Zarina Bhimji

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 20 Number 4 and 21 Number 1, 2002

Transcript

Preceded with a section of the soundtrack from Zarina Bhimji’s film, ‘Out of Blue’, the artists reflects on this work which metaphorically explores the autobiographical references of an early childhood spent in Uganda and as a member of an Asian family expelled by Idi Amin’s regime in 1972. Her work contains a highly charged sequence of atmospheric images that are potent because of the ways in which they evoke a sense of absence, loss, erasure, and the trace of suffering. She films interiors which were torture chambers, military barracks, police cells, airport terminal buildings and control tower at Entebbe. The texture and surfaces of the walls of the now functionless buildings, she likens to those of human skin, and goes on to emphasise the importance of sound in her film as an imaginative equivalent to language. The interview ends with a continuation of the soundtrack of ‘Out of Blue’.

William Furlong: Zarina, I’ve just seen your film here in Documenta 11 called ‘Out of Blue’. I found it an extraordinarily poignant and moving film. It was visually very stunning but of course the aesthetics are perhaps misleading because those buildings and interiors evoked the sense of activities that were probably extremely painful. Perhaps you could give me an over view of this work?

Zarina Bhimji: I suppose there are five scenes in the film and the first scene starts with the landscape. The reason why I was interested in the landscape was because I wanted to explore landscape as a painting, particularly Turner paintings. Is it (Kaspar?) the German painter, I was very struck by his work as well. I wanted to use landscape as a metaphor on several levels; the immediate level was that I wanted to talk about the British relationship to Uganda and I wanted to express the British space that Uganda held, the colonialism, through landscape. Another level was the connection that I felt to the landscape and the way I felt betrayed with what happened, as one feels betrayed when there’s an earthquake. It wasn’t the betrayal of the particular person but the fact that the earthquake happens. The second scene is prison and police cells; it started because as a young person I had an idea of what happened in police cells from adult conversations that I heard. made. It was my way of researching into human rights issues and prison spaces. I went into the houses because I was very interested to know how Indians ended up in Africa, and the madness in the way that the architecture is very Indian in (Ginga?) which is very much like (Butch?), a part of India that my family come from. The scene ends at Entebbe airport. That’s basically the basis of the film.

WF: Perhaps you can elaborate a little bit, on the interiors of buildings. I presume they were military barracks, rooms that almost scream out their history.

ZB: Well that was the weird thing, that when I went to those spaces they seemed very ordinary and I wanted to try and express what I thought had gone on. It was more to do with gestures, body, the power, the powerlessness or the feeling of being bad in those spaces.

WF: I think the work actually leaves those spaces open. There’s an atmosphere of tension and previous terror in the film which I found really strange because it was so powerful, and yet it also very poetic.

ZB: Very early on in the film I made a decision that I hoped the film could be shown anywhere and I thought about the way one uses language and that sometimes words can’t say it and that the world of sound can say it better. I’m very interested in skin and the way skin can be recorded with film and the luxury of the warmth of skin. I’d like to use it at some stage.

WF: When you say skin you mean the surface of skin and the colour of skin?

ZB: Yes, I mean certain skin has an atmosphere. It’s like walls, for me, different walls felt like skins. I suppose body skin is very similar to walls in a way, because in a house the wall covers it, like skin, you don’t see the inside. I suppose atmospheres and sounds affect you, like when I went into Idi Amin’s torture chamber, I think built by Germans, and how history changes things and people treat it as something else. I was also interested in what happens after a war and terror, when things begin to get back to normality, what happens to their grief. I saw people on the streets between 1972 – 74 and I knew that things weren’t right but I also knew that I had to remain sane in order to get through that period. I was only eight then, but to smell dead bodies on the ground and just left was quite disturbing; I didn’t know what one did. There are no words for it and I suppose the basis of my wanting to go into those prison spaces was to see if I could hear something else.

WF: I’m just curious to know how you walked that very fine line between making a very powerful political statement, but also a very imaginative resonant statement?

ZB: I felt several things in a way. I felt I owed Uganda a responsibility because I don’t think what happened is particular to Uganda. It’s easy to blame a Third World country so I didn’t want to make it that straightforward; this film could easily have been about somebody mourning the loss of their garden; it’s about loss I wanted to give space for those feelings. I didn’t want people to feel guilty or bad. I don’t think that that helps in a way.

WF: Do you think that the more you know about the context and the motivation for a piece the better? One very poignant sequence was the sequence of the aeroplane leaving; the skid marks of the tyres on the runway the decaying airport which was, in previous times, part of a repressive regime.

ZB: I think that scene was the most difficult for me to film because I was trying to work out how to show the number of Indians, 50,000, who left to come to the UK. The real reason I chose to use that scene was to show the contrast between the Ugandan Asians leaving and being photographed at Entebbe Airport, and their arrival in the UK; what they looked liked, the newspaper photographs. Those two airports somehow expressed something for me. People escaped torture and came into another country, to safety, is somehow quite amazing. Britain is contradictory like that, because I’ve been listening to a lot of asylum discussion and the anxiety about that, but in many ways there is, I think, generosity.

WF: Can I just ask you now to place this work within the context of your practice as a whole? Does this represent a new departure or is it a drawing together of the kinds of concerns that you’ve been exploring for many years?

ZB: In a way a departure and in a way a drawing together of concerns; I’ve never worked with sound before, I’ve always been interested in writing but somehow with sound you can be more atmospheric. You can in writing but it’s dependent on being able to read the English language whereas I wanted the work to reach people who don’t read and write English. Sound is universal and also quite powerful and atmospheric. Sound is used a lot to heal and move people, it’s multi-layered; it’s not definite. I don’t know why I was interested in bad sounds, crow sounds, gun sounds, but I liked them and I listened to those sounds and looked at the picture, and at some stage they came together. A bit like cooking I suppose, you get different ingredients and put them together. But actually the sound is 90% as far as I am concerned in the film because without sound it doesn’t hold in the same way.