Gui Marcondes is a filmmaker and photographer living and working in New York, USA and São Paulo, Brazil. Trained as an Architect, he started his career as an illustrator and later migrated to animation and photography. In 2020 his multidisciplinary Myrtle Project was part of the Magnum Photos development workshop with photographer Moises Saman and Time Maganize editor Paul Moakley. GIRA, his photobook series self-published since 2017 is part of the permanent collection of the Instituto Moreira Salles Library in São Paulo.

Out in the world, no one sleeps

When and why this particular project?

GM: This is a fairly recent project I have been working on since October last year but it has been fermenting in my mind for a while. Pre-election anxiety made it surface. The title could be translated as “Out in the world, no one sleeps”. It is taken from a verse of the poem “Ciudad Sin Sueño” (“Dreamless City” or “Sleepless City”) by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca who lived briefly in NY at the end of 1929 while the stock market crashed. His poems tell the horror, wonder and anxiety of walking in the city during that period. They are deeply personal, overtly political, and very surreal. I felt a connection with his walks.

“The title could be translated as “Out in the world, no one sleeps”. It is taken from a verse of the poem “Ciudad Sin Sueño” (“Dreamless City” or “Sleepless City”) by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca who lived briefly in NY at the end of 1929 while the stock market crashed”

You mentioned that photographing the city these days feels like documenting a cemetery. How distress and loneliness affects your creative process? (ie., comparing the vibrant city and excitement of packed crowds in the past)

That cemetery comment was made about a project I did back in June when they boarded up a bunch of stores in Soho because of the protests and the streets were completely empty, like a cemetery of “Capitalism”, if you will. In any case that sentiment extends to the whole period of last year, except that I don’t think the city as a whole is dying. Systems rise and fall and people live through it, make the best of it. I saw plenty of life in my walks in the streets of Brooklyn and Queens during this period. It’s not the glamorous life of cinematic NY, it’s more what Brazilian writer Luiz Antônio Simas calls “inventar a vida na fresta”, something like “to invent life between the cracks”, like hardy weed on the sidewalk. I felt alienated from my own bubble of people I normally meet in the endless procession of “networking” events in NY but on the other hand I could use that time to explore the city more. I ended up walking in every neighborhood in Brooklyn.

“ It’s not the glamorous life of cinematic NY, it’s more what Brazilian writer Luiz Antônio Simas calls “inventar a vida na fresta”, something like “to invent life between the cracks”

What does concepts such as industrialism-consumerism mean to you? How have they influenced your photography these days?

I have been thinking about the commodification of images. We produce so many images it is hard to fixate on anything. I want to use a metaphor lifted from the Theranos documentary, from all places. If you saw that film you know it’s about a fraudulent Silicon Valley startup, but that is not important here. What is interesting is the ingenious way they explain the impact of their product, a portable blood test machine. They compare a blood test to a “snapshot” of your health. We normally take one “snapshot” of our blood per year, at most. They represent this by a static picture of a human being. But what if we could test ourselves at home, more regularly? The static picture starts being replaced by other poses increasingly forward in time, just like a Muybridge motion study. The individual pictures cease to matter and from the flickering frames a dancing human figure arises. In its medical application the test would produce a similar “film” of your health were you could finally track emerging trends, visualize changes, detect patterns. Those things would be impossible to perceive in a single picture stuck in time. In a similar way, our culture reached such a level of acceleration that the narrative experience of navigating something like Instagram tramples over the value of the individual images contained in it. What we are really looking at are not the photographs themselves, but the flow between them, like a dance. We perceive the movement of the trends and patterns rising and falling in front of our eyes. I think this contains a beautifully radical idea of a collective production of culture that makes individual artists (the “genius”) obsolete as we all flow together in the ether creating art. Unfortunately, in the real world, huge corporations control, exploit and almost uniquely profit from this process. I am in awe of the forced obsolescence this causes and this has been popping up on my work lately in the form of abandoned places, construction sites, discarded objects, broken statues, faded signs etc.

“Initially the game was exactly not to produce any new images but to treat my own images as they were “discarded” or “found” images. That freed me to play around, destroy and repurpose them without the weight of the original meaning I attributed to them”

Is this project more experimental than prior photo projects you’ve done before?

I guess so. If by experimental you mean doing something without a plan and seeing where it leads, I think all street photography is somewhat experimental in content because you are inspired by whatever you bump into as opposed to journalism or documentary where you tend to have some kind of planned framework to approach an event. On the other hand, in terms of aesthetics, street photography has a tendency to use very objective and traditional forms of representation. It’s not a complaint, often the strength of the work comes exactly from the confrontation of something bizarre or absurd happening and the matter-of-fact way it is presented. Because I am a visual artist also working with animation and film, from time to time I get restless about the purely formal aspects of my work and I want to break this objectivity into something more graphic and dreamlike. There are many ways of doing it, of course. These montages are my own way of addressing the need for visual experimentation.

“ I think all street photography is somewhat experimental in content because you are inspired by whatever you bump into as opposed to journalism or documentary where you tend to have some kind of planned framework to approach an event. On the other hand, in terms of aesthetics, street photography has a tendency to use very objective and traditional forms of representation”

Any reference point in these photos and their sequencing? How does this inform your decision making process when you go outside to take photos or when you put together a collage?

Initially the game was exactly not to produce any new images but to treat my own images as they were “discarded” or “found” images. That freed me to play around, destroy and repurpose them without the weight of the original meaning I attributed to them. That “second life of the image” was directly inspired by what Stepháne Duroy did to his own book “Unknown”. Ten years later the published “Unknown #2” where he cut, painted over, re-ordered, and combined images from the original book, creating a second one that is both a commentary on the first and a totally new project. When I discovered his work I was “Wow, you can do that!” and went on to chop and screw my own photos. In the end my montages are absolutely different from what he has done. By looking at it you would never guess they are directly indebted to his work and I think there is some beauty in that fact.

Eventually, on a second moment, I felt the urge to bring new images into the mix. I noticed certain textures worked well and I was curious about some other elements like fading signage, ripped up posters, paint spills, graffiti etc. They are like marks, scars, disappearing messages you can find on the skin of the city. At that point I was consciously collecting those images even though when I create the montages the process is anything but rational. It is pretty much a flow of consciousness. I’m just playing around, really. Of course the fun is in the delicate dance between what you control and what you don’t. I drop images in Photoshop and let them clash. Then I work on how much abstraction versus figuration there is in each image, if I will use the human body or not, text or no text and many other things. I start seeing some patterns I don’t really understand at first, but you can feel them and I adjust the ingredients to get closer to that feeling. I guess it’s a little bit like cooking too.

Is there any particular collage-photograph that has a strong personal or political meaning to you?

There is no direct political message in this work, in the sense of a clear opinion on worldly matters. These are more about the emotional effect of the current situation on me. I am constantly reading about politics, as most people must be doing right now, but I am more concerned about the internal effects of these external circumstances. Not only my internal life, or course, but culture in general. I am aware this is a position of privilege because I still have a job, a roof, I’m not sick or under any imminent risk of bodily harm and on top of that I have time for thinking and making art. Still, psychological and spiritual aspects are important and a lot of our internal life is already trapped inside the clout-hole of the internet, getting packaged into suspiciously easy slogans and “right” things to say. It really looks like there is nothing beyond the colonizing power of these technologies, not even our dreams. The first name I gave this body of work was “Ferment” (a name I was luckily dissuaded from using during a photo group discussion) because of this haunting vision that we are standing in the dark over the putrefying carcass of the old world. The bad smell we can’t escape actually comes from the bacteria decomposing the corpse and paving the way for new life to come. So, I believe there is a silver lining in the long run, a new world to be born, but it smells so fucking bad right now. I think that’s why the images ended up different from traditional collages that are based on juxtaposition, and they look more like the dissolution of several forms swimming in and out of a primordial soup. I’m not sure what will come out of this “genesis of garbage”, to be honest. By no means I think I have successfully addressed these subjects in this work. I am merely giving you an idea of where they came from.

Do you have other sources of inspiration beyond photography (ie, sculpture, architecture, film, literature, etc) that are relevant to this project?

Yeah, absolutely. The first inspiration is the city itself. I studied Architecture and City Planning in college so I can’t escape seeing things from that angle. Besides Lorca, that I mentioned earlier, I can tell this project also unconsciously dipped into my sci-fi pool of references, writers like JG Ballard and Jeff VanderMeer, who have created wonderful worlds in dissolution. I can see hints of David Altmejd’s sculptures, 80s japanese animation like Akira, Max Ernst paintings, etchings from Brazilian artists Evandro Carlos Jardim and Carlos Mubarac, the music of english artist Burial and many other stuff that scapes me right now. It’s really a patchwork of stuff! I also have to say, I am indebted to my commercial animation work where I was trained to create photoshop montages really quickly to show clients. It sure feels good to use those skills somewhere else.

“I have been thinking about the commodification of images. We produce so many images it is hard to fixate on anything. I want to use a metaphor lifted from the Theranos documentary, from all places”

What is the end in mind with these photographs? Is this an ongoing project? What’s up next …

I don’t know yet. I made them in a kind of fever, almost one per day in the last couple of months. I am taking a break from it right now so I can come back to it and have a more distanced opinion. For the moment I’m back to “straight” street photography. I love making books so I definitely want to make a book of the montages eventually but I need to edit them down and maybe create new ones to tie in some kind of narrative. The important thing for me is that for the first time I was able to connect photography to my other visual practices. It feels like it is the beginning of something.

GUI MARCONDES

Out in the world, no one sleeps

ERICK PERES

JOÃO PEDRO LIMA