Where Do We Go Now! (On the dynamic of moving away)

Délio Jasse, Identidade Poética, 2009

The first time we decide to move away as human beings, after being recognised by others as belonging to a particular species, is just when became newborns – the moment when a woman gives birth, and we move from a gestational environment to an environment of different order. When we are outside of the womb and are stopped from being feed and keep alive through and by the bodily functional mechanisms of someone else. Before, we are foetus, when the body organs are not yet fully functional or are still unfolding in to and advancing for their final anatomical location, or an embryo of cosmological possibilities, forces, and energies. Whether or not this is important to understand the “dynamic of moving away” is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is that throughout our existence as human beings, we are in a permanent and constant process of moving away from a relative condition of what we do have to a perceived relative condition of what might satisfy us; however, what we discover is the realization of a correlative condition of something we believe that would satisfy us – in this moment, as a consequence, we appear to be at lost.

If the idea of moving away is intended to reflect the life and options of a particular age, it is because unusual social disturbances and unsettling dislocations are in play here. We move from a relative condition of “what we do have” to another relative condition, expecting and believing that that new condition will “satisfy us” more than the present condition, where we will feel less dislocated towards our socio-cultural environment. To the theorist Irit Rogoff, the dynamic of moving away is a componential “necessary part to the understanding of Visual Culture.” She further adds, “for whatever it may be it is NOT an accumulative, an addictive project in which bits of newly discovered perspectives are pasted on to an existing structure, seemingly making it acceptable to the pressures of the time.” This paradox, which might lead us to nowhere, “unravels a journey of phases in which the thought we are immersed in is invalidated.” Symbolically, it is the ability to think according to the impact of space and spatialisation, which makes immobility more comfortable and protects people from harder realities. In here, the movement in itself must induce the meaning of moving away, and the dynamics embodied by the action of changing from a physical location to another. In a foreign culture, it allows to begin to understand the meaning of words, context of actions, and to start to take part in a communal life. The dynamic of moving away can also open a breach in both the leaving and hosting culture. It is what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all values.” By representing an idea, custom, or habit in a different way, those that take part in the dynamic of moving away adjust or alter the leaving or hosting culture’s judgements of or reactions to that representation – one through the means of loss or being without, the other through ways of obtaining or bringing over.

Délio Jasse, Look Atlantico, 2010

The photographer Délio Jasse (b. 1980, Luanda, Angola) introduces the idea of the dynamic of moving away watchfully, in what is the most acute predicament on his body of work. The photographic proposition brought by the photographer evokes social disturbances, he documents on the interruption of normal and institutionalised social spatialisations and law-abiding conditions – due to the engagement with life’s diverse realities. The agency in his body of work is in documenting and examining loose archives, in representing a determined social reality related with the colonial Portuguese context, at one level, and with the global post-colonial experience, on another level; he reports, also, to a mediatory functional condition between different perceptions, related with the interruption of the continuous progress of the construction of social relations and cultural developments in that settled and immovable condition. But, its tricky condition is in examining the dynamic of moving away, in examining some of its adjacent consequences. In particular, interruptions, disruptions caused by the resultant dynamics derived from movements on the dislocation between different socio-cultural spatial environments.

With an opportunistic convenience, the idea of moving away into a situation that we believe will satisfy us more greatly got deeply rooted in the Portuguese imaginarium and socio-cultural history. A thought that extends for more than eight centuries in an entity with territorial rights recognised within Iberian and European political and religious contexts since the XI century, or whether, at a global level, with the emergence of the “Discoveries” period in the XV century, and the horizontal and vertical transversal relations with other ways of being, people with other set of habits and costumes. The dynamic of moving away is socially embraced and became a procedure culturally embodied within the Portuguese self-impose iconography. The concept of moving away is a morality signalling this people. It is a kind of boast, announcement, with all the inherent pleasures of saying it.

Délio Jasse, Freedom, 2010

Délio Jasse’s work is open and honest in the service of duplicity. He uses photography to persuade and mislead convincingly, plausibly, and unscrupulously – but photography can only be used like this if one knows about visual culture and, in particular, about photography’s rhetoric. The work Identidade Poética (2009) offers a view on a group of images used in the past to document a determined visual identity: Black & White portraits of anonymous people usually used as visual indexes in legal-biding documents, such as passports, national identity cards, prison records, travel cards, etc. Of particular importance is the fact that Délio Jasse, like an ethnographer, scavenged for these loose black and white images on Lisbon’s flea market – Feira da Ladra. Images that had become unattached from any legal belonging, from any particular legal body, entity, or organisation. What can they say about who was the photographer? Or, for the matter, who is the person photographed? What for and when were these portraits initially used? We will become lost when considering these and other questions: a woman dressed in black…is she a widower? In another portrait, a soldier…is he an anonymous citizen from a fatherland that no longer exists? (It is almost possible to know who was, in an almost adulterated way, the original photographer: «Foto Central da Graça, Lda. Rua Damasceno Monteiro 8-B e 8-C, Tel. 86 50 22 Lisboa», with written photo number «48583», is stamped over one of the images; another stamp refers to a recognisable political institution: «Serviços de Migração e Estrangeiros. Luanda Entrada 10», dated «04.06.2000»). While, on a complementary form, Schengen (2010), inserts the code into a medium, it combines with the physiognomic characteristics, presented by Identidade Poética, a set of socio-cultural characteristics: habits, costumes, values, and the capital acquired throughout our individual existence. Black & White images of archives, ceremonial acts and official delegations, seaside views, commerce, social contestation, folklore, and national symbols. On the whole, these two bodies of work expose us to the construction of the individual other. Although, with some images Délio Jasse emphasizes the construction of identity through race, gender, and class, with other images, he raises questions concerning the relationship between individuality within a particular social condition and the ways we classify ourselves according to cultural imperatives. In the work Schengen, printed on wood, the material texture both disturb and enrich the message of the image. Take for example in Direitos (2010), an amorphous form imposes itself on the printed image of people – immigrants – claiming equal rights, or in Freedom (2010), a public act performed by distinctive actors from the Portuguese rural scene is veiled by the same type of unclear shape and form – a visual inscription that bears resemblance to the conceptual idea of the abstract mechanical body defined as the State. At its core, all these images drive us though paths of geo-political impositions, between distinctive contemporary ideologies and contested territories. Délio Jasse engages, on a personal level, in narratives and constructs stories that unravel the disruption of social order occurring within multiple institutional spaces and bodily spatialisation.

Délio Jasse, Citizens, 2010

By moving away, we have, at least provisionally, freed ourselves from something, but then we have to deal with our new found freedom. What to do with this new found freedom? To live in the Schengen’s space is a desired aspiration for many people who (but not only) live in under-developed economies throughout the globe. Those people contemplate the possibility of doing something that might bring greater levels of favourable condition to rise socially, educationally, economically, etc. (some, are just looking for a new experience in life, irrespective of their social, educational, or economic condition); a more affluent environment that would allow improvement from what was a deplorable, molesting, and shameful human situation, i.e., “to go beyond one’s wildest dreams.” However, what has been discovered, or recovered, is not, in actuality, our freedom. It is merely a transitional condition, a threshold that allow us to revise our expectations, including having the time to re-write our own narrative within society. At this time, we think about all those practices “as linked in a complex process of knowledge production instead of the earlier separations” of narratives. Being immerged in a new culture means – regardless of how “new” can be categorised – to became involved in a debate about making new choices, about what to do way of the previous disturbing relative condition, and to decide on a new narrative towards one’s actions. But, those who have the desire to live in and be part of a new spatial environment have to be able to understand the encompassing cultural space and its set of rules and ways of being and acting, including moral principles and regulatory laws.

By deciding to use images scavenged from a local flea market, photos without any immediate referent or indication about its original intention or ownership, Délio Jasse is “able to analyse and unveil while at the same time sharing and living out the very conditions which we are able to see through” his work. In the present, he still shows us the hosting space functionality. A critical reflection on living within the European borderless area is brought by an individual born in Africa (Luanda) and who has moved away to Europe (Lisbon). The photographer is playing with notions of translation, interpretation, and global communication (coding, de-coding, and re-coding); he is able to talk about choices and decision-making, rights, and duties, inhabiting the structures that articulate out the very condition of perceive spatial reality and the dynamic of moving away.

The dynamic happens when we succeed at moving away from something. And, within this particular context, for something to happen, we are required to build and operate complex social systems. Clearly, moving away from something, doing it, will lead us to the idea of a previously constructed perceived reality. Something we believe will satisfy us. And yet, of course, we have always already found out that by ourselves, when deciding on the conditions that will satisfy us, it is about what might be called the built-in consequence of wanting something and the successfully completed action. That is, the former is pregnant by the expressive force of the latter.

Bibliography:
Phillips, Adam (2013) Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin Books.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. [Accessed February 26th, 2013]

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Part I - Délio Jasse.