Two major recorded events structure Black Magic Marker: the voice over of the poet and reggae promoter Henry W. Targowski, who recalls his visit to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Black Ark studio in Jamaica, and the visual depiction of Lee Perry's current house in Switzerland. Together, these two situations weave a narrative in which history and present appear inseparable.

Xavier García Bardón: What was the starting point of this work? Where did your interest for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry come from and how did your work develop?

Dani Gal: At the time I was working on a project called Chanting Down Babylon, which had to do with the Israeli flight crash in Amsterdam in 1992 and its associative connections to Rastafarian culture. One of the aspects of the crash that fuelled the conspirative imagination was the mysterious disappearance of the aircraft’s black box. The black box was most likely stolen by the Mossad but that brought me to think about the Black Ark which was “mysteriously” burned. I thought about the Black Ark studio being a kind of a giant black box or a black box being a miniature sound studio and started to explore Lee Perry’s story.

XGB: In Black Magic Marker, your recent visit to Perry's studio in Switzerland (a place he sometimes refers to as the White Ark) echoes the story told by reggae enthusiast, concrete poet and cyber visionary Henry W. Targowski, remembering his own visit to Perry’s legendary Black Ark studio in Jamaica in 1979, not long before Perry burned it down. The narrative seems to be the magic key here, connecting in a seemingly coherent flow two distinct sources of information but also two situations separated by 30 years and more than 8000 km.

DG: The narrative is important in my work on the level of speech, of an oral account. It is a starting point to many projects. In Black Magic Marker there is an interesting story but it is also about speech. Lee Perry uses language in original ways; his word games, spoken or written on the wall and the letter system that he wears are part of his world.

Targowski is mentioned in David Katz’s biography of Lee Perry. I wanted to document the experience of the Black Ark from someone who was there, first hand, and I found him. I met Targowski in London in a head shop on Portobello Road where he worked at the time. It ended up being much more interesting than I thought it would be because of Henk’s ability to tell a story so well. He also brought the magazine he made about Perry at the time, and the text he is reading in the bar scene is a transcript of recordings he made of Perry’s blabbing. Henk read it so nicely that it brought the poetry quality of the text out.

From the first seconds of the video there is a gap of representation – by means of sound and image. One hears a story about a trip to Jamaica but sees a journey in snowy Switzerland. Later, when the viewer hears more of the story and listens to Perry himself explaining his systems, the gap closes but a much stranger picture arises – the picture of Perry’s world which he relocated and reconstructed after he burned it down in Kingston.

XGB: If you read the anecdotes but also Perry’s own comments about the history of his studio, the Black Ark wasn't just a workspace where great music was produced. It also was and still is a fascinating environment, a space where Perry magically connected technology with every life form: vegetal, animal, mineral, spiritual. Rocks and pebbles, photographs, CDs, coconut, banana and ganja plants, words written on the walls, a plastic human skull, liquids and smoke all intertwine in “a huge collage, or montage of objects and things […] a sculpture, a sculptural environment”, as Targowski puts it. In this complex and organic system elaborated following cryptic rules, Perry performs his own invented rituals. All this is beautifully captured in your film, which offers a tentative understanding of Perry’s system of thought, one that seems largely articulated by superstitions and conspiracy theories. How did you enter his world and how did you and Perry work together?

DG: The conspiracy part interested me at the time because of Chanting Down Babylon, the above-mentioned project, but it was mostly Perry's spiritual ideas in relation to sound that interested me, such as putting his stereo on an open Bible, blowing ganja on the tape or connecting the palm tree with a cable to capture its sound. These things are of course connected, since conspiracy theories deal with making unusual connections, and Perry has sculptural ideas that I wanted to put in relation to the art context – he connects objects in an unexpected way in order to create new things. I was also fascinated by Perry's way of collecting belief systems. It seems like he embraces every possible belief system. When we arrived to the studio I did not have to talk much, it was about listening to him and trying to follow his thought. In Black Magic Marker Perry’s beautiful ideas about sound and language are documented together with Targowski’s voice mediating between the past and the present, between the memory and the document.

XGB: Like other of your works, Black Magic Marker focuses on a specific moment in time, one that stands on the border between history and myth, wrapped in mystery by the very fact that it has remained relatively undocumented, opening the door to all sorts of re-enactments, reconstructions and speculations. Can you elaborate on what seems to be a recurring interest of yours for the blank pages of history and for restaging what hasn't been recorded?

DG: Those blind spots and undocumented events can give the opportunity to bridge the gap between the events and what has remained from them in memory. I am interested in looking at this gap and understanding the construction of collective memory mainly through the means of image and sound and their relations. A small, sometimes banal event can put the “big history” in a new light if looked at closely. In the case of Perry it is about the gap between Targowski’s personal account of the visit and my own visit. His memory and my re-enactment of it with Perry himself.

Credits

Featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Henry W. Targowski

Camera: Carlotta Steinemann

Sound Design: Zohar Bonnie

Special thanks to Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth