Back to the Featured menu

LUX is very pleased to announce that it will be distributing the films of Argentine artist David Lamelas. Below, Nick Fitch provides an introduction to Lamelas and his work, and we reproduce an interview with the artist conducted by curators Pierre Bal-Blanc and Pascal Beause in 2004.

As well as distributing the individual films (listed in the online catalogue), LUX is offering a special touring package of the early films, David Lamelas: Time is a Ficton - details are in the touring section.

David Lamelas is also featured in Issue 11 of Afterall, with essays by Stuart Comer and Chus Martinez - see www.afterall.org for details. A retail DVD of some of Lamelas' work will be released by Bureau Des Videos in Paris in late 2005.

DAVID LAMELAS

'Anticipating our contemporary state of singularity and suspended surveillance, Lamelas' work confounds any attempt to maintain a distinction between real and fictional temporalities, or between "actualities" and theatre.'
- Stuart Comer, "David Lamelas: The Limits of Documentary"

A Study Of Relationships Between Inner And Outer Space (1969)

The Argentine artist David Lamelas is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art and the related practice of institutional critique, which developed during the 1960s and 1970s. Critic Benjamin Buchloh writes that the artist "emerged in the early sixties in Buenos Aires with an arsenal of artistic strategies and a clarity of concepts about the conditions and the necessities of contemporary artistic production which at that time had harDLy been formulated in any cultural context of the metropolitan centers of either the United States or Europe." So exceptional is Lamelas' intellectual comprehension of both the artistic legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the "postmodern" condition (which Argentine born architect Diana Agrest says starts "in the fifties, with cultural and technological changes, the development of communications and cybernetics infiltrating every level of life as mass culture and mass media within which any juxtaposition, no matter how odd is possible"), that it calls into question "traditional assumptions" about the relationship between the hegemonic centers of cultural production" and "the so-called peripheries."

Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946, the son of immigrants from Galicia, in north-western Spain. In an interview conducted by the French curators Pierre Bal-Blanc and Pascal Beause in 2004 (see below), Lamelas confides that, "The dictator figure has left a mark on my life, being from Argentina. My family had left Spain because of Franco, and later in Buenos Aires Perón appeared." The confession is rare, because Lamelas stands out among Hispanic émigrés of his generation for having avoided the opportunistic role of the "Professional Latin American," so well exemplified by Gabriel García Márquez and many contributors to the 'New Left Review', and he rarely if ever alludes to his own political experience in Argentina. Nonetheless, it is intriguing to reflect upon the biographical coincidence that Lamelas was born in 1946, the same year that Juan Perón was elected president of Argentina. As if mandating the artist's later move in 1977 to Los Angeles and the video work exploring the televisual conventions of American broadcast news programs that he would do there, Lamelas spent his earliest years in the heart of one of the past century's more outlandish state-orchestrated cults of personality and in the presence of the ubiquitous products of the Peronist political kitsch industry. (Such was the kitsch factor in Peronist Argentina, Lamelas' first school primer would have been Evita's ghost-written autobiography, 'La razón de mi vida' - My Reason for Living! Perhaps more germane to the artist's preoccupation with the intersection of politics and the communications media is the fact that Evita's televised state funeral, like the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Germany and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Great Britain, marked the beginning of the medium in Argentina.)

Writing in 1977 at the moment of his "temporary move from London to Los Angeles," in a piece entitled "A Very Personal Statement," Lamelas recounts the journey that he took with his family in 1958 at the age of twelve from Buenos Aires to Spain, "a 16 days trip in an English boat." He candiDLy states that this, his "first trip," "is probably the most important and influential of all my moves since then." From Galicia, Lamelas' parents native region, the family "traveled all over Spain," including to Madrid, where at the Prado, Lamelas recalls, "I had my first major impact on my Art Consciousness with Velasquez' 'Las Meninas.'" Lamelas describes his encounter with Velasquez' masterpiece as a "Vision," and insists that the "influence" of that "art experience" has never been matched and is seconded in importance only by his subsequent moves to London and Los Angeles. He explains:

It may sound strange that I co-relate [sic] my evolution as an artist according to my geographical changes but it is important to think of my work in reference to a particular 'time' and 'place' in which the work has been produced; I work as a response to the conditions of life in which I function at a particular moment and location.

What I call my geographical positions on earth are carefully chosen according to a pre-plan of what I intuit my "art concerns" will be at a later state.

Generally about two to three years in advance it is possible to predict the development of my art interests; then I try as much as possible to place myself into the nearest to perfect conditions for this work to be accomplished.

The sensitivity to his geographic environs that Lamelas describes is manifested in almost all of his work and it is no accident that he was a pioneer of the "site-specific" installation.

Lamelas began exhibiting as an adolescent in Buenos Aires, while still a student at the city's School of Fine Arts. Already at the precocious age of 20, Lamelas was invited to compete for the 'National Prize 66' organized by the Center for Visual Arts of the Instituto Di Tella, the foremost avant-garde cultural institution in Latin American during the 1960s. He was chosen the following year to represent Argentina at the 1967 'Sao Paolo Biennale', where he presented his architectural intervention 'Dos espacios modificados' (Two Modified Spaces). This same year Lamelas made his seminal installation work 'Situación de tiempo '(Time Situation) at the Instituto Di Tella. For this piece Lamelas installed seventeen television sets, all tuned to a non-existent channel (so that they would emit a bright white light and a loud humming sound) against the walls of the room. Lamelas specified that the televisions be of the latest model produced by the electronics wing of SIAM Di Tella, Argentina's largest industrial conglomerate, which had boomed during the Peronist government. The endowment of the Fundacion Torcuato Tella, the legal entity that financed Instituto Di Tella, was made up of the shares in SIAM Di Tella, donated by the Di Tella family.

Lamelas left Argentina for Europe in 1968. En route to London, his ultimate destination, where he studied sculpture at St. Martin's School of Art and resided until 1977, he traveled to Italy and represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale. Upon seeing Lamelas' installation 'Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio', the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers approached the younger artist. This encounter marked the beginning an intimate friendship that would profounDLy influence Lamelas' future development, not least by introducing him into the orbit of (continental) European Conceptual Art even before he arrived in England. Writing the following year, Broodthaers observes:

Lamelas, who expresses himself mainly through his films and photographs, is driven by a kind of superrealism. What he makes resembles television, but with the commonplace aspect exacerbated. By this very strange means, through a show of zeal in technique if you will, he manages to explode this notion of information and to place this notion directly at the center of his concerns and at the center of the viewer's concerns as well.

Broodthaers brilliantly captures Lamelas' intentions in 'Situación de tiempo 'specifically and the essence of all Lamelas' art; an art that "resembles television" but that "manages to explode" information and the invisible structures that organize its manipulation.

Upon beginning his studies at St. Martin's, where he studied sculpture under Anthony Caro, in the fall of 1968, Lamelas wished straight away to work with film: "With the Vietnam piece I had realized one thing that was dealing with images, with information and with sound, which are best represented and preserved through film. But Caro said that movies were not art, and that I should do a metal piece in order to my master's." Faced with Caro's non-negotiable dictum, Lamelas remade his 1966 sculpture 'Señalamiento de tres objetos '(Signaling of Three Objects) which involved placing a series of metal plaques at regular intervals around three objects, thereby "framing" them within an aesthetic space. With 'Señalamiento' and his brief return to "object-based" practice - a non-voluntary return that at the time might have felt more like a regression for an artist committed to what Lucy Lippard in a 1968 article termed the "dematerialization" of art - Lamelas nonetheless successfully foregrounds the ontological basis of his filmic practice, from 'A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space' (1969) onwards: "how the movie camera evokes meaning through framing". As Lamelas tells Bal-Blanc and Beause, "For me, cinema was a way of containing the world."

© Nick Fitch 2005

INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE BAL-BLANC & PASCAL BEAUSE

Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) (1972)

Below is a transcription of an interview with David Lamelas (DL), conducted on August 2nd 2004 by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Pascal Beause (BBB) as part of The Screen Effect, a series of screenings at CAC Bretigny. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and CAC Bretigny.

Bal-Blac and Beausse: In your work, the image appears above all by way of the light from a projector or television; how was the transition between object and image produced back then, around 1967?

David Lamelas: It's an evolution of my sculpture practice. I studied the traditional forms of visual arts at the Fine Arts school in Buenos Aries: painting, sculpture, etc., but none of these forms turned out to be complete for me, none of them satisfied me. Then I wanted to finish with objects. And that's how I came around to light, which allowed me to produce sculptural forms without any physical volume. This way, I did away with the object's material aspect. I wanted to work with ideas, with concepts. Above all I wanted an active viewer.

BBB: Do you consider, as Godard did, that the viewer should complete a task?

DL: Absolutely. If not, it isn't interesting. I myself have always been an active viewer. And I want viewers of my work to be active as well. I give them the indications and they complete their own work.

BBB: Is there a principle of equivalence between different media in your working method?

DL: I quickly made a list on a sheet of paper of the different possibilities for each piece: painting, drawing, sculpture, literature, film, etc. It is no coincidence when I make a film, a book or a painting. The ideas are there beforehand, the intentions, and then I reflect about what the best medium is in order to bring them to fruition.

BBB: What are those intentions?

DL: They're there in relation to what I see; in life, in museum halls... It's about making abstractions of daily life.

BBB: It has often been commented that your work is inscribed in post-minimalism, but that it's formulated in a very specific way. In 'Pantalla y situación del tiempo' (Screen and Situation of Time), the media tool is used as a light diffuser, in a negation of the information that supposeDLy should be transmitted.

DL: The information is that of the light itself. There is always information. Even when there isn't any. In this case we have the information of an absence of information.

BBB: In a case of the inverse, in 1968, in Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: the Visual Image Text and Audio at the Venice Biennial, there is an abundance of informative facts and deeds, permanently renewed.

DL: Yes, but I saw them in an abstract way. I didn't want to make art that was political. I chose the topic because it was the most important information at the time. I didn't want to make something against the Vietnam War. It would not have been my choice to be a critic of the political system at that moment. It was the information itself that interested me.

BBB: Is it the same case with the last part of A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space -your first film, made in 1969- where you make a mini sidewalk [survey] with Londoners about the day's event, the first man to walk on the Moon?

DL: That was also accidental. It was the most important event of the day. I didn't want to make an active critique of the political dimension of these events. That's something that has never interested me.

BBB: And in the case of your ‘Interview' with Marguerite Duras, did you choose her because she represented the French intellectual situation at the time?

DL: She interested me because I had seen her films and read her books. I saw a link between conceptual art and literature then, for the way Duras employed text. And she represented the French literary avant garde. It was not Duras' personna that interested me, the film is not a portrait of her. What interested me was her work with text.

BBB: Was the objective of the interview the form in and of itself, or its content?

DL: The idea was to hold an interview, its form and procedure interested me a great deal because it deals with a manner of speaking and of understanding certain things. I took photos of her at regular intervals. And I show them with the film and the text, where what she says is transcribed. It is a decomposition of the interview in order to reach a written form, which is her way of working, at the exact same moment when conceptual artists are using language as a form of art.

BBB: With Publication in 1970, you held an exhibition in the form of a book.

DL: Yes, the book was the exhibition. I had been invited to London by Nigel Greenwood, who wanted a classic exhibition. I proposed making a book, equivalent to an exhibition, to him. At the time I knew many artists who were using language. I made a list and sent each of them a letter proposing that they work with me on the project. They all said yes, with the exception of Ann Darboven. For example, Daniel Buren, Michel Claura and Lawrence Weiner participated… I proposed a questionnaire with three "statements" on language as an art form. Their responses made up the book, which was shown as an exhibition. Accordingly, I was the artist, but also the curator.

BBB: In regard to a Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space, it is a film in the form of an exhibition, deconstructing the very space where it takes place.

DL: Yes, I was invited to the Camden Arts Centre for The Environment Show. I wanted to do an exhibition about the environment that my work was going to be shown in. I made a film because it was the simplest way to show the space and the art center's activity. At first I had thought of showing photos and sound tracks, but later it seemed simpler to combine everything in a film.

BBB: The film's structure is linked to the way that Perec worked through concentric circles in Espèces d'espaces, beginning with his room and finally winding up with the cosmos. Poetry is born out of a system that tends to demonstrate that everything is interwoven. In your film, scale is exploded. It separates from rational elements and reaches an almost quasi-fiction.

DL: In the end, it's life itself which returns to its course. And at that moment I found fiction to be a medium practically inseparable from cinema. Even in making a documentary, the procedures of film -cuts, editing, etc.- produce fiction. Following this work, I made several films with the idea of reading in front of the camera. I was very interested in views on the relationship between film and words. Later I understood that I had to work with fiction. How can you fragment a fiction in order to understand it, to restructure it? And, there's always reality in fiction.

BBB: This constant give and take between fiction and documentation marks your cinematic practice.

DL: Yes, when I began The Desert People, I wanted to make two separate films, one of which would have the characteristics of a documentary, and the other, fiction. And when I mounted the two films together, a story appeared. My desire was to make a film where the protagonists would speak to the camera about an experience that they hadn't actually experienced: the story of a week-long stay with the Papago Indian tribe. And another film where these five characters are seen traveling somewhere in a car. They are two completely separate ideas that constitute a story when alternately edited together. In the case of the first film, the story told in front of the camera, we worked beforehand with the actors, one of whom actually was a Papago Indian who had lived with the tribe, while the others were city people -from Los Angeles, New York, etc.- and had nothing to do with that native indian civilization. The actors and I met with Mani various times, so that he could tell us about what life in the native tribes was like. Each actor then constructed their own character based on what he related as well as their own imagination. The film turned out to be a documentary about each one of the actors. The only one who tells the truth is Mani, who lived the drama of the disjunction between his own indigenous culture and white North American culture in the flesh. He is who gives the film its spirit.

BBB: With regard to the other actors, each one gave their own version of what they were capable of reconstructing using the Mani's source as a starting point. There is a distortion, then, of the original information, a bit like in Time in 1970, where you show people telling one another what time it is.

DL: Yes, it is a bit like that. Beginning with a basic piece of concrete information, a fiction is possible, as a function of the errors that intervene in the chain of transmission.

BBB: Upon being transmitted, the information is deformed and converted into rumor.

DL: That's what interests me about this form of production. Finally, a film takes on a life of its own, its own dimension. When I saw The Desert People for the first time, I was surprised, because it wasn't me who had wound up producing it, but the protagonists themselves! It made itself.

BBB: The surprising thing is that the film takes on the form of cinema-verité, with the sequence of testimonies facing the camera, and the trip sequences fictionalize it, setting the pace until reaching the surprise ending.

DL: Absolutely! In conventional cinema, looking straight at the camera is taboo. If the actor is looking at the camera, whatever he says is accepted as being true. It is a testimony, a confession. For me it was about changing these codes. It's also television's secret, where journalists and politicians look straight at the camera. The more they lie, the more they look at the camera!

BBB: When you arrived in the United States you discovered dominant culture by watching television.

The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare (2002-5)

DL: Yes, it was a medium for studying the culture and for living on art. I wasn't familiar with this culture. The discovery came as a great shock. Watching films on television interested me a great deal, the "Late Show" movies. Every night I would watch three films, the first at midnight, the second at three o'clock in the morning and the third at five. I was working on The Desert People at the time. So everything became related. The idea was to bring two cultures that didn't comprehend one another into contact. In London, while I prepared the idea for this film, I read lots of anthropology studies about the comprehension of other cultures. And when I arrived in Los Angeles, I understood that it was impossible to understand another culture. Even though you tried to. The Desert People is a film about the impossibility of comprehension. That's why the film ends with two of the characters dying in the car accident. And I understood this while I shot it, seeing the constant conflict between Mani and the actors.

BBB: He is the only one who gives a credible version of reality.

DL: Yes, and at the same time, you never know. He had already been overtaken by North American culture. And when he realized that he would never be able to understand this culture, he left Los Angeles and went back to live with his people, in the tribe. He never saw the film, and I never saw him again. This relationship of incomprehension is evidenced by the use of road-movie codes, where the opening sequence refers to initiation trip film genre, the [rite of ] passage through space. And this trip culminates in nothing, if not for the accident, falling off of a cliff. That car is the symbol of American civilization!

BBB: And the metaphor for cinema itself, as well. A machine that registers and distributes information about itself.

DL: Yes, like all machines, cameras, planes, automobiles, all means for getting somewhere.

BBB: Does the conflictive relationship between the medium and the message recur in your work?

DL: Yes, absolutely. It is exactly the same problem that exists between the five characters in that car with air conditioning and all its 20th Century comforts, listening to muzak music, headed toward a primitive tribe that they cannot comprehend because the truth is that it no longer exists.

BBB: And you realize that the means that permit them to reach that tribe, the car, the highway, are the same things that are destroying it. The road devours the end of the trip, that you never get to see.

DL: And Mani also has a false idea of the tribe, which he speaks of in a romanticized way. With a kind of nostalgia for what he has left behind, for what he's lost.

BBB: Throughout the film, you affirm your own way of observing a new continent and of making your work evolve by changing your place of residence. Your work is reconfigured by the displacement.

DL: It remains very clear in The Desert People. I had never been in the USA. I wanted to make the film as soon as I arrived, after having lived seven years in London, even before understanding that new culture for myself. The film wouldn't have been the same one year later. The film is my own discovery of American culture.

BBB: And your preceding films: Film Script, Manipulation of Meaning, etc. had already led the way for The Desert People.

DL: Yes, absolutely. Everything began with the film about Duras.

BBB: The interview with Duras allows us to see the interview system as well as Duras' personality.

DL: The two are inseparable.

BBB: The same thing happens with Time as Activity, where what you have to look at is not the neighborhood.

DL: That's right. I wanted to register time. For me, cinema was a way of containing the world.

BBB: In Time as Activity, you show portions of time as a material.

DL: Yes, it is a material. There are very interesting things of this type in The Desert People, for example, the relation that exists between the photographed and filmed images of the Papago tribe and their relation to us, the audience. There's the story of an old indigenous woman who had been photographed, for example. And when the photographer developed the image, it wasn't her, but a snake. It turns out that the crafts that she made always represented snakes. And it's true, because they believe that when you take a picture of someone, not only do you take their image, but their spirit as well. Mani himself used to say that it was very bad to let yourself be photographed. And at the end of the film, he really disappears. He's only in my film. It's strange. It isn't the first time that it's happened to me ... I work with someone and then I never see them again...

BBB: The image replaces the world, things, people. Like in 'Los carabineros' by Godard, where postcards are equivalent to acts of possessing countries and monuments seen by those soldiers who don't differentiate between reality and its representation.

DL: I believe that there is something very powerful, incomprehensible, in the relation between image and reality.

BBB: Is that what led you to subtitle Film Script as Manipulation of Meaning?

DL: That simply means that the meaning of an image can be changed through editing.

BBB: You made a critique of the media very early on, when they [didn't] constitute the power we know them to be today.

DL: I never was a believer in the media.

BBB: Very early you were aware that it was necessary to analyze this, deconstruct it and develop certain resistance to this machine.

DL: Yes, for me it was natural, even as a child when I looked at the newspaper, I already knew that it was fiction. I always understood it as that. I believe that art is a very good way of understanding it. If you look at Las Meninas, by Velázquez, for example, you know that the world wasn't like that, as if it were a theatrical construction. Art is a manner of making the world glamorous or of criticizing it.

BBB: And you chose the route of critique.

DL: At times with a bit of glamour as well. Glamour is inseparable from reality!

BBB: This can be found above all in London Friends, where you photography your friends like pop stars in Rock Star, in Violent Tapes... as well. Even the character of Marguerite Duras was very "glamour"! This is what differentiates you a great deal from many North American conceptual artists beside whom you have exhibited. You manage to integrate a living, subjective dimension into works that are nonetheless very radical. The works you produced during the Conceptualist era give the impression of having a life of their own, of developing over time with an awareness of their duration, their connotation. On the contrary to the cold, bureaucratic aesthetic of conceptual artists from the East Coast of the U.S., you inject a sensuality into your work that gives the concept warmth.

DL: The concept isn't everything. For example, in The Violent Tapes from 1975 or in the films I am making now, there is an analysis that uses the language of photography, or film or fashion... because everything is within our reach and as an artist I use that. It isn't extraordinary.

BBB: But what winds up being interesting is the fact that you do not exclude certain parameters. For example, in The Violent Tapes... or Film Script, you include parameters of fashion - or parameters that would have the connotation of fashion.

DL: Yes, because it's important! For example, the form in a work by Brancusi is not an end, but a means in order to get somewhere. For The Violent Tapes from 1975, I studied film photos a great deal during months. Then I would draw story-boards for each photo.

BBB: There you exploited the codes from a language that developed in an involuntary manner, photography that exploits cinematographic film, as Cindy Sherman would do later with her Film Stills.

DL: Yes, it became an autonomous aesthetic in the world of popular culture. For example, these photos that generated a fiction, that told a story, were then used by Helmut Newton in the world of fashion.

BBB: There is some relation evident between The Violent Tapes from 1975 and Rock Star (Character Appropriation) where you represent yourself in all the archetypes of rock star icons in ecstasy, up on the stage.

DL: It's a bit different, but the question is also the process of a character's transformation.

BBB: Were you working on the language of pop attitudes there?

DL: Yes, I lived in London then and that image was that of English culture of that era. Everyone in the world wanted to be that image. That's when I decided to make a photo of myself like that, like a rock star. And that I am -in the photo-, because photos are the truth!

BBB: You observed the phenomenon of individuals conforming, in their appearance and attitudes, in spectacular models?

DL: My fascination for Hollywood also had somewhat of a hand in that. But when I arrived in Los Angeles, the Hollywood reality didn't exist. In London, you ran into people who looked like stars in all the cafés. They lived like that. But in Los Angeles, that phenomenon didn't exist in real life. That was something only to be found in movie theaters. There is no connection between reality and the big screen. Between popular culture and the real life of the people. That mix isn't there. Today, this is increasingly true. It's like the culture: in the USA, its an issue for university students. It has no relation with the normal life of the people. Everything remains inside an intellectual ghetto. And it was hard for me to comprehend this.

BBB: Because you were making a very lucid verification of that fracture. What place is there for an artist in that society of spectacle, of entertainment?

DL: There wasn't any room for artists.

BBB: What was it that led you to Hollywood?

DL: The idea of comprehending the procedure of fiction fascinated me. How had such great importance come to be given to fiction? To such a point that it invaded the world, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, from Paris to London. I wanted to know what the reason behind the power of these images was. But it didn't exist. In only exists on the screen.

BBB: That is the verification that Balard made in The Atrocity Exhibition, of the power of media images, the monstrosity of show business and media icons in the public sphere, dominating individuals, who are offered one single model, made up of stereotypes. What effect did this awareness have on your work?

DL: It generated new forms. I believe that art always winds up being outside show business' grand discourse. But I'm content with that. Art has always been like that. I myself came to believe that it was possible to reach Hollywood and to make my films. Just like everyone else, for me, Hollywood was a fiction. But there isn't any place for artists in the commercial system of Hollywood movies.

BBB: Nevertheless, at one point during the ‘90s, it was believed to have become possible, when Robert Longo or Schnabel seemed to have the authority to make films within that system.

DL: But actually, they were careers that lasted one or two films, with low budgets, made in New York. Many artists have tried to make films. But the truth is that it's something that Hollywood has never accepted.

BBB: Is that what brought you to television, with The Hand?

DL: I watched a lot of television, and what fascinated me the most were talk shows, where people speak with the accent of truth. It was spectacle showed as if it were reality. So I invented a talk show titled "The Newsmakershow", a parody of American television when it wants to hanDLe political issues from time to time, but transforming them into spectacle. Actually, I had the idea in London and I finally produced it five years later in Los Angeles, in 1976. The Hand is about terrorism. It is the story of a rock star who returns to Los Angeles to return to the stage, ten years after having disappeared from show business. Since the reasons for his return awaken a great deal of suspicion, the police search his hotel room and find three suitcases full of arms and explosives. A reporter interrogates him on television. He says that they are part of his private collection. And right at the moment when he is about to tell the truth, they kill him. This was during the period of investigative reporting, at the time of Watergate, when the press had new power. It is a film about the impossibility of knowing the truth.

BBB: This kicked off a series of videos, on which you worked during a number of years, on issues related to current political and media events. All the videos take on the question of the form in which American television views international politics, always in relation to a dictator who must be eliminated -the Shah of Iran, Marcos, etc. The dictator figure has left a mark on my life, being from Argentina. My family had left Spain because of Franco, and later in Buenos Aires Perón appeared. Dictators have always been in my repertoire as a kind of phantasm. A dictator provokes a feeling of admiration. A dictator is the image of the strong man. But in fact a dictator is a victim, product of the system that does away with him when he no longer serves their purpose. In history all over the world it has always been like that. All this was inspired by Barbara Walters, who was the first female reporter who interviewed important figures such as Fidel Castro. I created the Bárbara López character. For me parody was the best way to show the use that television made of dictators in order to gain a larger audience.

BBB: In these videos, you combine the soap opera genre with current events. You transfer the political figures evoked to the world of spectacle.

DL: Yes, I made them banal. Because for American television, it's the only acceptable way to see them. This then serves them in order to create fictions.

BBB: In what context did you show these films?

DL: They were distributed on cable television channels, just beginning at the time. It was a space with freedom. For example, the "Jewish Channel", and later "National Public Radio" scheduled them often, up to three or four times a day, like normal programming.

BBB: Can you talk a bit about how Time as Activity developed, which you began in 1969 in Dusseldorf and then took up again in Berlin in 1998?

DL: When I returned to Europe I met up again with old ideas and felt like developing them in other directions. Time as Activity was made as a function of the city that I live in. The architecture and urbanism interested me a great deal. To film Berlin from a plane was a way to show the city in the midst of transformation. And of course, the film is seen in very different ways depending on what city it is shown in.

BBB: In Bretigny, your use of the light emitted by projectors developed very neo-Platonic ideas. The idea of extended cinema can be found there, connected to the architecture.

DL: I transformed the space of the art center with the aim of achieving a projection room where the work would be made visible. The concrete corridor that I add to the art center's architecture becomes a permanent sculpture, independent from the exhibition. That's why it proves interesting. It isn't a decoration. The work takes on a life of its own. I like art that gains its own presence. Works should develop their own consciousness.

BBB: This coincides with what Severo Sarduy says: "Lamelas' objective is the event, or more precisely: Lamelas' work constitutes and annuls itself (in so far as an art object) by way of an ‘analytic practice' of the event". You manage to create an event that engenders its own situation.

DL: That's the case with Bretigny. For me seeing the exhibition was a surprise. This is due to my practice with space. In another era, I would have been a sculptor.

BBB: But couldn't you say that you sculpt time, duration?

DL: Space! Space is time, it's the same thing. Time doesn't exist, our consciousness constructs it. Time is a fiction, it doesn't exist. But space has a reality, it exists.

BBB: So you sculpt space, then?

DL: I live in space!