo cameras, making use of the time-lapse technique.
Even though the initial idea and the motivation to make this film came out of my own work, the project gradually and naturally turned into a joint enterprise, which is a new and exciting experience. Katrien and I had already worked together on Boulevard d’Ypres, but there the tasks were more clearly delineated: she did the camera, I directed it. In the Spanish project it’s very different: we make all the decisions together - technical, artistic, and productional related.
Our process was that we would ask the archaeologists to leave the grave (and the frame) each time we wanted to make a still photo or short video of the evolution of the excavation. In the first days they left the grave (taking away all their tools, buckets, cushions, etc.) every ten minutes. Once the excavation work became more precise (and slower), however, we asked them to leave the grave only every 20 to 30 minutes.
Now we are in the process of connecting these individual shots (using fades to go from one image to the other), so that it appears as if the grave is sculpting itself. This series of shots of the entire grave forms the ‘ground structure’ of the film.
Apart from that we also made various time-lapse series of details of the mass grave with a second camera, for instance the appearance of a shoe, a skull, some golden teeth, the removal of a bone. Again, one never saw the archaeologists - before taking a picture they had to keep their hands and tools out of the frame.
We are currently in the process of editing all these images.
We feel like medieval monks. The precision of the extremely delicate handwork of the archaeologists is now mirrored by the equally time-consuming construction of the individual frames into film sequences in the cutting room.
I think we are slowly finding our way in our self-constructed labyrinth of the more than 32,000 individual stills that we made during the exhumation.
6 April, 2012 - Email from Sarah Vanagt to Moira Roth, Part 2
It is of course difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain exactly why it is that one returns to the same set of questions or sensibilities again and again.
There is that famous sentence by Walter Benjamin, which is always somehow present when I work on a film:
‘It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.’
For the small ‘historical constructions’ I make (my films), I tend to rely on the imaginative powers of the people (often children) whom I film. So one could say I make documentaries about the (historical) imagination of my contemporaries.
Not surprisingly, my favourite historians are the ones with the most vivid imagination (they don’t make up facts, but rather link the facts with one another in an imaginative way). For example, when I asked the participants of Boulevard d’Ypres to tell a story - their story, in the third person, as if it were a fairy tale - it was precisely to film those moments where facts meet fictions.
Now, why is it that I am so interested in, so drawn to that very moment, to that meeting point between the real and the imagined?
Perhaps because this is where history is born, during or inside this spark, this étincelle - often brief, often fragile and playful at the same time.
