Duncan Campbell: Pt I

PRECIPITATE RELATIONS
By Andrew Maerkle


It for Others (2013), 16 mm film, 54 min, black-and-white and color, 16:9, with sound. Courtesy Duncan Campbell and LUX, London.

Born in Dublin in 1972 and currently based in Glasgow, Duncan Campbell has won international acclaim for video works that draw from archival footage and materials to probe themes ranging from the specific politics, economics and social structure of Northern Ireland to broader reflections on otherness, difference and subjectivity. In 2014, Campbell was awarded the Turner Prize for his film It for Others (2013), made for the Scottish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which recreates footage from the 1953 film Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and also uses contemporary dance to interpret Karl Marx’s Capital.

The film was recently screened in Tokyo as part of the 7th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, 2015, where two other works were also presented: Make it New John (2009), investigating the legacy of the DeLorean Motor Company’s manufacturing plant established in Belfast in the early 1980s, was on view as part of the festival’s exhibition component, while Bernadette (2008), about the political activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, was also included in the screening program. On March 8, Campbell participated in a lounge talk at the festival’s Garden Hall venue. ART iT met with him following the talk to discuss his work in greater detail.

The 7th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, entitled “See You on the Planet,” ran from February 27 to March 8 of this year.

I.

ART iT: I’d like to start with a somewhat unusual question, in the sense that the context might be obvious to people who are more familiar with the situation. In Japan, when we think about the post-colonial, we tend to imagine Asia first and foremost, and then maybe Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and perhaps the Japanese experience of the US occupation after World War II. But looking at your work, and thinking about other aspects of Irish literature, it becomes apparent that there is a post-colonial context that applies to Ireland and Northern Ireland as well. To what extent do you consciously work with the idea of the post-colonial, or to what extent do you try to avoid falling into that framework when you use the materials that you do?

DC: If I’m trying to avoid falling into a post-colonial framework, I’m not doing a very good job! In It for Others (2013), there’s a whole colonial legacy, and post-colonial aftermath, which enters the film through my quotation of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s Statues Also Die, which was shot in 1953 at a time when France was still a colonial power in West Africa.
I’ve largely reprised the arguments Marker and Resnais made in relation to the objects they considered, but I also researched the journal that commissioned their film, Présence Africaine, to understand how the debate about cultural authority unfolded there. A lot of the intellectual momentum behind the film – in particular the idea of négritude as a quasi-spiritual attempt to define some kind of black cultural essence – also fed into independence struggles in West Africa at the time. There was a lot of optimism about these struggles. But, entering the 1970s, the reality of African nations becoming independent under the rule of indigenous elites, who in many cases weren’t much better than the colonial administrators they replaced, in turn generated a lot of pessimism.
There are some parallels between West Africa and the situation in Northern Ireland, but I wouldn’t want to labor the connections. For me, many of the problems with how power was administered in Northern Ireland apply also in the Republic of Ireland – the independent part. This boils down to economic factors. I’m very interested in figures like Bernadette Devlin and organizations like People’s Democracy because they recognized this and attempted to build an alternative politics that is not based on religious difference but rather on class solidarity. The reality of course, turned out somewhat differently, but the attempt was there and that’s what interests me.


Above: Bernadette (2008), film transferred to video, 38 min 10 sec, black-and-white and colour, 4:3, with sound. Below: Make it New John (2009), film transferred to video, 50 min, black-and-white and color, 4:3, with sound. Both: Courtesy Duncan Campbell and LUX, London.

ART iT: Does a post-colonial framework provide a bridge for establishing links between what’s happening in Northern Ireland and someplace else?

DC: Yes, in a way, but I wouldn’t want to overstate the importance of this framework in relation to the films I make. For example, much of the anti-colonial rhetoric that was employed by the Nationalists and Republicans in Northern Ireland was either dated or misplaced, and actually unhelpful in the situation. So it is a bridge, but you have to take each situation on its own merits. There are cultural parallels between West Africa and négritude and the Irish Celtic revival that happened toward the end of the 19th century, which attempted to discover an Irish essence. But in the Republic of Ireland, that revival became part of the church of state. That orthodoxy needed to be kicked against.
There is also economic domination and cultural colonialism, which work more subtly. In Northern Ireland and West Africa you have a nexus of post-colonial issues, but these now overlap with and are superseded in some cases by global trade agreements and, in the case of Northern Ireland, the role of the European Union.
These are all crosscurrents I was trying to chart with Make it New John (2009). I wanted to focus on what was happening in terms of the economic revolution that came about – at least in the Anglo-Saxon world – with Thatcher and Reagan, and the shift away from Keynesian, postwar economics. They just ripped it up and said, “It’s not working anymore. What we need is to allow people to become wealthy at the expense of social infrastructure.”
That’s the reality of the world we are now in. We’re still living in that moment. Obviously, there were historically specific issues to do with Northern Ireland that either directly or indirectly shaped the progress of the DeLorean factory, but it was the broader economic change that I wanted to focus on.

ART iT: It seems you handle the context differently in different works. In Bernadette (2008), for example, there was minimal information about the People’s Democracy movement. On the other hand, with Make it New John – maybe because the film deals with ongoing global issues – it’s easier to piece together the social context. Do you make such decisions based on subject matter, or do you feel your treatment of the context is relatively consistent?

DC: It’s something that comes out of the process of making the films. When I was making Bernadette, I had a long lead-in period for research, mainly because at the start I didn’t have the budget I felt was necessary to make the film. So I read as much as I could about Bernadette Devlin and the political and social context at the time, and I spoke to people she was involved with in People’s Democracy, but when it came to the archival material, the narrative I had built up in my mind wasn’t necessarily represented there – the two didn’t correlate. This was a bit of a crisis, and I had the choice of either trying to stretch the material to make it fit the narrative I already had, or making the film in response to the material I had found, which is what I decided to do.
I knew from the start that I didn’t want to add narration to contextualize or explain the events you see in the footage. The only thing I did was to take away sound in places and replace it with something else. Maybe that adds an atmosphere to the footage, but it doesn’t contextualize it in any way. There are a variety of reasons for this. For a certain generation of people, particularly in Britain and Ireland, but also in Europe as well as the US, Bernadette Devlin was an iconic figure, instantly recognizable, but she was also a polarizing figure. People either liked and identified with her, or they thought she was the embodiment of a politics they despised, and demonized her. So it was partly an attempt to disarm those preconceptions.


Both: Still from Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), 35 mm photographic negatives and 16 mm film transferred to digital video, 33 min. Courtesy Duncan Campbell and Rodeo, Istanbul/London.

ART iT: There are a number of themes in your response I’d like to further address, but first I’d like to ask about a film I feel sets the stage for your work over the past 10 years or so, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), which has a disembodied voice looking at photographic images taken from archives in Belfast. The highly neurotic and literary voiceover narration undermines itself as it goes along, and also in a sense undermines the images you present. I feel that the film’s concern with self, other and difference, and with how to relate subjectively to the material world, carries through to the works that followed. Do you see it as a keystone for your practice?

DC: Falls Burns Malone Fiddles is an important film for me. The whole time I lived and studied in Belfast was before the first IRA ceasefire. It was a bitter period, because although Republican paramilitaries were preparing for the ceasefire behind the scenes, they basically wanted to eliminate the opposition before agreeing to it. So they would shoot or blow up a Loyalist leader or two, and then there was a spiral of reprisals from the Loyalist side.
In that situation I felt it was difficult to address what was going on. There was and is a sophisticated political culture – like street murals and such – that already did that. I felt you couldn’t deal with these things as symbols, because they had real life or death consequences. You couldn’t treat it in a neutral or ironic way.
There is a media neurosis about life in Belfast or Northern Ireland which assumes that everything – all human life there – is reducible to the political conflict, or rather the media’s understanding of the conflict. This is a very limiting, reductive way of looking at the situation. The material I used came from community photographic archives, which were established as an intervention into that field of representation. The people behind the archives worked with young people, showed them how to use cameras, and sent them out to photograph their lives. Their archive is a really interesting document for that reason. The photographs are often accompanied by captions – sometimes poems – written by the photographers, and because the photographers were teenagers, they were full of self-doubt to begin with. That’s where the basis of doubt in the film came from, and the voiceover actually develops into this almost meta-narration. When you combine imagery with a narrator’s voice, there’s usually a benign, complementary, invisible relationship between the two, and I wanted to complicate those assumptions and make them an issue as well.
Going back to the question, in a very general way I think it does serve as a keystone because – whether it’s to do with Northern Ireland or not – I’m never easy taking any material at face value. This is especially true of archival material, which even before I get my hands on it is highly coded, constructed and partial. All images contain sedimentary layers of preference or prejudice, and it is important to me to make that explicit. So Falls Burns Malone Fiddles sets the tone in that respect.

Part II | III

Duncan Campbell: Precipitate Relations

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