History in the Present Tense: Storytelling in the Art of Julie Ault and Alejandro Cesarco

I’m reluctant to exemplify recent projects. I’d rather enact than represent. How do you conceptualize or inhabit roles of narration, particularly in your film work, where there often seem to be voices that speak not only for themselves but in double or multiple ways?

AC: The way you characterize voice or narrative makes me think of how Marguerite Duras uses “the voices” in India Song. In the play, four unseen voices recount a love story that unfolds before the viewer at the same time as the voices that narrate remember, or are reminded, by the events unfolding before them. This creates an echo-chamber effect that perpetuates the past as it is being recalled. In her introductory notes to the text, Duras clarifies, “The difference between the voices, between forgetfulness on the one hand and remembrance on the other, arises from the same cause—the fascination the story exerts on the voices. Some have rejected the fascination, others have better tolerated it.”

Often the voice in my work appears as an intimate conversation between two people who are seemingly aware they are being listened to. Or it’s a conversation that could be a monologue. In general, the tone of the conversations are highly personal, but also somewhat artificial. A tone that is intimate but in the sense of intimation. They are characters that speak as if they were reading or citing something from a book. And often they actually are (something I’ve elsewhere referred to as the use of emotional-readymades). Perhaps this is something else learned from growing up watching a lot of nouvelle vague films.

JA: Your description of voice fits my experience of your films. I often sense that the apparent subject of your work is not the only subject; characters foretell others’ stories across time. Tenses intertwine. To me, personal experience and “the telling of selves” runs through your work. The absence of spoken or written words in Present Memory struck me. The figure, your father, is silent. The means you used in the film to denote a fusion of tenses is effective. What is the structure of the work?

AC: Present Memory is a portrait of my father shortly after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. I filmed him in his office (he was a doctor) using a handheld 16mm camera that kind of caresses him. I later projected what I had filmed onto the same wall and recorded that projection on video.

The work documents both a constructed and an anticipated memory. The literal and metaphorical projection staged in the work is a rehearsal of fears: an attempt at dealing with a future absence, the process of mourning and remembering, mortality and letting go. It was, in a way, an attempt at managing or controlling the feeling of loss by anticipating someone’s absence. However, the process of mourning of course exceeds any foretelling or rationalization: one can never fully prepare for it. Working on this video was also, at its most basic, an excuse to spend time with my dad. To acknowledge and face the moment together and help each other process what was happening.

In terms of silence, one of the tragedies of death is the silencing of conversation through loss. Yet silence is part of every conversation and of every narrative. It is how language unfolds and how we recognize the other by yielding to silence. Related to this, and following your own wish to enact, and as if I were playing one of my own characters, I’d like to share a line from a poem by Rosemarie Waldrop I was just reading: “A sentence with the word ‘time’ in it already contains a shadow.”¹