Aesthetics of the Antrum

Aesthetics of the Cavern. Louisa Babari

A film on paper. A story narrated shot by shot. Each shot is a unique history, told in an open narrative line. Transporting the cinematic universe into a book of still images. Cut and placed one after the other, silent as in the origins of cinema.

I worked mainly with magazines of the seventies. That black and white, and that peculiar gray, have a substance and a texture all their own. This project took me back to my early childhood, autobiographical forays connected to a fictional universe. I reached a point where I could scarcely distinguish between experience and fiction, for a third factor emerged: history with a capital H.

I was born in Moscow and spent the first six years of my life in the Soviet Union, with many trips back and forth between the Soviet Union and Algeria. There was always in me a double belonging to the Soviet Union and North Africa. The issue of borders and migration have always been present in my work. When one is born in Soviet Russia of an Algerian father, one is necessarily imbued with history and ideology. Emigrating meant to be able to leave these walls. It was the great obsession of my childhood. The highway is a round trip with no exit… A narrow perspective that leads nowhere. A line of flight. The boat diffuses shores, brings together other places… But the collages are not pictures of the trip, or of the geographical displacement, or escape. They are images of closed worlds navigating two realities.

The initial idea of this work was to create, through graphic compositions, a cinematographic narration simulating the sequential narrative planes of a movie. This would be a movie made of paper that would borrow some codes rom cinematographic language such as the successive reading of the image, composition, duration of the planes, editing… My intention was to construct a narrative that had a beginning, a middle and an end. The impossibility I had, at that time, to make a feature­length flim, forced me to explore other fields where the expressions were frozen and silent, where the movement emerged from the relationship between the planes/ collages.

The production and,, after that, the reading of the collages creates something of a narrative. However, this wasn’t preconceived, or staged, or even devised during editing. Paradoxically, it created the absence of a narrative, or, rather, a non­narrative. Maybe the story does not exist, since the recomposed or decomposed collage image transcends its very essence. Each contains an induced narrative. The shots become paintings, unique works, a vision­­in the sense of a cinema of visions­­as that created by Andrei Tarkovsky. Therefore this series of images is no longer a film in its most intrinsic meaning, but rather, the succession and the order in which we discovered those images may refer to the film and its object. One of the points of contact between “The Aesthetics of Antro” and cinema lies at the crossroads of fiction and autofiction.

The term ́fiction ́ belongs to the field of storytelling, and contains an intrinsic autobiographical dimension, completely fictitious, but born of the singular ambiguity that fiction has with the intimate. I therefore chose the title “The Cavern”; a natural excavation that serves as a refuge for men and animals. That dark, mysterious or dangerous site, depending on who visits or lives there. “The Cavern” is also a term applied, due to its analogousness to form, to some body cavities. The body of the intimate also served as an entryway into this work, bringing this body face­to­face with the historical body and the political and graphic context of the images that are the heart of the collages that make up “The Aesthetics”. This work explores its origins. The beginning, genesis, ascendency, source and relationship that govern the unconscious of my creative process.