rafal Morusiewicz
and Guilherme Maggessi
in conversation
Dear Gui,
this is my attempt at a starter to the situation I invited you into, having been asked by the Film Place Collective team to produce a text (or something else) relating to my recent film, copia de la copia (de la copia). I thought of starting it in the format of a staged conversation between you and me, as it rhymes with the discussion-based collaborative approach that we have practiced while working on a few projects over the past two months (I am writing these words on Sep 20). This has also been the time that we have got to know our respective academic research-and-practice interests, and, in consequence, developed what I identify as mutual interest in working together. From what I think I remember, you encountered copia de la copia (de la copia) as an introduction to my practice and, in a larger sense, to my way of thinking and operating, laced with erratically contained messiness and glitchiness. For me, in turn, the film constitutes a multiplicity of closures. Most straightforwardly, it came into being as my PhD defensio film, as an ending to the practice I had developed over six years as a part of the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.[1] It is also, especially in retrospect, a break-up, a symbolical gesture through which I cut emotional ties binding me to Poland, where I lived for the first 35 years of my life. Finally, it marks my decision to stop working on my own and be more proactive at designing a more consistent setting for collaborative creative situations, such as this one. This project is, therefore, the first iteration of a new beginning, and I am thrilled that you have agreed to become its half.
Where do we start? The first thing that comes to my mind concerns temporality: you once said that, while watching copia de la copia (de la copia), it was tricky for you to guess when the film would be reaching its end. This made me think of my overall experience of watching films that resist temporal predictability. I think of situations when I am unable to guess, while watching a film, how much time has already passed and how much time is still ahead of me. For each of us, this was the recent experience of watching I Am Thinking of Ending Things,[2] whose temporality was, for me, super fascinating. Was watching those two films anyhow similar to you in terms of feeling the passing of time?
From this angle, watching I Am Thinking of Ending Things was upsetting and disturbing. I felt that its ambiguous temporality was planned, as if it was a goal in and of itself. Kaufman’s film felt to me like too much intention, like a perverted narrative, even despite the dream aesthetics that it had (and that we both seem to enjoy). The temporality in copia de la copia (de la copia) makes me disoriented because I try to grasp onto a narration or a narrative agency, which I am always denied. It changes, it moves and fades, and it occasionally blurs, which perhaps relates to what you call the “mixtape economy,” in which your work is immersed. But maybe I take it too literally: I may be seeing it everywhere now that we have talked about it. The political agendas that inform your films are situated around the politics of sexual rights in the Polish (or, maybe, even Eastern-European) context. While, in your earlier works, you reference political issues more openly (pedagogically, even), you make them more felt rather than seen in copia de la copia (de la copia). Sure, there is this footage of policemen during a protest situation, there is the rolling-out of the rainbow flag on a bridge, but somehow all this is the fulfilment of the premise coming from your earlier Uprooting Ghosts.
Do you remember how the characters in I’m Thinking of Ending Things change their age, clothes, even bodies throughout the film?
text: Rafal Morusiewicz
concept: Guilherme Maggessi
Found footage has a quality similar to collages. Small pieces of a bigger picture are cut out and brought into a new (or another) context. As you would say it, they get infected and are infectious at the same time. However, as we both saw in this slick found-footage film that we talked about a lot,[3] this pre-existing, and then re-contextualized, imagery can swiftly become entangled in a new linear narration, in which it does not matter so much where the images come from. It is how they are woven into each other.
image: Uprooting Ghosts: A Queer “Fantasia on National Themes” (dir. Rafał Morusiewicz, 2017, film mixtape)
concept: Guilherme Maggessi
reference: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Let me give an example of why I think your political agenda through storytelling has become more abstract. There is this one film [4] that you reference both in copia de la copia (de la copia) and Uprooting Ghosts. In the former, you give just a slight nod to Éva Szalánczky’s story, while, in the latter, there is much more room dedicated to her character and her story that she speaks by herself. In that sense, Uprooting Ghosts builds a premise or an agenda for your future works, where you develop something that I would call a “methodology of remembrance.” For instance, watching another of your films, Bodies without Bodies in Outer Space, I feel as if you were taking me on a trip through a dream narrative: it is present there also on the text level (there’s this line, “I close my eyes and I start falling”). In copia de la copia (de la copia), you just “go there,” you do not use text captions or cue cards to tell me where, but you somehow just go. And the experience is ambivalent, enerving, and pleasant. It upsets my narrative expectations. I feel as if I was going on this trip “with you” but without being guided “by you.”
When you mentioned “political agenda,” I thought of a few important references. One of them is Maria Janion, a scholar and writer who passed away in August 2020.[5] I did not reference her extensively in my PhD project, nor have I been heavily influenced by her texts. However, her reading of “Polishness” was present in a lot of literature that shaped the founding years of what has become my artistic-and-research practice. What I find particularly significant to this conversation (dedicated, among other things, to endings) is her last piece of writing, delivered at the Congress of Culture (October 2016).[6] Janion condemns there the Polish national paradigm of messianic martyrdom, to which she dedicated a few decades of her studies and writing. This trope manifests itself in the state-clerical politics of right-wing governments (its most recent Polish iteration has been in power since 2015), which she reads as the emanations of the fetishistic attachment to pain and suffering of the national collective unconscious. Janion points to the still-current Polish government’s attempts to further curb the already strict abortion laws (which has recently happened again - I am writing these words on Nov 2), to their oft-declared cultivation of coal-based (and ecologically dirty) energy, and to their overt disdain against respecting and protecting the equal provision of human rights. In this view, Poland is a place and a phantasmatic idea that is ultimately unable to modernize, to make an intellectual and empathetic effort to work out a new secular meaning of equalitarian community.
image: Skorpion, panna, łucznik (Scorpio, Virgo and Sagittarius, dir. Andrzej Kondratiuk, 1972)
I read Janion’s last text as a break-up, which I, egotistically, imprint on my own affective attachment to Poland as a physical place and an idea. I spent most of my 2010s on reading, thinking of, and writing about conceptualizations of a possible methodology of doing artistic research and practice through my queer affect towards the idea of me “being Polish.” Yet copia de la copia (de la copia) has brought me to an end, to a thought that what I care more about now is not necessarily something that has to do with Poland as a situatedness of my research-based artistic activity. And this is connected to the overtness of what you called a political agenda. While working on my films, I kept wanting to lose my tendency to indulge in wordiness or pedagogical verbal transparency. I think that copia de la copia (de la copia) may epitomize the split in which I find myself now, being suspended between the attachment to verbalizing and storytelling, on one end, and disidentifying and abstracting, on the other.[7]
An interesting element of this disidentifying-abstracting pull is the changing “I” within and of the film. It gives you this ability of changing skins through time. It is like in a dreamscape, when you look in the mirror and see someone else, but it actually is still you. You do not forget that you see yourself, but the seeing acquires a distance, as if this “you” was someone or something else, maybe an actual “fictional character,” whom you can look at and get to know again, whom you can judge or become uninterested in after 15 minutes. The setting metamorphs, but it stays the same. And, like falling into an Inception-like scenario, [8] I move further along your (sub)conscious relationship with these films and establish one on my own.
Who am “I”? How many bodies can the “I” wear during twenty plus minutes? copia de la copia (de la copia) propels me to confront and contend with the role of an
author
editor
dj
fictional character
of this work, as well as with the constant exercise of situating myself in many
places
bodies
at once. You move away from a fixed situation, from“one” standing point, to the manifold. I try to move with you — I get disoriented: who is speaking, whom am I looking at?
image: Arrebato (dir. Iván Zulueta, 1979)
Maks, Éva, Rafal?
This is not a film about you in the doorway, suddenly, there (come, we're going, let's go)
image: Me in 20 Years (video, dir. Moses Sumney & Josh Finck, perf. Moses Sumney, 2020)
In her essay “The I Who Is Not Me,” Zadie Smith ponders upon the “true role of the autobiographical in fiction.” She admits that she used to treat the inclusion of the “I” into fictional writing as something not serious, as “a kind of weakness, a failure of imagination, something a little embarrassing.”[9] She writes about her ambivalence about the “I.” Despite being “a little repelled by the idea,” she nevertheless decided to write a novel using the first-person “I,” and therefore indulged herself to the prospect of writing a version of reality that would be its subconscious fictionalization. I read what she writes about in this way: the “I” perspective, one that I identify in your film, creates a possibility for an “impossible” subjectivity. This subjectivity is born out of the ambivalence of being both a cleft and a unity. This situation originates out of the departure both from thinking (as a reader) of a written text as written by someone else, and perceiving (as a writer) text as something fictional and extraneous. In that sense, fiction is a space where the reader and the writer sit side by side. I can see you from a distance. Your edges blur into the white. You ride a bike. We sit side by side.
It is interesting for me to watch copia de la copia (de la copia) and then hear you say that situating your practice as “Polish” or “related to Poland” is not something that you care so much about anymore. I am interested in this because the first time I saw your film, I felt ignorant for not knowing what certain issues, topics, and aesthetics matter in the country that I have shared a border with for the past 7 years (I lived in Germany, then in Austria). After staying with your film a little longer, I realized that this does not matter so much, that I do not necessarily need a thorough understanding of a Polish-Hungarian socio-political context in the 1960s-1990s. Then, I even forgot about it and instead started seeing snippets of myself, of you, of friends, of other people’s families. Not knowing the context does not hinder my experience. This “losing the wordiness or verbal transparency,” which you mentioned before, does not unground me as a watcher. Somehow, I feel more like a character or, as we both say, a “fictional person” within the film. But then again
this is not a film about you this is not a film about me.
image: Inland Empire (dir. David Lynch, 2006)
What you called a “fictional person” may refer to the ambiguously multiple status or function that I was interested in emulating and exploring, starting with my own position of an artist, filmmaker, or editor who is, explicitly or not, and also or maybe instead, a character, a narrator, or a narrative agency in the films I make. For instance, in Uprooting Ghosts, there are plural “I”s that belong to the several films I remixed, and to the film characters, to the films, to the filmmakers. They manifest themselves also through non-diegetic stories that permeated into my films, stories about, for instance, the trouble that the filmmakers and their films experienced for being critical or not sufficiently ecstatic about the state’s actions. Some other “I”s belong to some other films, some of whichbelong to what I thought of as my “research field,” while some others belong elsewhere. Some other “I”s point to “me”: to some stories that I thought I remembered, to some moments that, allegedly, I had lived or thought I had lived through, to some dreams that I thought I had and remembered, and then fictionalized.
copia de la copia (de la copia) tells a story, but it also breaks and crumbles, has gaps, milky windows, creeks on the floor, rooms filled with steam, and light beams coming through windows and blinding my sight. Ambiguity is made visual through formal elements of changing aspect ratios, narrating voices, subtitles, captions, poems set in different fonts. Who is speaking, talking to me in the end?
You once spoke about the ambivalent emotional relationship towards the Polish cinema, particularly towards the heteronormative gender-sexual violence that they carry. You said that through your films you were interested in doing something opposite to a break-up. That you did not want to erase the films, together with their violence, but you wanted to imagine a pleasant future through them, as they did something to you back then, when you watched them as a child or a teenager. In a sense, you owe them this, as without this experience you would not have become who you are now.
image: Uprooting Ghosts: A Queer “Fantasia on National Themes” (dir. Rafał Morusiewicz, 2017, film mixtape)
concept: Guilherme Maggessi
reference: Eve Tuck and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.” In Handbook of Autoethnography edited by Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639-658. California: Left Coast Press, 2013.
Western academic discourses have a long tradition of denying situatedness and claiming a “bodiless body,” thus perpetuating the promise of making knowledge that is universal and totalizing. Both of us, I gather, have established in our reading a “canon” of academic writing and artistic practices that go against bodilessness. As “embodied others,”[10] you and I aim to present a body, a situation, a point of view from which to speak from. You move away from a fixed situation, the “one” standing point, to the manifold. I never know who the main character is, or if there was any character in the first place. Like in a dreamscape, someone’s faces change, but the person remains the same. Is it you I am looking at?
image: Hydrozagadka (Hydro-Puzzle, dir. Andrzej Kondratiuk, 1970, film)
Sometimes I feel so close, and then you push me far away. You move away from a fixed situation, this “one” standing point, to the manifold. Temporalities crumble. I wanted to ask for a while now: whom is Éva bringing flowers to?
Whom do you write about when you write about yourself?
Yours,
Gui
[1] copia de la copia (de la copia) is a remix of my two previous films: Uprooting Ghosts: A Queer “Fantasia on National Themes” (2017, https://vimeo.com/219544235) and Bodies without Bodies in Outer Space (2019, https://vimeo.com/303649861). My doctoral project, consisting of two films and one written dissertation, focuses on the analysis of several films made during the Polish People’s Republic (1952-1989) by applying a hybridic theoretical framework of “queer reading.” I conceptualized the latter as a methodological imperative of doing politically and ethically sensitive intersectional and transversal research, which consists in investigating whether (and, if yes, then what) the study of the past artistic practices has anything significant to say on urgent socio-political issues and situations. While the project is historiographic and archive-based, it is informed by my personal experience of watching films while growing up as a queer child in a small town in stifling Catholic and toxically heteronormative Poland during the 1980s and 1990s.
[2] Editing this text, we decided to include a few references about which we discussed while, simultaneously, working on other projects. One of them is I Am Thinking of Ending Things (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2020) with its bending and permeating temporalities.
[3] Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Just Don't Think I'll Scream, dir. Frank Beauvais, 2018)
[4] This is a reference to Egymásra nézve (Another Way, dir. Károly Makk, 1982), set in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution (1956). It is the only film made in a Soviet-Block country that centers on a romantic and sexual relationship of two cis women. The protagonist, Éva Szalánczky, is a political persona non grata, a “non-entity,” as she calls herself, due to her journalist integrity of reporting about communist atrocities. Consistently losing jobs, she eventually attempts to cross the Austro-Hungarian border illegally and gets shot dead by the border patrol. The film is based on Törvényen belül (“Within the Law”), a novel by Erzsébet Galgóczi, who also served as the film’s script co-writer.
[5] Daria Chibner, “Poland lies nowhere, it is a universal idea: Maria Janion, Uncanny Slavdom and Polish Identity,”Notes from Poland (2020, Sep 5), https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/09/05/poland-lies-nowhere-it-is-a-universal-idea-maria-janion-uncanny-slavdom-and-polish-identity/.
[6] Ewa Majewska, “The Weak Internationalism? Women's Protests in Poland and Internationally, Art and Law,” L’Internationale Online (2018), https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/politics_of_life_and_death/98_the_weak_internationalism_womens_protests_in_poland_and_internationally_art_and_law.
[7] We adopt here the concept of disidentification from Muñoz, who defines it as “descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (p. 4). Predicated upon one’s ambivalence towards the prospect of fully identifying with “an object, person, lifestyle, history, political ideology, or religious orientation” (to name just a few), disidentification provides one with the agency of producing a minoritarian (queer, in this case) subjectivity (or a counterpublic sphere), a (counter-)reaction to the complicated process of forming and “dissing” identity, of responding to “the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny,” which, as Muñoz claims, underlie state power (pp. 5, 8). See: José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
[8] This is a reference to Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010), a film that only one of us has managed to watch till the end.
[9] Zadie Smith, “The I Who Is Not Me,” in Feel Free: Essays(New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 333-348.
[10] Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988), 575.
bio
rafal Morusiewicz
Rafal Morusiewicz is a gender non-binary visual artist, writer, and educator based in Vienna. They have recently completed a “PhD-in-Practice” artistic project at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on queering/remixing “Polish film history.” In their film-based artistic/ research activity, they explore methodological strategies that could “queer,” i.e. upset and denormalize, the vertical and binary relationality between the “artist-researcher” and the field study. For that purpose, they employ the strategies and aesthetics of remixing and mashing up various socio-political political threads, narratives, characterizations, genres, and formats, together with affective memory and confessional writing style.
Guilherme Maggessi
Guilherme Maggessi (born in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil) is a graphic designer, artist, and researcher, living and working in Vienna. Having a background in graphic design, he is interested in critical approaches to image production, invested both in its historic and material manifestations. His artistic practice takes different forms, ranging from drawing, painting, and textile works to digital interfaces and mixed-media installation. His current focus lies in developing an artistic and theoretical vocabulary for working with and through othering and orientalizing imagery, focusing especially on the 19th-century painting and drawing from Central Europe.