Louidgi Beltrame
Free the Ghosts !
by Stéphanie Moisdon
“If I had to define the current state of things I would say that we are in the aftermath of the orgy. The orgy refers to the explosive moment in our modern times when liberation took place in all fields. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces, women and children’s liberation, liberation of subconscious urges, liberation of the arts. Assumption of all representation and anti-representation models. It was a full- fledged orgy, real and rational, sexual and critical and anti-critical, an orgy of economic growth and crisis. We have been down every path, producing and virtually overproducing objects, signs, messages, ideologies, and pleasures. Nowadays, everything has been liberated, the chips are down and we are collectively faced with the crucial question: WHAT TO DO AFTER THE ORGY?”
Jean Baudrillard
What to do after the orgy, Baudrillard asked not long before his theory of simulacra – which has had such a deep impact on art over the past few years – fell into a nihilistic version of simulation, conspiracy and nullity? Artists have already answered this implacable question with the cry: Free the ghosts! From the capitalistic cult, from cultural religion, from the hollowness of representation.
Vertical Island – Sea-Side Hotel – Les Dormeurs, Louidgi Beltrame’s three latest films are haunted with absent characters in the empty spaces elicited by our modern times, spaces filling the narratives with a new, unrestrained reality.
These works form a new type of filmed bestiary, spectral and haunting, starring mostly women. Through the screen in her glass cage, the ghost of a pallid young woman stares at the cityscape of Toronto spreading as far as the eye can see (Vertical Island). Her near-articulate visions are accompanied by voice-over narration provided by another woman, an invisible professional in the narrative fiction industry, who rear-projects her inner-thoughts, consisting of filmic sensations and city moments.
We also meet the spirits of nature who disturb the sleepers’ artificial slumber in Les dormeurs, like the kodamas dear to the Japanese animistic tradition who nestle in the vibrations of a tree, in gusts of wind or in the tumult of the rain. We also see the Sea-Side Hotel’s phantom who –from her world fuzzy with white noise – reminds us of the existence, somewhere in the jungle, of an architecture left long ago to rot by mankind. This specter isn’t far – spiritually or geographically - from the one in Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s The Ring, whose power extends via waves of telecommunication and technological developments.
The ghosts in Louidgi Beltrame’s work are not your typical ghosts, and they certainly aren’t metaphors. They are as subject as anyone to the whims of fate, (though their world is fantastical), frivolously gambling, winning and losing, as the cult of capitalism is profaned. Forever young (the nouveau damned), they have moved away from the classical specter’s aesthetic sense and motivations. They draw upon mass media culture and contemporary ways of life, employing the lexicon of communication and consumption.
These characters are transfers arriving in the next life and finding that it is based on self-reproduction, networking, never-ending commutation, extenuation, dispersion, and, ultimately, disappearance.
“In its most extreme form,” Giorgio Agamben says, “the capitalistic religion brings about the purest type of separation without actually separating anything at all. An absolute profanation devoid of any residue whatsoever coincides with, meanwhile, a consecration just as empty and integral. (…) What can no longer be used is written off as business consumption.” Thus, everything is profaned in the capitalistic cult and even withdrawn from use, use has become impossible. The two examples chosen by Agamben to describe the cultural void caused by capitalistic consumption are pornography and fashion. Needless to say, increasingly deep connections are gradually emerging between contemporary art and those two spheres.
“Remember Marcel Duchamp’s search for a fourth dimension, remember Poltergeist; ghosts have reached the widespread broadcasting era! In the Middle Ages one could hear the clanking of chains in the dark hallways of castles; now one can hear weird nuclear reactor noises in country homes. With the passing of the centuries, ghosts have geared up, and now have access to nuclear weapons. There is a spirituality market where they are also hawking desire. Fundamentalists take hold of religious cults, instituting the extreme right of morality. There are areas where even angels fear to tread.”
Angels buried in sorrow and ghosts with serious gear. These are our spectors, stuck in the glue of time because of a scandalous death that stopped them short at work, occurred under violent circumstances, was unfair, untimely, anonymous, intolerable for the living who are unable to let the dead rest in peace, unbearable for the deceased who then break into the present demanding an explanation. Imagine the sorrow of those modern angels wandering through a restless death, a death doomed to remain forever onscreen.
Let us not forget the obligations of the ghosts. They must always respond to these convocations, reminding the living that planet earth is built on the ruins of sexual revolutions, capitalists, technology, that they are not the first ones here and they still have a debt to clear. The duty of the specter is to stand up for his/her rights as the living wonder about their own legitimacy. Thus it raises the only question worth asking: who should be haunted, or rather, what place? Keeping in mind that a place appropriate for haunting must have certain favorable conditions – an incomplete mourning, a bad conscience, a state of loneliness or remorse.
Which place to haunt? Beltrame addresses this issue and proposes a few lines of thought, a sort of roadmap. He points out to his characters the right place: a film studio, a city center, an aerial landscape, a high-rise, a sea resort, a tree, a desert, or an island. In Les Dormeurs, ghosts go back to a restless place: one of the only buildings that withstood the H-bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The ghost disrupts the comforting chronology of things; it is a past that won’t let go. The living dead hover over the present and make threats about what’s still to come: the resurfacing of repressed feelings. The ghost says that history is not a linear phenomenon but rather a convulsive and discontinuous one; that the present is made of entangled layers of time, that what is labeled “progress” is tainted with barbarism.
Each one of Louidgi Beltrame’s movies is a device giving shape to a new sort of structure, perceptive and composed of intervals (the distance between the gaze, its point of transmission to its point of reception) within which images and signs slip away from one world to the next.
The “indifferent” beauty of the images is enhanced by a complex sound texture heralding the dialogue-free moments (to which the music adds much significance), the noises and also the grain of the image.
One mustn’t mistake the fantastical elements pervading his works for a comeback of the genre, or for spirituality or spiritualism, but rather one ought to see them as another way to carve into the language the terms of apparition and surface; that of our condition as viewers, as lonely characters.
If art has induced a movement over the past few years, it is undoubtedly that of history blurring with fiction and fiction blurring with reality. Which is a way to break free from the dead-end of linear narration and to hunt down in the time allotted to production, editing, and distribution, a specific event: the moment when the character - neither a hero nor a master - appears onscreen.
From the limbo of canvas or screen, through the apparition of Ann Lee (a character awaiting fiction, diverted from her industrial fate and placed at the disposal of a group of artists), of Pierre Joseph’s to-be-reactivated characters or of Doug Aitken’s insomniacs, emerge the skeleton of a new language, a common project spanning an infinitely humane horizon concerned with use and users, this whole community dependent on machines, inventing its own life with the tools of the present, connections, methods of recording and deleting, storage units, screens, fears, and dreams of technology.
In the same way, in Louigi Beltrame’s works, the awaiting character becomes a sign. Film production and distribution aside, once filmed, this sign steps into a process of exposure engraved in time that accompanies perfectly his state of being a ghost.
A character in the process of being written offering the feeling of a story, the “story of a feeling” and who asks the only question that matters: What are the conditions required for a story to emerge?
This character results from a collective experience. He is well aware that we live in an era when space, simultaneity and juxtaposition rule, an era torn between closeness and distance, between standing side-by- side and being scattered. That we are experiencing a time when the world is less conceived and felt as a great life evolving with time than as a network connecting dots, planes of consistence in search of its own connections.
The space clearing out above the horizon of our crises, our theories, our systems is not an innovation, or even a new step, but rather a place we are to create, to walk up and down, and to de-zone.
Nowadays, the fields of research and arts revolve around the drastic transformations undergone by the modern city, the paradoxical and complex relationships between its territory, its layout, and its use. Since the sixties and seventies a great amount of artistic productions have observed and analyzed urban transformations, the creation of new means of transportation that obviously imply a shift in our perception of space, and in the ways, real or virtual, in which we go through it. The aerial shots of skyscrapers in Vertical Island seem to indicate a neutralized violence: a workplace is but a universal sign, power is made as important as monuments. Images partially related to the dramatized objectivity of Sarah Morris’s films, allowing her to grasp in the transformations brought about by modernist architecture a world deserted by the subject, a world lying above the void, perceived from a mechanical height and constructing itself outside human perceptions and perspectives.
Today, location has replaced area, which had already supplanted space. Location is now defined not by neighbors, but by the neighborly relationships between points and elements; categorically described as series of numbers, a lattice-work of zeroes and ones, and in groups of bytes.
Space and location are more and more of the essence today: storage of information or of the fragmented results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, circulation of random elements, spotting, marking and coding within a single set.
The space issue affects mankind in terms of projection and image. We cannot simply ask ourselves if there will be enough room left for human beings in the world, we also need to reflect upon what kind of neighborly relationships, what kind of circulation and partitioning we are going to have to deal with.
The relation of locations to one another presents us with another aspect of the space issue.
Those tangible relationships are expressed - in the most contemporary forms of life and creation - through a refreshing of pragmatic oppositions: between private and public space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space, leisure and professional space.
It is precisely at this point of a theoretical fissure, where a new generation of artists manages to manipulate this story and produce other territories less oriented towards utopias than towards locations linked with real space by a general or an inverted analogy relationship.
A concern that can be coupled with that of function, and therefore that of the machine, all those large and small “machines for living” (according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase) which gave shape in a quickly forgotten time to abandoned projects for big housing complexes and new cities.
Though Louidgi Beltrame is clearly affiliated with this zone of research and creation, his work does not simply consist in bringing back to life or taming “disqualified” landscapes or architectures, but also in reproducing from memory the informational vision of a map, of a geographical area, so as to catch a glimpse of what keeps peering out at us from those lost spaces. At times romantic, often idealistic, probably biographical, his vision offers a thorough reading of his childhood history set in a time tainted with the great reformist narratives, the social revolution of the sixties and the deadlocks of productivism.
Louidgi Beltrame’s project is intricately linked with those insulated architectures appearing as counter-locations, as places outside all other places even though they can be located, still absolutely different.
Nowadays, the viewer is a user of fictitious spaces, a deft driver used to walking up and down the world of animated images like the ever-decaying streets of Sim City (the electronic city requiring consistent upkeep). The builder of the world is aware that he can, at any time, meet all kinds of unlikely creatures in this virtual reality, in his journeys through the inter-planetary network. It has now become obvious that, as Philippe Parreno says, “one can no longer sit down in front of an image like in the old days. Instead, one fatally slides into it and gets abruptly sucked into this world bearing no real significance.”
Bearing no real significance – situations that are not real – Louidgi Beltrame’s images were indirectly inspired by a contrary and paradoxical history in the process of which mankind has turned into a hyper-viewer, living and seeing everything at the same time, half spectator, half participant, both permanent and ephemeral, real and fictitious, of in the audience and on the screen.
“The time is out of joint,” the Prince of Elseneur, Hamlet, declared. This might be the most beautiful definition of these melancholic times: a feeling of collective grief dampens the intensity of the present, a place where all possible options seem to have the same worth, in a world where signifiers aren’t all that significant, and where nothing is more difficult than to make a mark that could actually change the course of things.
“If I had to define the current state of things I would say that we are in the aftermath of the orgy. The orgy refers to the explosive moment in our modern times when liberation took place in all fields. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces, women and children’s liberation, liberation of subconscious urges, liberation of the arts. Assumption of all representation and anti-representation models. It was a full- fledged orgy, real and rational, sexual and critical and anti-critical, an orgy of economic growth and crisis. We have been down every path, producing and virtually overproducing objects, signs, messages, ideologies, and pleasures. Nowadays, everything has been liberated, the chips are down and we are collectively faced with the crucial question: WHAT TO DO AFTER THE ORGY?”
Jean Baudrillard
What to do after the orgy, Baudrillard asked not long before his theory of simulacra – which has had such a deep impact on art over the past few years – fell into a nihilistic version of simulation, conspiracy and nullity? Artists have already answered this implacable question with the cry: Free the ghosts! From the capitalistic cult, from cultural religion, from the hollowness of representation.
Vertical Island – Sea-Side Hotel – Les Dormeurs, Louidgi Beltrame’s three latest films are haunted with absent characters in the empty spaces elicited by our modern times, spaces filling the narratives with a new, unrestrained reality.
These works form a new type of filmed bestiary, spectral and haunting, starring mostly women. Through the screen in her glass cage, the ghost of a pallid young woman stares at the cityscape of Toronto spreading as far as the eye can see (Vertical Island). Her near-articulate visions are accompanied by voice-over narration provided by another woman, an invisible professional in the narrative fiction industry, who rear-projects her inner-thoughts, consisting of filmic sensations and city moments.
We also meet the spirits of nature who disturb the sleepers’ artificial slumber in Les dormeurs, like the kodamas dear to the Japanese animistic tradition who nestle in the vibrations of a tree, in gusts of wind or in the tumult of the rain. We also see the Sea-Side Hotel’s phantom who –from her world fuzzy with white noise – reminds us of the existence, somewhere in the jungle, of an architecture left long ago to rot by mankind. This specter isn’t far – spiritually or geographically - from the one in Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s The Ring, whose power extends via waves of telecommunication and technological developments.
The ghosts in Louidgi Beltrame’s work are not your typical ghosts, and they certainly aren’t metaphors. They are as subject as anyone to the whims of fate, (though their world is fantastical), frivolously gambling, winning and losing, as the cult of capitalism is profaned. Forever young (the nouveau damned), they have moved away from the classical specter’s aesthetic sense and motivations. They draw upon mass media culture and contemporary ways of life, employing the lexicon of communication and consumption.
These characters are transfers arriving in the next life and finding that it is based on self-reproduction, networking, never-ending commutation, extenuation, dispersion, and, ultimately, disappearance.
“In its most extreme form,” Giorgio Agamben says, “the capitalistic religion brings about the purest type of separation without actually separating anything at all. An absolute profanation devoid of any residue whatsoever coincides with, meanwhile, a consecration just as empty and integral. (…) What can no longer be used is written off as business consumption.” Thus, everything is profaned in the capitalistic cult and even withdrawn from use, use has become impossible. The two examples chosen by Agamben to describe the cultural void caused by capitalistic consumption are pornography and fashion. Needless to say, increasingly deep connections are gradually emerging between contemporary art and those two spheres.
“Remember Marcel Duchamp’s search for a fourth dimension, remember Poltergeist; ghosts have reached the widespread broadcasting era! In the Middle Ages one could hear the clanking of chains in the dark hallways of castles; now one can hear weird nuclear reactor noises in country homes. With the passing of the centuries, ghosts have geared up, and now have access to nuclear weapons. There is a spirituality market where they are also hawking desire. Fundamentalists take hold of religious cults, instituting the extreme right of morality. There are areas where even angels fear to tread.”
Angels buried in sorrow and ghosts with serious gear. These are our spectors, stuck in the glue of time because of a scandalous death that stopped them short at work, occurred under violent circumstances, was unfair, untimely, anonymous, intolerable for the living who are unable to let the dead rest in peace, unbearable for the deceased who then break into the present demanding an explanation. Imagine the sorrow of those modern angels wandering through a restless death, a death doomed to remain forever onscreen.
Let us not forget the obligations of the ghosts. They must always respond to these convocations, reminding the living that planet earth is built on the ruins of sexual revolutions, capitalists, technology, that they are not the first ones here and they still have a debt to clear. The duty of the specter is to stand up for his/her rights as the living wonder about their own legitimacy. Thus it raises the only question worth asking: who should be haunted, or rather, what place? Keeping in mind that a place appropriate for haunting must have certain favorable conditions – an incomplete mourning, a bad conscience, a state of loneliness or remorse.
Which place to haunt? Beltrame addresses this issue and proposes a few lines of thought, a sort of roadmap. He points out to his characters the right place: a film studio, a city center, an aerial landscape, a high-rise, a sea resort, a tree, a desert, or an island. In Les Dormeurs, ghosts go back to a restless place: one of the only buildings that withstood the H-bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The ghost disrupts the comforting chronology of things; it is a past that won’t let go. The living dead hover over the present and make threats about what’s still to come: the resurfacing of repressed feelings. The ghost says that history is not a linear phenomenon but rather a convulsive and discontinuous one; that the present is made of entangled layers of time, that what is labeled “progress” is tainted with barbarism.
Each one of Louidgi Beltrame’s movies is a device giving shape to a new sort of structure, perceptive and composed of intervals (the distance between the gaze, its point of transmission to its point of reception) within which images and signs slip away from one world to the next.
The “indifferent” beauty of the images is enhanced by a complex sound texture heralding the dialogue-free moments (to which the music adds much significance), the noises and also the grain of the image.
One mustn’t mistake the fantastical elements pervading his works for a comeback of the genre, or for spirituality or spiritualism, but rather one ought to see them as another way to carve into the language the terms of apparition and surface; that of our condition as viewers, as lonely characters.
If art has induced a movement over the past few years, it is undoubtedly that of history blurring with fiction and fiction blurring with reality. Which is a way to break free from the dead-end of linear narration and to hunt down in the time allotted to production, editing, and distribution, a specific event: the moment when the character - neither a hero nor a master - appears onscreen.
From the limbo of canvas or screen, through the apparition of Ann Lee (a character awaiting fiction, diverted from her industrial fate and placed at the disposal of a group of artists), of Pierre Joseph’s to-be-reactivated characters or of Doug Aitken’s insomniacs, emerge the skeleton of a new language, a common project spanning an infinitely humane horizon concerned with use and users, this whole community dependent on machines, inventing its own life with the tools of the present, connections, methods of recording and deleting, storage units, screens, fears, and dreams of technology.
In the same way, in Louigi Beltrame’s works, the awaiting character becomes a sign. Film production and distribution aside, once filmed, this sign steps into a process of exposure engraved in time that accompanies perfectly his state of being a ghost.
A character in the process of being written offering the feeling of a story, the “story of a feeling” and who asks the only question that matters: What are the conditions required for a story to emerge?
This character results from a collective experience. He is well aware that we live in an era when space, simultaneity and juxtaposition rule, an era torn between closeness and distance, between standing side-by- side and being scattered. That we are experiencing a time when the world is less conceived and felt as a great life evolving with time than as a network connecting dots, planes of consistence in search of its own connections.
The space clearing out above the horizon of our crises, our theories, our systems is not an innovation, or even a new step, but rather a place we are to create, to walk up and down, and to de-zone.
Nowadays, the fields of research and arts revolve around the drastic transformations undergone by the modern city, the paradoxical and complex relationships between its territory, its layout, and its use. Since the sixties and seventies a great amount of artistic productions have observed and analyzed urban transformations, the creation of new means of transportation that obviously imply a shift in our perception of space, and in the ways, real or virtual, in which we go through it. The aerial shots of skyscrapers in Vertical Island seem to indicate a neutralized violence: a workplace is but a universal sign, power is made as important as monuments. Images partially related to the dramatized objectivity of Sarah Morris’s films, allowing her to grasp in the transformations brought about by modernist architecture a world deserted by the subject, a world lying above the void, perceived from a mechanical height and constructing itself outside human perceptions and perspectives.
Today, location has replaced area, which had already supplanted space. Location is now defined not by neighbors, but by the neighborly relationships between points and elements; categorically described as series of numbers, a lattice-work of zeroes and ones, and in groups of bytes.
Space and location are more and more of the essence today: storage of information or of the fragmented results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, circulation of random elements, spotting, marking and coding within a single set.
The space issue affects mankind in terms of projection and image. We cannot simply ask ourselves if there will be enough room left for human beings in the world, we also need to reflect upon what kind of neighborly relationships, what kind of circulation and partitioning we are going to have to deal with.
The relation of locations to one another presents us with another aspect of the space issue.
Those tangible relationships are expressed - in the most contemporary forms of life and creation - through a refreshing of pragmatic oppositions: between private and public space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space, leisure and professional space.
It is precisely at this point of a theoretical fissure, where a new generation of artists manages to manipulate this story and produce other territories less oriented towards utopias than towards locations linked with real space by a general or an inverted analogy relationship.
A concern that can be coupled with that of function, and therefore that of the machine, all those large and small “machines for living” (according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase) which gave shape in a quickly forgotten time to abandoned projects for big housing complexes and new cities.
Though Louidgi Beltrame is clearly affiliated with this zone of research and creation, his work does not simply consist in bringing back to life or taming “disqualified” landscapes or architectures, but also in reproducing from memory the informational vision of a map, of a geographical area, so as to catch a glimpse of what keeps peering out at us from those lost spaces. At times romantic, often idealistic, probably biographical, his vision offers a thorough reading of his childhood history set in a time tainted with the great reformist narratives, the social revolution of the sixties and the deadlocks of productivism.
Louidgi Beltrame’s project is intricately linked with those insulated architectures appearing as counter-locations, as places outside all other places even though they can be located, still absolutely different.
Nowadays, the viewer is a user of fictitious spaces, a deft driver used to walking up and down the world of animated images like the ever-decaying streets of Sim City (the electronic city requiring consistent upkeep). The builder of the world is aware that he can, at any time, meet all kinds of unlikely creatures in this virtual reality, in his journeys through the inter-planetary network. It has now become obvious that, as Philippe Parreno says, “one can no longer sit down in front of an image like in the old days. Instead, one fatally slides into it and gets abruptly sucked into this world bearing no real significance.”
Bearing no real significance – situations that are not real – Louidgi Beltrame’s images were indirectly inspired by a contrary and paradoxical history in the process of which mankind has turned into a hyper-viewer, living and seeing everything at the same time, half spectator, half participant, both permanent and ephemeral, real and fictitious, of in the audience and on the screen.
“The time is out of joint,” the Prince of Elseneur, Hamlet, declared. This might be the most beautiful definition of these melancholic times: a feeling of collective grief dampens the intensity of the present, a place where all possible options seem to have the same worth, in a world where signifiers aren’t all that significant, and where nothing is more difficult than to make a mark that could actually change the course of things.
