You’re a writer, a sculpter, a performer and a filmmaker. In your new opus, you use cinemat-ic means and film in Buenos Aires. How did the project start? Why in this particular neighborhood?
The streets in Buenos Aires, and specifically in the micro centro, have always struck me as a semantic party: the “compro oro” (I buy gold) signs on Libertad Street, where you’ll find all the pawnshops, the recollections of the conquest of America, the whole neighborhood swarming in all directions try-ing to sell gold and silver and dollars, the relationship to currency exchange (dollars – pesos) is per-manent in the street, which is both an inexhaustible source of ideas and speech, where everyone who takes part and speaks is contaminated by the noise of the buses and motorcycles passing by, which always made me feel like I was taking part in a collective ballet where everyone had a role that was constantly changing.
I wanted to transcribe the essence of this ballet and the fact that people talk a great deal in the street, outside and inside, and that every slightly out-of-context conversation has always struck me as a strange psychiatric event, as if a form of pragmatic surrealism had taken root in our daily lives as be-ings who work in the city. I am also interested by the neighborhood’s post-colonial reminiscences, which are inscribed in everyday language: the quest for gold, the neo-colonial and essential relationship with the dollar, the event of survival. And of course, I also wanted to transcribe the relationship to the economic and political crisis that has shaken the country in the wake of recent events.
In a few finely-crafted long takes, we follow some forty characters in a series of rambling con-versations that resonate with the city. How did you come up with the text? The choice of the route and the locations?
The text has been ten years in the making! For ten years I have been wanting to do this project with the t-shirts and the conversations. In fact, it was very simple, but it had to be built up gradually following day-to-day life in the city. The neighborhood is also my neighborhood, so I spent a lot of time wandering on the streets, in bars and buses, listening to various conversations. Then, I went through the archives of the women’s prison (between 1904 and 1970) in Buenos Aires, which was run by French nuns, and there I saw that there were a lot of women who were locked up for “psychological” problems, so to speak, but which were in fact moral issues and defying body and sexuality taboos in the public context. I also gathered a number of stories told to me by Dr. Sebastian Baeza: a Guarani psychiatrist from Misiones, a city on the Argentinian coast. Then I invented things inspired by the city’s own resources. The result is a film written on three pillars: economic problems, psychiatric problems and a contraceptive method for liberation. The choice of the route is a semantic choice in relation to the names of the streets: from Libertad we go to Corrientes, to Florida where the dollars get exchanged into pesos, and from there to the City, where the film ends, in the Communist Party’s co-operative bank. My intention was to convey the economic and emotional history of the city.
The characters are wearing T-shirts with carefully chosen slogans. How did the casting take place? How did you split the dialogue?
The casting process took place in three stages: we put out a call for applications open to all, then I hired some of my aunts and then some of my friends and their children. At casting time, everyone came at once and we shot while we tried out lines, as the script was already well underway. Then I split the cast into “actors with lines” and “actors without lines”. It was an intuitive casting process, depending on how they felt about speaking at the time of the audition. The succession of t-shirts happened similarly: it was written in the script, and I handed them out at the same time as I did the roles. I wrote the t-shirts, so I knew more or less how to include them in the symbolic framework.
The stream of voices and speeches blend and telescope into a dizzying maelstrom. But in the process, the city and its sounds are also very prominent. How come?
We amplified the urban sounds with the music and the other way round, things got mixed up on purpose, and I always felt that the sound of this very neighborhood expanded itself like a multitude of voices that weren’t always human, but had a lot to say. I wanted to recreate this highly immersive atmosphere with sounds, music, cars, off-screen and on-screen voices, as if the camera was a fly, or a low-flying pigeon. The actors all used wireless microphones and played in front of the camera and off-camera, and we integrated everything as if it were an immediate choreography.
Money, desire, psychology, esotericism, the financial crisis and the crisis of capitalism, contra-ception… In your unique and radical interpretation of our modernity, its richness and profusion, we are constantly challenged, called upon to do our own editing too.
We are all part of a sort of homemade algorithm made of our own importance within our own experience. In the neoliberal narcissistic world we live in, we are constantly being called upon for some sort of public self-validation sprinkled with esotericism. As we circulate and move through life, and especially in the current economic crisis which makes things completely unpredictable, we have the instinct to act as if in a personalized tarot card: every sign has a meaning, even advertising ones, everything is a sign of something else, our whole life is a metaphor which would eventually explain the “real” reality to us, in the impossibility of believing in the milieu, the system, democracy. We create our own montage in our minds, trying to make sense of the collective psychosis as individuals. What we realize is that reality has a thousand layers, which we are constantly editing. A kind of montage ahead of time reads what we can’t read, the t-shirts that remain outside the realm of understanding, the disconnected speeches that don’t explain anything. Sometimes we have to accept that there are other ways of understanding language that are more of a somatic nature.
The title?
The title is an ambiguous term in Spanish, with two meanings: on the one hand, it means a circle that has rolled away, and on the other, a circle that has broken in on itself, in the sense that in Spanish “roder” also means “to roll” in the same way as you might roll a film or a story. The idea came from the fact that writing is in fact structurally circular but out of control, as if it had to close in on itself like any other cycle. But in the end there would have been a de-regulation, something that would have taken the circle off its self-tracking path.
Interview by Nicolas Feodoroff
