Carlos Casas “Vucca”
HD video, stereo sound, 15:17
Introduced by Jade de Cock de Rameyen
Year: 2016
At the tip of Italy’s heel, lies la Vucca de lu puzzu, the gaping “mouth of the well”. Vucca (2016) is the intimate result of the artist’s field recordings inside the cave. Saline and pluvial water merge through an underwater tunnel, refracted sunlight challenges obscurity, while the rock stubbornly resists the passages of civilizations. The multilayered soundtrack and visuals echo the dizziness of the space. Casas’ aural environments are hypnotic and highly immersive. They often speak of spiritual or intercultural encounters, always critical ones, dangerously flirting with the limits of thought. Here, in Vucca, the milieu becomes sensuously messy. Our connection to it is both endangering and endangered. Nowhere else do we experience how risky it is to attune to a landscape. After all, has fiat lux ever reached the edge of our world?
Jade de Cock de Rameyen: Vucca was made during a residency in Santa Maria di Leuca, an Italian village located at the very end of Europe, where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet. You were investigating the idea of remoteness, a recurrent motive in your work.
Carlos Casas: Puglia and especially the region of Salento and Capo di Leuca is one of the most resilient areas of Italy, in terms of transport and access. Only one road leads you there and you have the feeling of being protected from the rest of Italy, which is a bit more exploited. What really struck me was the geological quality of the region; the rocks, the way the soil not only defined the coast but also the people. The spaccapietre were a very elusive image that was coming back to me all the time, from the early listening of Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella’s field recording expedition of 1954. In some ways it is still a defining image of the region for me.
JDC: The spaccapietre?
CC: The coast and most of the land in the region were shaped by its hard-bitten habitants. Stone by stone, the land was cleaned in order to build houses, plant crops, keep herds. The spaccapietre slowly changed the landscape, and in some cases tamed it by the hard labour of their hammer and pick.
While travelling around, I was introduced to different quarries or cavas, human-made and natural ones, which populate the landscape of Salento. I was fascinated by some of them, so I started filming, recording sound and eventually even performing in one of them (CAVA). When I visited Vucca de lu puzzu for the first time, I was blown away by its stature and archaic character. As I walked inside, I really had the vision of the genesis or Charles Darwin’s pond–a sort of Fiat lux as you mention, but in a more biogenic way. I could imagine these early molecules moving from cold and warm environments and mingling with light particles to create early life forms.
JDC:A speculative vision of an alternative origin of the species?
CC: Exactly, sitting there contemplating the union of the rain and sea waters, and the shimmering light arriving from the sun through the seafloor reflection, I also couldn’t help but think of Plato’s cave. I would imagine early humans escaping from wild beasts, hiding in Vucca and enjoying a proto-cinema experience.
JDC: In times of wounded earth and vulnerable livings, your work honours what is on the verge of disappearance. Vucca is perhaps the most autobiographical of your films: you experienced first-hand the fragility of your own existence. The walls of the cave are now imprinted on your skull. What a plot twist for a field-recorder!
CC: Yes, it is interesting that you say it is autobiographical, and it really is; but in the most abstract and personal way possible, like an ancestral selfie with millions of years of delay. After my fall in the cave, it took some time for me to look back at the material. I had a Cranial trauma and PTS that lasted several months. When I finished the film a year later, I understood that it was also an exorcism or healing process; a way to overcome that physical trauma and near death experience. But in a way I didn’t want the film to be about that, but instead about the genesis cave, as well as a rebirth of sorts. I wanted it to be as open as possible, a portrait of that first cave. A very encyclopedic one in a way, but again most of my fieldworks are–descriptions or filmic archetypes of places, ideas or states.
JDC: In your installations, images are often overtaken by the strong affective soundscape. The screen performs as a cue. Soon, sound takes over the narration, people close their eyes.
CC: Sound has always been essential in how I see my surroundings and how I transcribe them. Affect is normally triggered by sound and image performs as a cue or support for transfiguration. There are always a series of layers that converge in the soundtrack. Our mind is structured like frequency ranges, we feel the lower frequencies in different ways than higher pitches. It is important for me that a film captures all that spectrum, whether half of it is subliminal does not matter, as long as it gets there to affect us. In Vucca I used the sounds of my MRI scan, field recordings as well as radio frequencies and hydrophone sounds gathered in different parts of the cave. There is a cassette release of the sessions I made in the cave. It could be a sort of an accompaniment of the film. In my last film, Cemetery (2019), I have dealt with the infrasound and elephant communication recordings as new ways to affect through sound. Spectators are really forced to close their eyes in darkness and navigate through sound to imagine their own elephant graveyard.
JDC: The processual existence of your projects is extremely consistent with the state of artists’ moving-image today: when each work evolves according to the contingencies of exhibition (space, technologies at hand, budget or local music scene), it also has infinite possible “reincarnations”. The perspective of film having a unique body is lost.
CC: Since I started my ongoing project Avalanche (2009-), I stopped believing in film as a closed entity, encapsulated in one single form or way of seeing it. For me, film is bodyless, contextless, but with a specific form that can mutate and adapt to a place, a public, a moment; to all the capricious changes of our social structures. I am fascinated by site-specificity because it uses space in new ways, still unexplored. For instance, how architecture or a spatial setting can transform a narrative or audiovisual experience, how they echo and affect sensorial apprehension.
This is also why I believe live editing is the future of cinema, for the possibilities it offers. Editing live for an audience of one or a thousand, not in an automated manner or AI programmed but more as a communal experience, even a spiritual one. Live cinema resists the industrial entertainment default machinery. Cinema is still in its infancy: while we keep on changing technological supports or the tapestry in the cinema halls we still need to reinvent the actual grammar of the experience.
“But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia& phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.” (Letter from Charles Darwin To J. D. Hooker, 1 February, 1871)
Credits
Vucca is part of a trilogy of films developed during a residency at Ramdom, Lastation in Capo di Leuca, Salento, Puglia, Italy.
Carlos Casas “Capo di Leuca Fieldworks” (Fieldworks#19) © 2016
Thanks to Paolo Mele, Luca Coclite, Laura Perrone, Domenico Licheli and everybody at Lastation and Ramdom
HD video, stereo sound, 15:17
Introduced by Jade de Cock de Rameyen
Carlos Casas “Vucca”
Year: 2016
At the tip of Italy’s heel, lies la Vucca de lu puzzu, the gaping “mouth of the well”. Vucca (2016) is the intimate result of the artist’s field recordings inside the cave. Saline and pluvial water merge through an underwater tunnel, refracted sunlight challenges obscurity, while the rock stubbornly resists the passages of civilizations. The multilayered soundtrack and visuals echo the dizziness of the space. Casas’ aural environments are hypnotic and highly immersive. They often speak of spiritual or intercultural encounters, always critical ones, dangerously flirting with the limits of thought. Here, in Vucca, the milieu becomes sensuously messy. Our connection to it is both endangering and endangered. Nowhere else do we experience how risky it is to attune to a landscape. After all, has fiat lux ever reached the edge of our world?
Jade de Cock de Rameyen: Vucca was made during a residency in Santa Maria di Leuca, an Italian village located at the very end of Europe, where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet. You were investigating the idea of remoteness, a recurrent motive in your work.
Carlos Casas: Puglia and especially the region of Salento and Capo di Leuca is one of the most resilient areas of Italy, in terms of transport and access. Only one road leads you there and you have the feeling of being protected from the rest of Italy, which is a bit more exploited. What really struck me was the geological quality of the region; the rocks, the way the soil not only defined the coast but also the people. The spaccapietre were a very elusive image that was coming back to me all the time, from the early listening of Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella’s field recording expedition of 1954. In some ways it is still a defining image of the region for me.
JDC: The spaccapietre?
CC: The coast and most of the land in the region were shaped by its hard-bitten habitants. Stone by stone, the land was cleaned in order to build houses, plant crops, keep herds. The spaccapietre slowly changed the landscape, and in some cases tamed it by the hard labour of their hammer and pick.
While travelling around, I was introduced to different quarries or cavas, human-made and natural ones, which populate the landscape of Salento. I was fascinated by some of them, so I started filming, recording sound and eventually even performing in one of them (CAVA). When I visited Vucca de lu puzzu for the first time, I was blown away by its stature and archaic character. As I walked inside, I really had the vision of the genesis or Charles Darwin’s pond–a sort of Fiat lux as you mention, but in a more biogenic way. I could imagine these early molecules moving from cold and warm environments and mingling with light particles to create early life forms.
JDC:A speculative vision of an alternative origin of the species?
CC: Exactly, sitting there contemplating the union of the rain and sea waters, and the shimmering light arriving from the sun through the seafloor reflection, I also couldn’t help but think of Plato’s cave. I would imagine early humans escaping from wild beasts, hiding in Vucca and enjoying a proto-cinema experience.
JDC: In times of wounded earth and vulnerable livings, your work honours what is on the verge of disappearance. Vucca is perhaps the most autobiographical of your films: you experienced first-hand the fragility of your own existence. The walls of the cave are now imprinted on your skull. What a plot twist for a field-recorder!
CC: Yes, it is interesting that you say it is autobiographical, and it really is; but in the most abstract and personal way possible, like an ancestral selfie with millions of years of delay. After my fall in the cave, it took some time for me to look back at the material. I had a Cranial trauma and PTS that lasted several months. When I finished the film a year later, I understood that it was also an exorcism or healing process; a way to overcome that physical trauma and near death experience. But in a way I didn’t want the film to be about that, but instead about the genesis cave, as well as a rebirth of sorts. I wanted it to be as open as possible, a portrait of that first cave. A very encyclopedic one in a way, but again most of my fieldworks are–descriptions or filmic archetypes of places, ideas or states.
JDC: In your installations, images are often overtaken by the strong affective soundscape. The screen performs as a cue. Soon, sound takes over the narration, people close their eyes.
CC: Sound has always been essential in how I see my surroundings and how I transcribe them. Affect is normally triggered by sound and image performs as a cue or support for transfiguration. There are always a series of layers that converge in the soundtrack. Our mind is structured like frequency ranges, we feel the lower frequencies in different ways than higher pitches. It is important for me that a film captures all that spectrum, whether half of it is subliminal does not matter, as long as it gets there to affect us. In Vucca I used the sounds of my MRI scan, field recordings as well as radio frequencies and hydrophone sounds gathered in different parts of the cave. There is a cassette release of the sessions I made in the cave. It could be a sort of an accompaniment of the film. In my last film, Cemetery (2019), I have dealt with the infrasound and elephant communication recordings as new ways to affect through sound. Spectators are really forced to close their eyes in darkness and navigate through sound to imagine their own elephant graveyard.
JDC: The processual existence of your projects is extremely consistent with the state of artists’ moving-image today: when each work evolves according to the contingencies of exhibition (space, technologies at hand, budget or local music scene), it also has infinite possible “reincarnations”. The perspective of film having a unique body is lost.
CC: Since I started my ongoing project Avalanche (2009-), I stopped believing in film as a closed entity, encapsulated in one single form or way of seeing it. For me, film is bodyless, contextless, but with a specific form that can mutate and adapt to a place, a public, a moment; to all the capricious changes of our social structures. I am fascinated by site-specificity because it uses space in new ways, still unexplored. For instance, how architecture or a spatial setting can transform a narrative or audiovisual experience, how they echo and affect sensorial apprehension.
This is also why I believe live editing is the future of cinema, for the possibilities it offers. Editing live for an audience of one or a thousand, not in an automated manner or AI programmed but more as a communal experience, even a spiritual one. Live cinema resists the industrial entertainment default machinery. Cinema is still in its infancy: while we keep on changing technological supports or the tapestry in the cinema halls we still need to reinvent the actual grammar of the experience.
“But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia& phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.” (Letter from Charles Darwin To J. D. Hooker, 1 February, 1871)
Credits
Vucca is part of a trilogy of films developed during a residency at Ramdom, Lastation in Capo di Leuca, Salento, Puglia, Italy.
Carlos Casas “Capo di Leuca Fieldworks” (Fieldworks#19) © 2016
Thanks to Paolo Mele, Luca Coclite, Laura Perrone, Domenico Licheli and everybody at Lastation and Ramdom