An interview with Solange Fabião

on Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles

by Julian Zugazagoitia

SF: I am trained as a set designer and have studied architecture. The dynamics of the body in space is a natural thinking process for me. I like the theatrical evolution, the process of viewing an exhibition; there is a necessary balance in the way of presenting the work. Actually, it needs to be perfectly precise through the intuitive eye. I know when something is right. Galleries are definitely not just walls; the work breathes differently in different spaces.

JZ: The piece was presented along with a number of stills from the video. How would you define the relationship between the flux of the video and the motionless quality of the print? What are the qualities that you were looking for when selecting the stills from a million possibilities that constitute the Broadway portfolio?

SF: In the 2001 exhibition the combination of the stills and the video created a dialogue in relation to the space. I selected nineteen images in sequence, from uptown to downtown. In the gallery the images were displayed in a linear composition in which images and the empty spaces between them formed a continuum. That sequence of prints framed a circular path in the gallery, physically connecting the stills to the video installation.

The relation between the video and the still images brought to the viewer a sort of a joy. . . like a game, that relation gives to the viewer the opportunity to recognize those almost ungraspable moments of appearance on the screen. Captured through the interaction between the camera, the car movement and the outside, the stills turned out to be very unique and diversified in its themes. The selection among largely accumulated information is made intuitively.

JZ: This work was produced before the tragic events of September 11, 2001. It was presented to the public for the first time on September 20, 2001 at Paul Rodgers/9W in New York. How do you think the work’s reception has changed since those events? Do you feel that a new layer of meaning filters through today?

SF: The exhibition opened nine days after "September 11." I had been working on Duration: 1 Hour and 3 Minutes — Location: 17.3 Miles every day for the past three months. New York has always fascinated me and this project was the expression of that very lively city. With September 11 the understanding of meaning in art, in coexistence and in the context of the actual erupted. And so did the entire world. That show was a bit of a light for us to remember how beautiful New York is.

JZ: The work obviously takes place in New York where you have established yourself for some years coming from Berlin where you lived upon your departure from Brazil the country of your birth. In the articulation of both the empirical/sensual and rational/intellectual context from which the work is created, how do you see yourself today as a Brazilian artist? How do you relate to contemporary art from Brazil? Having left Brazil so long ago, and with so many experiences since then, how do you relate to the international artistic context? Where are your elected roots? Are they at all important in the process of how you work, conceive of a work of art, integrate it in the artistic milieu?

SF: "Sou Brasileira de estatura mediana" — I believe that one cannot detach art from life. I remember when I left Rio in 1989 for Berlin, I never doubted that I was going on a long journey. As another radically different reality to Rio, Berlin gave me a totally new mindset. The language, the weather, and especially the history and the cultural moment were extremely different from the life I had earlier in Brazil. Arriving seven months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and spending five years there, I was a witness to the transformation of Germany as well as all of Europe and the world with the end of the Cold War. Those first two years trying to survive and understand where I was going might have been the strongest and most difficult of my life.

I literally lived through the emergent globalization process. I moved to New York from Berlin in 1994. The arrival in New York via Berlin and Europe was key for an asymmetry that is very enjoyable — a three-point base, the understanding of polarization on the West — South America, North America, and Europe. That type of relation is atypical; in this dialectic there is a deep understanding of cultural thinking processes. On the one hand there is a kind of violation of cultural privacy, and on the other a shared complicity.

People are moving around the world every day. Around 70 million people change their homes every year. At this point I don’t ask myself where I belong, I don’t see a reason for that. I am an artist working with philosophical and cultural issues. As for now my place lies in the mediation between cultures.