Aleesa Cohene, in the tradition of found-footage art,
removes filmic elements from the confines of narrative continuity and context to
expose and explore shared anxieties. Separating gestures, glances and objects from
their original narratives, she focuses on the anticipation of catharsis and emotional peaks,
creating her own stories with composite characters compiled from literally hundreds of
different filmic sources. She was invited to Copenhagen from Toronto on a DIVA
residency to create a work specifically for Lost and Found. During her residency
she sat down with Jane Rowley, one of the exhibition’s curators, to talk about her
work in progress and in general.
JR: How did you start working with the film media that you deploy with such skill in your work?
AC: What draws me to the footage I use in my work are things that kept me
calm as a kid, when I watched TV secretly late at night. I don’t think I was actually
watching the stories. I was in my own mind. It was my time. But that experience was
informed by these characters and dramas, and it’s almost as if the very presence of a
plot made it possible for my mind to be free. I think I know that because it’s the same
zone I still go into in making my works - a kind of ‘other’ world.
Later, I trained as a film editor and fell in love with editing and the relationship it opened
up between details. What emerged was that there were so many choices in so little material
and therefore so many surprises.
JR: Your early single-channel works were mainly screened on the film
festival circuit, but your works are increasingly shown in a gallery and exhibition context.
What difference does that make?
AC: I come from an activist background, where ‘art’ is sometimes seen as the
easy way out. But I became increasingly frustrated with activist scenes and the way that
people would communicate - or not - with each other in some kind of judgmental
structure. I did my degree in philosophy. And that also influenced how I was thinking.
So I found an outlet for that in art. At the same time as it felt so much more important to
be protesting - to be active. And I did both - I do both. But art has definitely prevailed in
terms of what I find personally useful. Exhibiting in galleries and my move to multiple
channels has also brought me into another context of relationships. People are relating
to the work, I’m relating to more people. It’s less about watching something in the dark.
In a gallery it feels more social and communal, more about dialogue. That’s exciting.
JR: You’re part of a long tradition of found-footage art.
What does being part of that tradition mean to you?
AC: The footage I work with is not found, it’s reused. I didn’t find it in my family’s collection of
home videos or a dumpster, like other artists have. It’s refuse in other ways.
I generally like the aesthetics of things that weren’t too popular - they weren’t necessarily
blockbuster hits and there are no special effects or fancy editing. My work draws on a
history of stereotypes and conventions and norms, and that’s important to me.
As is an alliance with other found-footage artists working to change and question
‘the known’ and what is considered to be normal and right.
But that’s only the base. From there you can go into the realm of total imagination.
But without that base I find a lot of art really difficult to digest. Not because I find all found-footage
art interesting - people can use found footage to reiterate things that really frustrate me.
Shared politics is not a given, but we’ve all done that work of sifting through stuff that
already happened with a high level of subjectivity that has an inherent integrity to it,
because all we ever really know is what we know about ourselves.
JR: Talking about sifting through footage,
it might be interesting to talk about your creative process?
AC: I’ve been carrying around a library of about 700 films for the past 3-4 years,
and it’s constantly growing. Every time I add to my own personal archive of footage
I go back to my original stock looking for new shots, so I know those tapes really well.
I’m also looking for very specific kinds of shots and have developed a kind of rulebook.
I only use shots with a single person in the frame. Or close-ups. Or interiors or exteriors
without people.
JR: When does the musical soundtrack come into your work?
AC: Very early on I’ll choose some music - or fragments - that fit the mood and
form the story around that. But the music changes as often as the editing changes.
Which happens every day, when I remix the sound with the images constantly.
The two are integral throughout the process.
JR: Have there been any new challenges with the work based solely on female
characters you’re creating for Lost and Found?
AC: I decided to do a piece about two women in a relationship, so I’m only looking for
footage with women. Because of the story I want to tell, they have to be sincere.
Most of what I’m finding is hysterical drama, which no one bought in the original context,
and certainly won’t believe in out of context. This is a two-channel piece, and I’ve already
gone through twice the amount of footage I went through for my three-channel work
SOMETHING BETTER (2008). And I’m only halfway through.
In my work I don’t really care where something happens. If it happens in a bathroom,
bedroom, corridor, supermarket or parking lot. It just has to happen.
And I keep hitting a wall. It’s really sad to see that the sheer catalogue of mainstream
representations of women is about how pathetic they are. I’m not so interested in violence
or denigration - all those things are true in terms of how women are represented.
But what has struck me is the sadness of vacancy - a kind of emptiness.
What I keep finding is woman after woman in white nightgowns.
Whilst so much happens around the women.
And yet what actually happens to them and with them - in them - is not represented.
And yet we have thousands and thousands of films that live on and have significance,
so I’m interested in that absence.
For the work I’m creating for Lost and Found I had a clear idea of how I wanted
the piece to be. That each composite character - my characters are always compiled of
hundreds of different people in the stories I make - had their reasons for doing what they
were doing. And that viewers should be able to relate to each character - shift in their
attachments maybe - but relate to both. But I’m realizing that my desire for that kind of
democracy and understanding is simply not to be found in the vast amount of footage I
have. I face the challenge of having an evil bitch from hell on one side, and a passive
victim on the other. For example, in order to make a masturbation scene I’m using
women’s gestures and expressions from a rape scene, an abortion scene, despondent
sex and sleeping. In order to create joy and release I need to sample stories about
boredom, violence and the unconscious.
JR: One of the unique aspects of your work is your creation of single,
coherent characters from hundreds of different film roles. How does that work?
AC: Emotion rules. As long as the emotion is there and is consistent,
and is evolving as we understand emotion to evolve, it has an architecture that
we can all relate to. As long as I’m feeling it - and am in it - a single person can be
made up of thousands. This prevails over continuity. Continuity ‘mistakes’ where the
character has glasses on then not happen all the time in mainstream films, but if the
emotion prevails we don’t notice. It’s the role of emotion in the suspension of disbelief
that I push in my work.
I think one of the interesting political aspects of this current work is portraying a
bad relationship between two women, but a ‘bad’ relationship that is far more universal.
I’m interested in how we communicate - or fail to. How we all struggle with the
solitude of inner experience as it collides with a relationship. I work with emotions like
shame, guilt or regret. They’re like blanket emotions - they cover us and protect us from
feeling anything else. Those are what a lot of my characters feel.
JR: The home and interiors are pretty dominant in your work.
What and who are you investigating?
AC: I’m investigating relationships - and projection. When I’m talking to you,
who am I talking to? Is it you - or a part of myself? I’m interested in the ways in
which conversations and relationships are individual mirrors.
So my work is an intensively subjective experiment. The closeness the characters
feel or the loneliness they feel is actually how close or distant they feel to themselves.
I create opportunities for myself and maybe the viewer to jump outside of themselves.
So the two women in my current piece are, of course, myself.
Both of them do things that remind me of myself - and of people I think I know.
JR: Working as you do sampling mass media, where are the boundaries between being
moved by your work and being moved by the original and memories of it?
AC: What I feel about all art works is that the emotion pre-exists the context,
so we are moved simultaneously by the ‘original’ content and the ‘new’ content.
I hope that it evokes something in us that we can’t evoke without a little bit of help.
That’s why I make art - because it helps me to be present. To be more in the world.
Otherwise, I’d just check out.
Jane Rowley is Co-curator of Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive.
The interview is published in
AFART #26, 2009
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