Amalia Ulman’s Sordid Scandal exists both as a video work and as a live performance that mixes fiction, a confessional style, academic or scientific language and historical anecdotes. Structured as a powerpoint presentation, in which Ulman narrates the process of shooting her film El Planeta, the video grasps the repercussions of the fictional on the real. Its script weaves, in a comedic style, dark personal memories with the technicalities of filming in a small town, restraining grants systems, globalist deceptions and the story of a criminal mother-daughter duo from Gijón.

Manuel Segade: Your video took my brain for some weeks. I was giving a lecture yesterday and I could notice that when the lights were going for me to start after the thanksgiving initial moment, I was using the way you speak, as if a contagious seduction virus was taking over my voice. It remembered me a Federico Garcia Lorca effect: “Tu nombre envenena mis sueños”.
I love the reference to Lorca. I’m a big fan of the concept of duende.

My first question relates to that way of locution: your voice produces an engagement with something personal and affective (a forced intimacy) and, at the same time, in moments when it repeats things in Spanish or makes inserts in Spanish that come from sayings or proverbs seems to make a mockery of the need of English as a colonial standard.

Your work has always been a critique of representational forces and the possibilities of reality as fictional structure. There is a layered realism in the film that goes incredibly sophisticated this in this film. Are they aesthetics of administration reformulated?

Amalia Ulman: Yes, I’ve always been very interested in fiction, manipulation and propaganda, in taking formats known for their legitimacy and subverting them. It all started in 2012, when I was invited to give my first artist talk. I realised that the PowerPoint presentation itself was a visual medium that didn’t have to be holding my thoughts on art but could become art itself too. And since then it is part of my practice to create these pieces that are supposedly explanatory but in reality are still abstract and poetic. I like this format because usually, when I’m able to perform the presentations live (in costume and a clicker to move through the slides), the obscure script leaves enough clues for people to remain engaged but also fills their mind with questions that can get addressed directly during a Q&A. Therefore, the “lectures” take place during the Q&A.

Also, what you are pointing out about the specific way of locution, is something I started doing as a way to be subversive against the manners women are supposed to act to be taken seriously. Women tend to lower the pitch of their voices in certain environments to be respected so instead I mixed elements of professionality with a narration in baby-voice. I guess I was an early precursor of the current “bimbofication of culture” trends, haha.

MS: The film relates to the production of a movie of yours, El Planeta, is it conceived as a sort of twisted “making of…”? From the title, I get a sense of everything that I can feel in this movie too, in ambitious layers impossible to grasp in a first view.

AU: Something that people have appreciated in El Planeta is how it seems that nothing is happening but then it all makes sense in the end. This allows the audience to rewatch the film multiple times and enjoy it. I like this kind of cinema so I’m happy to have achieved it. For me, cinema isn’t only a means to move a story forward but also a way of creating beauty, of crafting sensual scenes that are pleasurable for the sake of it.

Also the film itself includes a reflection on film as fetish-maker. It made me think about the possibilities of PowerPoint not just a mockery of business presentation or conventional simplified methodologies of education, but as a perfected scopic regime of desire.

I always steer away from mockery. People seem to think that I’m always mocking something even when my interests are sincere. I think it is because my tastes are somewhat unusual, so many people think they can’t possibly be honest. I’m just very curious and I like exercising my own aesthetic empathy by constantly asking myself: why do I find this unattractive, boring or disgusting? Why am I repelled by something? Is it because I’ve been conditioned culturally to feel this way? I guess that’s a way of addressing colonialism or the eurocentric aesthetics/ dialogue, because that’s how I was educated as an Argentinean, under those ideals. But I also like exploring aesthetic trends that are specific to other places, let’s say China, and see the world through that lens too.

Within that framework I also ask why certain ways to present oneself or one’s ideas tend to hold a certain allure of legitimacy, and of course a big issue in this particular case is education, and why certain people or institutions hold the power to alter other people’s mindsets. A huge learning curve for me as an artist was to get rid of all the knowledge I had acquired at Saint Martins. When I was a student, I took all that information very seriously and thought of it as complete and absolute truths which now I consider more like opinions by very specific individuals and not something to be taken too literally.

MS: Finally, I would love you to share a bit about emotions. I love the way the film has manipulated me and how its technologies of telling got installed as a formula I would love to imitate… but also I love the sound and vision complex system of references that punctuate the tales in a very effective way. Your film is emotionally sticky.

AU: Using my intuition and making art in an almost trance-like state is related to what I was saying before about unlearning certain systems and structures that were imposed on me in art school, where ar making was closer to the fabrication of luxury objects accompanied by an essay/press release. Desire creates the universe. While I veer away from trauma-porn and self-masturbatory exhibitionism, I try to not question too much my impulses and visions. El Planeta, for example, was made from a raw feeling and a desire for experimenting with a new language, cinematic language in this case. Sordid Scandal, as an “explanation”, came many months later, but as such, it resembles more a fleeting feeling of “Eureka!” that made sense during a particular moment but is also not the only reason behind the making of the movie and shouldn’t be taken as a guideline but more as a feeling, a gesture, a scribble.

Credits

Courtesy of Amalia Ulman and Tate Modern