Contadora, 40km off the coast from Panama City, played host to the former Iranian royal family in exile during 1979-80. This abstract film essay recounts island life from the unobserved observances of the bodyguard, José de Jesús Martínez (Chuchú). Philosophy, mathematics and logic inform his viewpoint while history remains a matter of the heart.

Magali Arriola: You’ve had a long-time interest in the Shah of Iran, who is a central character in Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad. The Shah’s history is quite extraordinary: mastering, settling, fleeing, relocating, migrating and downfall… a history in which many minor stories and secondary characters cross paths to play a major role in the contemporary political landscape. Where did this interest of yours begin?

Michael Stevenson: I remember when you first asked me to participate in the 8th Panama Biennial, a project that dealt specifically in Panamanian history, I of course responded enthusiastically… but soon after I remember also asking myself “how can I make work in someone else’s backyard that is both important and meaningful, which is to say, how can I make work without a true first person relation to the subject?” This then became my working problem. As you know, I was raised in New Zealand in the 1970s but into a very stringent brand of global, evangelical christianity, you might call it pentecostal, it was certainly fundamentalist. In this anomalous world my parents – its conflicted enforcers - were in turn an anomaly: they were also my high school art teachers. This ‘heady’ mix rendered my world then as the pursuit of both formalism – which brings meaning to things (that’s one of its enduring attractions), and its progression, which at the time I saw as eschatological… so enter the Antichrist. For the evangelicals/pentecostals formalism is a roadmap set in written scripture, therefore it’s a matter of understanding the prophecies - the structure – and applying it to the complexities of current affairs. It was with this ideological bias that we viewed the 6 o’clock news… a prime example of the terror of convergent thinking. My practice has always been a struggle with this… the need or desire to see pre-destination, to take on the coincidental, and to place meaning there. Aesthetically we were bereft, but this was part of a constant urge to be contemporary and in part this lay in the interpretation of current events as signals for the unfolding of end times. Being set apart, yet (paradoxically) still for this moment here on earth, was our perpetual condition and – believe me – it is utterly exhausting to remain in a state of constant readiness to leave the planet. The future we were informed – was autocratic rule: terrifying, global autocratic rule, so naturally for any true believer the preference was to leave the planet, though there was debate as to how much of this one would, could, even should, be permitted to escape.

This was, if you like our Science Fiction, (of course ours denied both the sciences and fiction in spite of the fact that cover illustrations from any given book on the subject consistently confirmed this genre). We saw ourselves as dealing in ‘fact’ and ensuing autocracy and so, perhaps not so strangely, there was a natural gravitation toward the tyrants of the day. We used these despots as examples or role models for how we believed our future would be (which is quite an assumption). The pantheon of unelected leaders of the time are therefore important to me for this reason. Their existence being a symbiotic necessity in the maintenance of my belief system (they, unknowingly chose me!)

MA: Indeed, Introducción… puts into practice an alternate way of narrating, not only history but stories, in which interestingly probability, and perhaps even chance, seem to play a major role in defining what we could call the Fate of history. Could you say more about this approach to narration that seems to be lead by a planned fortuitousness?
And about your role as narrator in a work that plays on some kind of tension between a solitary card game with no witnesses, and the account of a specific episode that involved many historical characters?

MS: As it happened, the central character of the film was to be a bodyguard; classically this role has a pre-disposition that I for one saw as similar to the working problem I mentioned earlier, or at least parallel with it, (the ambivalence born from the state of being ever present yet ever absent). Next I wanted to know more of this bodyguard… one of the first things I learned was that he was also a mathematician and that one of his mathematical interests was probability. He had written a book on the subject, published by the military regime: Introducción a la teoría de la probabilidad (from whence the film title is derived). Probability often deals in the hypothetical, but here, via the bodyguard, via biography, theory and practice come together in fascinating ways. Stepping away from the all embracing view of events discussed earlier, here was a way to confront this view with what is called, ‘chance as the motivational relic in the writing of history.’

Going further into the subject of probability, the bodyguard begins with set theory, and therein hints at a black hole of philosophic proportion - an oversight – the very downfall of rational thought! The rectangle drawn in each and every Venn diagram (namely the Set of all Sets, the Universal Set, or simply “U”) must, according to the theory, include everything - quite an assumption. Bertrand Russell, for one, enquired: “if it includes everything, then does it also include itself?” (hence the constant game of inclusion and exclusion in the film). But beyond implications mathematical, Russell’s question also implies something else, something biographical, since to include oneself is biography.

Credits

Camera: Volker Gläser
Sound: Titus Maderlechner
Voice: Teresa Cosci
Script: Mark von Schlegell and Michael Stevenson

First shown Panama Art Biennial 8, The Sweet Burnt Smell of History, Panama City, 10.09.08 – 21.10.08 curator Magali Arriola

Courtesy of the artist.