Time Takes a Cigarette
at Espaço MIRA, Porto
TIME TAKES A CIGARETTE
Video installation by Aya Koretzky
Text by Raquel Schefer (1)
Aya Koretzky's immersive video installation Time Takes a Cigarette, presented at Espaço Mira, takes as its starting point the short film of the same name made by the filmmaker in 2023. The title takes a verse from the first stanza of the song Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide, from the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, released by David Bowie in 1972: Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth / You pull on your finger / Then another finger, then cigarette / The wall-to-wall is calling / It lingers, then you forget. If the title evokes a precise historical and cultural context - the European music scene of the seventies, here approached from the perspective of the city of Porto - the quotation of the stanza from Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide immediately introduces certain conceptual assumptions of the installation, which are expressed in its forms and structures. The work takes a twofold approach to reconstitution as a way of representing history and memory, placing the past and the present in tension. In other words, if, on an internal, narrative level, Time Takes a Cigarette reconstructs fleeting moments from Porto's punk scene of the seventies and eighties in the present, photographically recorded, snapshots of a past time, the structure and exhibition elements recreate the atmosphere of the nightclubs of that historical period, offering the viewer a phenomenological and performative experience. Set against the backdrop of the great transformations in Portuguese society that took place after the 1974-1975 Revolution, Time Takes a Cigarette opposes any static conception of history. On the contrary, it works from a principle of transit and impermanence, which translates into the visitor moving around the exhibition space, looking in the present not for traces, but for updates of the past. In this way, the installation not only inscribes the history of Porto's youth counter-culture in the space of representation, but also scrutinises and inventories its parallels and current declinations.
The exhibition consists of a five-channel video installation, complemented by scenographic elements that aim to reconstitute the décor and atmosphere of the nightclubs of the seventies and eighties. Operating on a principle of fragmentation - division and dispersion of the different narrative lines of the 2023 short film —, Time Takes a Cigarette presents, on each of its five screens, tableaux vivants that recreate photographic archives of Porto's punk movement with young people from the city's current counter-cultural scene. The sequences are accompanied by the voice-over testimonies of young people from the seventies and eighties, vibrant evocations of the effervescence of that historical period, of the ethos and way of being in life of the Porto punk movement (2).
The complex narrative structure of the feature films Yama no Anata and Around the World When You Were My Age, directed by Koretzky in 2011 and 2018 respectively, already put the past and the present in tension from a dynamic temporal (and spatial) conception. In these two films, the filmmaker combined different modes of representation to reconstitute personal and family stories and memories, restoring them to their sensitive thickness, as lived and remembered experiences, sculpted on the material of collective history. The Time Takes a Cigarette exhibition transposes the formal system of the two feature films into the exhibition space, thus expanding and complexifying the spectator experience. If Time Takes a Cigarette brings painting (the tableaux vivants), photography and cinema as media into friction, creating entre-images (3), the structure and scenographic elements provide a sensitive reconstruction of the experience of the past. The work seems to claim a mobility of the historical gaze by linking the perspective of the young people of the past, represented photographically, the point of view of the characters who embody them in the present from a logic of non-coincidence and the view of the spectator herself, moving through the exhibition space. The archives of the past are not only recreated in the enunciative present, but also re-signified over successive time horizons, including in the sphere of reception of the installation.
The place of the spectator is therefore central to Time Takes a Cigarette. If re-enactment, as a way of representing history and memory in theatre and cinema, offers the viewer an active role in events, tearing open the horizon of time, Time Takes a Cigarette applies its foundations to the exhibition space. The installation gives the visitor, in effect, a position that transcends contemplation, inviting her to phenomenologically relive the experience of the past, mediated by its recreation in the enunciative present of the five videos. This gesture is not only aesthetically powerful, but also political and epistemological. If Dylan Clark considers that the culture industry has neutralised punk (4), Time Takes a Cigarette revitalises its political dimension by reactivating this counter-cultural movement both in the film sequences and in the exhibition space itself. The reactivation is enhanced by the spectatorial experience: an experience of participation and fruition that appeals to the spectator's perceptual structures and body. To paraphrase Artaud, Time Takes a Cigarette makes bodies and gazes dance (5).
(1) The author writes according to the old orthographic norm.
(2) Guerra, Paula. ‘Punk, action and contradiction in Portugal. An approach to contemporary youth cultures’. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 102 | 2013, published 10 April 2014, consulted 05 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/5486; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.5486.
(3) Bellour, Raymond. L’entre-images 1. Photo, cinéma, vidéo. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002; Bellour Raymond. L’entre-images 2. Mots, images. Paris: P.O.L., Trafic, 1999, translation by the author.
(4) Clark, Dylan.“ The Death and Life of Punk, the Last Subculture”. The Post-subcultures Reader / ed. by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl. Oxford: Berg, p. 227.
(5) Artaud, Antonin. Os Tarahumaras. Lisboa: Relógio dÁ’gua, 2000.