Alternatives to Memories

By Marion Hohlfeldt

Excerpt p. 2

Translated from the French

The experience of a confined space is also at work in Laura Waddington’s video Cargo (2002). Invited to participate in the project On the Waterfront, commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the artist decided to travel aboard a cargo ship that was transporting containers to the Middle East. For six weeks, she shared the daily life of around thirty sailors of different backgrounds – Romanian, Indian, Ukrainian, Filipino – most of whom were not allowed to leave the ship during the voyage. “And they were living like prisoners, without the papers to go ashore,” the voice-over tells us. “It was as if we lived the world with the curtains drawn.” So much so that, even though the movement here is physical, the artist produces in her film narrative more of a mental journey, woven into this interstice of suspended time, conveying the feeling of abandonment that she bears witness to. As Bouchra Khalili points out, we always recognise in her work the need to “accompany the world in its movement, even at its most impenetrable.”¹⁵ Filmed with a small, sometimes hidden camera, she accompanies the involuntary retreat of these sea workers for whom movement is rarely a choice. “I wonder if you’d believe me if I told you, some of them hadn’t been paid? It was possible to stay like that for months, waiting for your money or for some outside organisation to intervene.” From these clandestine images, she creates a splendid portrait of these men, while the editing and the voice-over, as often in her work, carry the story through weightless images, pushing colours and time to the brink of abstraction. For, in constant negotiation with reality, “Her territory begins at the edges of the visible, where absence persists in maintaining itself for a moment longer.”¹⁶

Footnotes

• Bouchra Khalili, The Pain of Seeing: The Videos of Laura Waddington in The 51st Oberhausen Short Film Festival Catalogue p.170

• Ibid p.171

Source