FONS ÀUDIO #21
Eric Baudelaire
In ‘The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images’ Baudelaire creates a transmedia piece (a film shot on Super 8, but also photographs and printed documents) that brings to light the personal stories, the political intrigue and the life journeys of these three iconic figures linked to the Japanese Red Army in the course of almost three decades living underground in Lebanon.
Like other works by Baudelaire, this piece emphasises multiple tensions, between yesterday and today, between the real and the fictitious, the absent and the present, over-documentation and oblivion, actual events and memory. Always focusing particularly on Masao Adachi, the Japanese filmmaker and political activist who, in the sixties, developed a methodology for critical analysis based on the observation of the landscape.
Baudelaire’s work thus stems from an experimental approach, almost in the scientific sense: what happens when you apply a theory that is virtually an unexplored mystery to the person who created it? An experiment that, Baudelaire claims, raises other interesting questions, regardless of the end result.
Is it possible to reconstruct those twenty-seven years of exile in Beirut through the study of the day-to-day surroundings of its protagonists? What narratives can we deduce from the remains of certain architectural and power structures? How do we, in general, reconstruct history through fragmented and terribly subjective fragments? What role do images play in this reconstruction?
Haig Aivazian
Through media such as lectures, performance, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Haig Aivazian’s multifaceted works intricately blend the personal and the geopolitical as well as micro and macro narratives. They uncover or perhaps even fabricate complex threads, timelines and visual networks with multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity. His stories are intended to puzzle, reveal intangible connections, and evoke a sense of ghostly friction among conflicting ideas. In this podcast, we talk to Haig Aivazian about counter-propaganda, sports, blackouts, Palestine, fugitivity and what he calls “the dumping grounds of democracy”.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our interview with Eric Baudelaire.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with the Catalan photographer Xavier Ribas.
Xavier Ribas
The photographs of Xavier Ribas analyse processes of transformation of contemporary metropolises, and the ways of life and habitability that these changes bring about.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with the Catalan photographer Sandra Balsells.
Sandra Balsells
Sandra Balsells has spent more than twenty years using her camera to document and denounce the impact that military, natural and social catastrophes have on people. She practices a humanist, combative, poetic photojournalism that lays bare the conflicts of our time, offering us images with which to construct critical discourses and organise our visual memory.