Thanks to curator Pablo de Ocampo for his email interview conversation with Deborah Stratman conducted during March and April 2014.
My work explores life’s intangible forces—memory,
PDO
Deborah, I’m really thrilled that you’ve been recognized with this award as I’ve been a huge fan and supporter of your work for some time now. I wanted to actually begin by asking a question I use when leading workshops and talks about cinema, which is to ask you to share a memorable or defining moment you have of watching a film. I don’t so much mean the film itself, but something about the experience of watching it: the context, the architecture, the weather, etc.
Employing both aromatic incense and robotics, she creates haunting milieus where spectators confront erosion, decay, and rupture. Yet embedded in her work is also the act of repair: in filling her late brother’s 1993 Nissan pickup truck with his music, voice memos, and candy-colored visuals, she transforms it into a mobile mortuary temple and a ritual of remembrance, bridging personal mourning with collective expression.
My work explores life’s intangible forces—memory,
DS
I was in the cinema with my family watching Dumbo when my mom went into labor with my youngest brother, Dave. I guess I would have been about nine. That was pretty memorable. Especially since my brother was arriving two months early. Dad’s good at kicking into efficient triage mode during chaotic, stressful scenarios, so all came out fine in the end. But we had to leave the film when things were still really grim for Dumbo, before he realizes he can fly, which I recall was very troubling.
In terms of defining my practice, one of the more memorable experiences was circa 1987, taking a class with Peter Kubelka. I was an undergrad, just transferred to art from what had been a physics trajectory, and I had no idea who he was. He projected his film Unsere Afrika Reise from a flatbed for the entire semester, breaking it down cut by cut. It was a radical immersion in synchresis, contextual slippage, transplantation, manipulating temporal pressure, choreographing the gaze… basically, a cinematic grammar 101. It instilled in me a love of something beyond literary or theatrical tropes, a kind of pure cinema.
PDO
We’ve talked before about the idea of suspension in relationship to your film Kings Of The Sky and I wanted to revisit that idea and ask you to respond to that idea in the broader context of your work. I’m thinking here both of other direct visual images – like your use of Niagara Falls in “O’er the Land” – but also of suspension as a phenomenological experience of sound that permeates so much of your work.
My work explores life’s intangible forces—memory,
DS
Suspension, yes. It’s a resilient theme for me. I think about it on a number of registers, many of which seem to make cinema possible.
Suspension of belief. Suspension of time – internally to the film, how the filmmaker stretches and compresses it, or externally, when viewers relinquishes their personal time to enter the film’s. I think about suspension in terms of gravity, or when gravity is resisted. The story of Colonel Rankin in “O’er the Land”, for instance. Or the levitating man who appears in Immortal, Suspended, in the center of T’ang Yin’s painting. The title of the painting suggests that he is levitating because he is immortal, and so outside of time. I think of suspension in terms of a cut, where an action is arrested, so not subject to the normal laws and forces that affect bodies. But it could also be, as you suggest with the Niagara Falls shot, a durational experience that changes yet remains the same – an image that aspires to the condition of a drone.
Then there’s suspension as preservation, bugs in amber or objects in museums or ideas in books. And suspension as cessation, whether the stoppage be permanent or temporary. When I consider it this way, I start recognizing suspension as a potential force, like with a general strike.
Of course, there’s also the phenomenon of suspense, one of the primary engines of cinema, and sound is extremely facile in this realm of tension building. I love audio for its capacity to manipulate our expectations, but also for how it somatically evokes place. I hear grasshoppers, a distant lawnmower, kids playing, leaves moving in the wind, maybe a far away plane…and I effortlessly imagine a hot summer afternoon, sitting in the prickly grass. Incidentally, sound can be used to levitate objects! It’s called acoustic levitation. Small objects placed in the crosshairs of oscillators on x-y-z axes get trapped in the wave pattern and appear to float.
Z Tech
PDO
Acoustic levitation! Your knowledge base continually amazes me. It’s something that is so striking in your work, the way in which you draw on these expansive systems of knowledge, both scientific and worldly yet create work that seems to transcend knowing. This acoustic levitation idea is such a perfect example of that, capturing this slippage in which scientific knowledge and magic come together. Could you talk more about this idea of slippage?
