Baltimore, 2003, Installation view,
©Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Gallery
It’s not a linear process of retrieval. That plays into how you use three
split screens.
I’m trying to pierce the
historical legacy of the official nation-building story that Peary was the
person to reach the North Pole; the heroic exploration part. I wanted to
make this story contemporized through this younger black female
protagonist who re-articulates the interview, using his memory to tell
this other story that’s not part of that official history.
How has Henson’s experience of going to "a place of no return" been useful
to the construction of the Ice Project?
The idea of becoming an
ambulatory subject maneuvering and transgressing borders is a very
contemporary question. It predicts globalization and the movement of
people, but of course Matthew Henson was not meant to do that.
It’s
moving beyond what the New Yorker writer
Malcolm Gladwell calls the "blink culture," of being able to summarize
people within a blink. The journey of no return is about not being able to
fix people’s identities historically in relationship to their possible
achievement. One of the things that is really very important to me in
terms of thinking about the journey of no return is revisiting spaces like
Iceland to see that the ice is melting; we’re concerned with questions of
difference, we’re obsessed with them, we start wars because of them; this
is done on a planet that has scarce resources.
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Baltimore Series (Angela in Brown), 2003,
Filmstill ©Courtesy of the Artist
and Metro Pictures Gallery
In your film
"Baltimore" (2003), desolation frames an imminent violence.
What’s interesting for me is the idea that modernity is made through violence.
There’s also a question of slavery in which the world becomes welded. In
Baltimore, violence is predicated through references to Black Exploitation
films sampled in the film. In True North, there’s a violence of the
landscape itself. Violence is very close to memory and suppression.
The chase scenes in "Baltimore" are loaded with suspicion.
I’m trying to probe at those suspicions, those constant assumptions about
particular locations, landscapes and people. In Baltimore, suspicion is
played out as the museological aspect of a collection and culture
moralizing its past.
Baltimore Series (Street Life/Still Life), 2003, Filmstill
©Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Gallery
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