by Annalisa Giacinti, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Sept. 27, 2024
On a recent early autumn morning, still sunny yet deceivingly warm, I walked to Eli Cortiñas’ studio in Neukölln. As I reached her floor, she welcomed me with a beaming smile, while funky music played from the end of the hall, and threads of sunlight inundated the kitchen inside. At her place, it seemed, summer was still around. In her office, I took a seat on a yellow couch while she sat at her long desk. She’s enthusiastic, yet collected, remarkably focused when she speaks. Countless books are crammed into two shelves behind her, and large posters from her collage projects hang on the walls.
Her exhibition at Fotografiska, ‘The Machine Monologs – Part I: The Storm,’ opened in August. It consists of a multichannel installation that examines the relationship between technology and humanity; the presence of biases in the former, the necessity to project human narratives manifested by the latter. Inspired by the research of American scholar Julie Carpenter on human forms of attachments to artificial knowledge, Cortiñas stages monologues delivered by robots through the medium of video essays and shorter, experiential videos. The show is a speculation on their consciousness and sentience, where she asks the audience: “Do [the machines] have a soul? Are they able to produce their own thinking, and what will happen if they’re able to come up with ideas that differ from the way humans handle our planet?” She draws from the postcolonial legacy of Frantz Fanon, who studied the physical and psychological effects of colonialism and oppression on colonized bodies, to probe the geopolitical and ecological consequences of the pervasive surveillance wielded by AI.
‘The Machine Monologs’ is a multilayered research developed from earlier projects, though this is the first time the machines get to do the talking. Cortiñas crafts her videos by piecing together new and found footage, stock images with archival ones. At this point she’s built a substantial archive of material, some of which she occasionally reuses. “Every time I look at the images differently, because I change, my ideas change, the world changes.” Her long-standing fascination with images concerns how they circulate, where and in which material conditions they’re produced, the production value behind them, as well as the historical context in which they are originally received. In light of the present-day content creation mania, she considers, “Everybody is making images but who’s looking at them?”
Her creative process originates from a topic she wants to research, but when it comes to selecting imagery, she relies on a clear visual language and the spontaneous influence of serendipity to shape her work. Later, in the editing phase, she elaborates her intention informed by what she’s been reading alongside. “By the end it becomes a big collage of paraphrases and my own conclusions,” woven together through an intense back and forth between visuals and texts. Everything is copy, the motto goes. Cortiñas collects material all the time, she admits sheepishly, “I’m the worst person to go to the cinema with! A film needs to be really good to make me forget I’m looking at images I could potentially appropriate!”
For her latest project, which took her about a year to make, the video artist used primarily stock images. “What was very telling was how incredibly biased the production of those images is,” she says. She recalls that it was almost impossible to find any Black or POC avatars that were as well animated and without any signs of othering and mystification; difficult to find diversity overall. “We think that we live in a very diverse world but actually the images that are produced and circulate are not that diverse.”
Cortiñas’ career started out in cinema, she was originally interested in fiction and wanted to be a director, before working as a documentary editor and discovering how malleable reality is, that narratives can be constructed, even truth manipulated. “You realize you can make 20 films out of the same material; you develop a certain sense of looking for what the material is actually telling, and it becomes a search for signs and symbols and how to make them appear.” Naturally, editing became the way she writes, a system of assembling ideas and events into a narrative with a plot. “Montage is absolutely everything, it’s how you enter a room, the way you talk.”
She takes care of pretty much every step of the video production, even sourcing the music. She finds the sound for her videos, while someone else mixes it for her, or she collaborates with musicians. Sometimes she’s assisted by one or two people, who help her pull back from the overwhelming feeling of being submerged in footage and assist with the production of the exhibitions. Mostly, though, she loves to work alone: her ideal day starts off with a walk, which helps her metabolize what she’s been consuming. She goes to a cafè, she reads.
The work of Frantz Fanon is a continuous source of inspiration. For Fotografiska, Cortiñas referenced ‘How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body’ by Matthew Beaumont, which revisits Fanon’s politics of the body through a contemporary lens. Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado is another important literary reference, as are Audre Lorde and Angela Davis. However, Cortiñas doesn’t believe that academia is the only site of knowledge production and collection, in fact, she asserts, everything we do is knowledge. Her mother’s family migrated from Cuba to the Canary Islands, Spain, and she understood at an early age how much knowledge happens through sharing and storytelling, especially amongst women. Her great grandmother was a healer who used plants, her mum a tarot reader, and Cortiñas absorbed some of that wisdom and instilled it into her practice (her work ‘Walls Have Feelings’ (2019) evokes the animist power of objects and interiors, and questions their role as witnesses, protectors and amplifiers of power).
Cortiñas teaches Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, yet she is critical of her role as a professor, and inhabits it with a radical bearing. “When you have been reading a lot and you want to speak about certain topics, sometimes the risk is ending up at the place of illustrating to make a point; the world becomes a display of things you’re trying to prove. And academic knowledge is oftentimes rooted in violent epistemologies that I vehemently refuse.” Instead, she wants her work to engage people, and her students to challenge the constructions within which they learn; her experience not to become dogmatic but wobble and get uncertain, just like her pupils do.
Her practice is a critical meditation on our relationship with technology, the systems that sustain it—warfare, extractivism, capitalism, colonialism—and our increasing reliance on it. Her videos adopt a postcolonial, intersectional and feminist perspective, and succeed in deconstructing myths, patriarchal narratives—one of her next projects debunks the traditional roles of service and care-labor historically assigned to women and perpetuated through the feminization of AI—as well in imagining alternative futures built around solidarity and mutual care.
Being hopeful is not always easy, though. “I’m oscillating, like everybody, I’m trying not to get depressed.” Poetry, moments of beauty and political change fuel her artistic drive. She alludes to Toni Morrison’s words to position herself as an artist: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” Cortiñas has surrounded herself by a community of people, friends, allies and fellow artists who made her realize how interdependent we all are. “I wouldn’t say I’m an optimist, a utopist, but I’m somewhere there in the critical hope department. Sometimes I lose it, like everybody else, but then I say, ‘Ok, it’s our responsibility and privilege to keep going.’”
Exhibition Info
Fotografiska
Eli Cortiñas: ‘The Machine Monologs – Part 1: The Storm’
Exhibition: Aug. 23-Dec. 1, 2024
berlin.fotografiska.com
Oranienburger Str. 54, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
