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26/10/2012

Eric Baudelaire

Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid

Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako — leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations — has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’ — fukeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.

It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire — an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality — chose to bring forth using the documentary format. Filmed on Super 8 mm, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of which adds up not so much to an enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis. (Jean-Pierre Rehm, director of FID Marseille)

“The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images” is Eric Baudelaire’s second solo show at Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, following “Acontecimientos” in 2007. Shown for the first time in Spain, Eric Baudelaire’s film is presented alongside a documentary installation that includes archives about the Japanese Red Army, personal photographs from the Shigenobu family album, prison drawings by Masao Adachi, an excerpt from his seminal film “AKA Serial Killer” (1969), a printed exhibition libretto, and monochromatic silkscreen prints titled “Pictures of Documents” (2011).

The documentary installation and the 66 min film unfold complex and intersecting accounts, ranging from personal stories, political history, revolutionary propaganda and film theory. Stories from imageless clandestine lives where the recurring theme is the question of images. Nothing didactic or objective is attempted in Eric Baudelaire’s project; the point is rather to give space to stories, accepting the idea that a history of extreme leftwing terrorism can be nothing but the confrontation of antagonistic, ideological narratives, in a haze of fantasy, emotion, pain and indifference.

Opening: 27 October 2012

Galeria Juana de Aizpuru
barquillo 44, Madrid
Hours: Monday to Saturday 10.30-14, closed on Sunday
Free Admission

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