Julian Zugazagoitia: The possible narrative of Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles is given by its title and linear approach: a ride in a taxi along Broadway in New York, from 228th Street to its end near Wall Street. It could be defined as an urban road movie. Yet what is more surprising is that it does not attempt to document in a straightforward manner that journey. It is more of an impressionistic approach, more abstract and random at times. How do you integrate randomness, how much did you want to control what was being filmed where the camera zoomed or made focus?

Solange Fabião: There is no need for control. It’s the opposite, that freedom of the subjective eye works collectively with randomness to produce this portrait. The intention of the title is to let one know that there is a physical bracket, 17.3 miles — a diagonal through Manhattan — and a relative duration for crossing the island. Somehow space in this case limits time. . . That linearity may be time-space; the film is a continuous path, shot in one take, with no editing. Velocity is the motivator of this video. The decisions made are intuitively; there is no time for any conscious choice. Movement stimulates the act of search, leading to the occurrence of this more fragmented and abstract flux. As the taxi goes down Broadway its acceleration interacts with the camera, manipulation that in countermovements capture instants. At some point this dynamic brings velocity to zero (graspable information). De-acceleration the flow of the ever-present city and that act of search form that accumulated reality.

There is a kind of dispersion through this manipulation of the camera. Even though the course is contained in that linearity, multiple stories sometimes start more than once and then vanish, ripping that linearity. The collected images change significantly through this process. Subjects, colors, and shapes appear in a chaotic surprise and abandon us.

JZ: This work is one of your first videos. The other videos that I have seen also deal in a way with the notion of time, of acceleration, with a sense of a fragmented reality. Nevertheless the others seemed to contain a more straightforward narrative. Can you explain how the first video in this fashion articulates a link to this recent work?

SF: Most of my videos are free of a plot, they are formed by the event of a passage. Duration 3:5 (1999) is the first video where I responded to the phenomena of speed and which in turn informed the realization of Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles.

Duration 3:5 was a discovery, a form of fluctuating between movement and moment. This way of filming is autonomous. There was no need to create a narrative for the video but I decided to take that direction, to produce a narrative that structurally deals with a speed format. Duration 3:5 is a run through the desert of Tucson, Arizona. Due to the exploitation that is taking place in that area and in so many others, I decided to incorporate a scene of the transportation of a cactus (caught on film by accident) from its original site to a new and terminal habitat on the video. The contrast of the two scenes, that search for a moment in a disturbed desert and the constancy of the moving truck with a cactus, that calmness of the final scene contradicts our expectation of a relief through the lack of speed. It shocks us with the calm surprise of a missile-like cactus on a truck.

JZ: Chance seems to play an important role in the way you work. Especially in the Washer series. How would you compare Broadway or the two projects if at all?

SF: I am not sure if it is chance or rather a way of perceiving reality that is at play in regard to the two projects. The Washer as well as Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles are encounters (and at some point discoveries). Both are bringing to the surface something that we normally don’t see, surely in a very different form from one another.

The Washer series relates more to the realm of probability rather than to chance. Today, after photographing over 100 washers in so many different cities, I am convinced that they are there and exist as a post-life. That discovery, the one of that small element that has served its function and now hovers over the streets, that fact is brought out to our consciousness. After that recognition any possible yet unexpected encounter with a washer turns out to be a direct link to an artistic field. On Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles I wrote the equation time + chance = sequence, a reference to patterns that may take place. It is probability. It is chance.

Another aspect that both series share is their urban context where the issue of "global/local" is a common theme. The Washer images are like fingerprints of cities with all their peculiarities condensed in a square foot. Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles is the first video of an ongoing project titled Transitio that embodies a "city within a city."

Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles and Washer stimulate the perception of poetics within the world.

In a more distant form both series call for simultaneity and accumulation. A passage, a line or a circle, a pencil mark, an imprint, fragments are all accumulations. Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles is dynamic, is ephemeral and in mutation. Washer is iconic, is material and long-lasting.

JZ: When you filmed Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles, did you already have in your mind the sculptural element that was going to be part of the presentation/projection? How does this two-sided element play in the understanding/appreciation of the work? What do you foresee as the result of that double-sided reading?

SF: Actually, I didn’t have anything in mind. But the possibility of showing the video as a simple projection wasn’t satisfying me. I had the feeling that the viewing of the video, the way of experiencing it, should have been similar to the way it was produced, on the one hand random and on the other systematic. There was the desire to add formal and spatial aspects to the video and with it a certain aesthetic pleasure. I wanted to create a sculpture that would allow the video to be seen on two sides. So I created this DVSculpture, which is based on the idea of a "Double Spatiality." This freestanding object creates two perspectives for the video that are interconnected and yet independent. Rather than an object, this "anti-sculpture" defines space. The sculpture is a structure in which one side is a front/rear screen and the other one is this "reshaping." In this case I chose to redefine and reorient the viewing field to a crossing, a link between two streams, condensation of flatness and depth in opposition to the multidimensional character of the video. My fascination with the diagonal, the diagonally crossing of Manhattan, stream of intersections, streams in intersection, a line that in my opinion is an expression of movement. With the "X" shape in combination with the video dynamics I was looking for a new type of symmetry, of dynamic and meaningful light.

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