In artist Alice Miceli's work, the exploration of traumatized territories began with her 2010 Chernobyl project and expanded with the development of her 2014-2019 photographic series In Depth [minefields]. In her photographs, the camouflaged threat of the mines, invisible to the naked eye, takes on a new dimension. The landscapes photographed are the remnants of bloody conflicts, where underground mines are still detonated inadvertently after peace has been declared. The artist had access to contaminated unexploded fields in Cambodia, Colombia, Bosnia and Angola, and now presents chapters from Bosnia and Angola at Porto's Catholic University School of Arts.

IN A WORLD "SATURATED BY THE SPECTACULAR", THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMING THE INVISIBILITY OF DANGER INTO AN IMAGE INVOLVES QUESTIONING THE NATURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY ITSELF, AS WELL AS ITS POLITICAL EFFECTS AND LIMITATIONS.

It is necessary to have a close look at the images in order to grasp the details, as a quick glance cannot capture the subtle and sinister reality they represent. The artist's interest in these areas implies a deep study of both the form and content of her work-photography as a tool for questioning, and minefields as marks of unspeakable horrors and stories of death and suffering that remain part of individual and collective traumas.

By collaborating with de-mining agencies and organizations, the artist is able to set foot on land that has remained deadly hostile for decades. In doing so, she points to a gradual path toward possible recovery. In this conversation, recorded the day before the exhibition opening, artist Alice Miceli and curator Luiz Camillo Osório unfold the work, unravel its conceptual and logistical process, and reflect on the concept of depth as a multiple metaphor relating to the altered time and space that characterizes these landscapes that remain.

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Ana Salazar Herrera (AS): Alice, could you describe the project and the research behind it? When did it start, and how has it evolved over time?

Alice Miceli (AM): It's a long process. The whole project was carried out in four continents, where there is still the problem of territories occupied by landmines, by explosives left over from conflicts and wars. I started in 2014. The whole work deals with spaces in Cambodia, Colombia, Bosnia and Angola. 2014 was the beginning, and the first place I had access to was Cambodia, then Colombia, then Bosnia, and later Angola. Because it's a complex pre-production job to get access and plan what I needed to do in each of those places, it took a while of production, pre-production and then even production on location. It took from 2014 to 2018 to do all the traveling.

AS: Luiz, how did you get to know Alice's work and when did your collaboration begin? How did this exhibition in Porto come about?

Luiz Camillo Osorio (LCO): I was introduced to Alice's work at the São Paulo Biennial in 2010, when she first presented the Chernobyl project. I knew the person, but I didn't know the work, so that was my first introduction to what she was working on. In 2014, I was the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. We had a partnership with the PIPA Institute, which held the PIPA Contemporary Art Prize there. It's an important prize in Brazil, and Alice was one of the finalists, shortlisted, with the first part of the minefields, Cambodia. She was the eventual winner. I found the work enlightening, fascinating and interesting. Then I left the museum and went to the PIPA Institute as a curator. I talked to Alice, and we kept talking and making plans together. She still had to do the Angola part, and the institute asked her to go to Angola. Then in 2019, after completing the four stages on the four continents, we had an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro with the four parts of the minefields-Cambodia, Colombia, Bosnia, and Angola.

At that time, I was already working with the School of Arts here in Porto, with Nuno Crespo, and we had this idea: Let's do the Minefields here, thinking of this project not only as an exhibition, but also as a slightly larger project that would involve Alice's participation at the school with a workshop (which she has already done, it was a success) and with a seminar linked to the exhibition, which starts today, the spring seminar "Traumatic Landscapes". The idea was to do it in 2020/21, but with the pandemic, it didn't work out, so we're doing it now. And we decided to do only two parts, because not everything would fit in the exhibition space we have here. We thought it was important to show Angola in Portugal. We also thought Bosnia would be interesting because of the European geography and context in terms of the presence of landmines.

And finally, because we know this is a recurring problem, it was an unfortunate coincidence that this happened simultaneously with the war in Ukraine. The wars, all these wars are over, but unfortunately the landmines are the remnants of a war that does not end, of a territory traumatized and still exposed to this kind of violence with unexploded ordnance. And now we have it again in Europe, again here in the neighborhood, a violent armed conflict in progress.

AS: That answers my next question a little bit, which is how did you think about the exhibition here and the experience of the public, considering the Portuguese context?

AM: We had to adapt in terms of the size of the project, because it is a big project. It is a group of four series, some of which are larger than the others. They take up a certain amount of space to be shown in their entirety. So we had to make a choice. To add to what Camillo said: Angola was obviously something we wanted to show here in Portugal. It's something that I personally have always been curious about, because I didn't know any other former colonies of Portugal except Brazil. So it was a clear decision that we wanted to show Angola here. And Bosnia, it's a matter of the European context. Where is it in Europe that there is a serious problem of contamination by this kind of explosive material? And the place where this problem is most concentrated is Bosnia. This is because of the war in Yugoslavia. Finally, there is the dark coincidence that at the moment we have a war in which Russia, it seems, is using these weapons again in Ukraine.

In terms of the public, the exhibition is open to everybody. But I have a feeling that a large part of the audience here will be students from the school or people from the campus. So I think it will be interesting to have the cinema kids, the photography kids, the students directly involved in the thinking and making of images, to have them look at the work. Everybody is welcome.

AS: De-mining research, as you said, involves a lot of pre-production and is a dangerous process in itself. Getting all the material together and going through all the logistical hurdles to do the research and making the necessary travels is also part of the job. Are these elements visible in any way? And how do you both feel about this gesture of making visible what the eye cannot see, and the lens cannot capture? In what way does the mined landscape itself, which represents a threat and imminent danger, become more visible?

AM: Pre-production was a very active part of the creative process of this work. It is a collaborative instance because it is obvious that in places like this, we have limited choices to work with, depending on the nature of the access, and those limitations and choices will yield the raw material with which I will then do the work. So the pre-production, even if it is invisible in the finished work, is always present in terms of the choices made then and there, in terms of what was ultimately framed by the camera.

I would like to relate what I did in the minefields to my work in Chernobyl. Because these projects deal with similar, but also unique kinds of invisibility. I began to think about and consider the questions I raised in the minefields after finishing with Chernobyl. I didn't start the Minefields project right after that, but I already had some of those questions in mind. So Chernobyl is this work that deals with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on the border between Ukraine and Belarus. It's theoretically empty, but it's actually taken over by an invisible energy that you don't experience in any way except for the destruction it leaves behind. It's an energy that changes matter in the most fundamental way, in terms of its substance. But you can't see it. It is localized, it has an origin and date, but it remains global in terms of time, because it is eternal, if you think of it on the human scale of life expectancy. When this project ended, I wanted to continue to wonder what other inscrutable landscapes existed on the surface of the Earth. The logical next step was to look at minefield spaces.

This consideration was interesting because if before, with Chernobyl, it was the invisibility of matter that I wanted to capture, in the situation of the minefields, what is impenetrable then shifts to the literal depth of space to be captured two-dimensionally in the photographic image. It is something we can see. It is not exactly the same kind of invisibility regime (as Chernobyl), because radioactivity is really physically invisible, whereas landmines are visible, can be detected when they are hidden, have a visual appearance, are placed in different situations, and can be more or less concealed depending on the situation. In the work, we can also perceive them through the traces left in the landscape during the demining process. This was the kind of collaboration that supported the work. I had to make arrangements with the demining agencies and government agencies that do this work to get specific access to the minefields at the moment when the explosives are still in the ground, but have been mapped as much as possible.

LCO: I can add to what Alice said. In the case of Chernobyl, there was an arrangement between this impregnation of gamma radiation in the photographic material, trying to reveal this invisible, this unrepresentable of radioactive energy, and a series of other more documentary material from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. So it's a configuration of a conceptual, abstract photographic material and a more straightforward documentary photographic material. When you move to the minefields, to this next project, there's a confluence of these two parts in the same photographic imagery, where an apparently bucolic, innocent landscape is itself impregnated with deadly explosives, deadly material, which is a remnant of human violence on this territory, on nature, on living species, on human beings, but which you might not notice if you don't look closely. Of course, there are markings on the pictures to help you take notice - you see on the motifs with the words "danger" or "mines" - but the landscape remains as it is.

It's a landscape photograph, with elements that repeat themselves, which is also important, the narrative recording of a sequence of images in which it's the same landscape over and over again, with Alice's gradual penetration into the territory depicted in the image building up this movement and keeping the landscape, let's say, stable. Both stable and in motion. It is difficult to talk about what is happening, and I think this is fascinating and challenging for those who want to look. If you want to look inattentively, you just look at a normal landscape. But within that landscape, you can also begin to unearth hidden elements: the invisibility in these images, which is an operational mode, the procedure she has created to cross the minefield, to put herself in danger and to come out on the other side.

Putting herself in danger is also important in this relationship with the deminers who have already made the markings, allowing a certain control or safety in entering the impenetrability of the minefield, controlling the risks as much as possible. In this way, it is both an abstract and a documentary landscape at the same time. It is abstract because there is no sense of imminent danger, but it is also a place where the narrative path can be further unraveled. In Angola, for example, in the 15 images of the series, you can reimagine the landmines hidden there. I find it interesting that these two things complement each other in the same image, which is neither documentary nor abstract. In Chernobyl, there was still a certain relationship. I don't know if Alice agrees, but that's how I see this movement from one to the other. It is the same question, it is the same restlessness: how to deal with the invisibility of danger in different procedures simultaneously, because they are different invisibilities and different dangers. So they require different methods, and in the end they will constitute different visual results.

AM: Invisibilities that make these spaces impenetrable in different ways. One in a visual way and the other in a literal way in terms of the depth of walking through a land mine area. Similar starting points, but requiring different methods that ultimately produce different visual results.

AS: The title In Depth is like a play on words, bringing together both form and content. The content would be the mines, which are underground and therefore in depth, and the form would be the photography, which plays with depth of field and emphasizes the landscape as a whole. Can you talk a little bit about this notion of depth and how the landscapes themselves, which contain the mines, lend themselves to being represented in that depth?

AM: Yeah. It's a two-dimensional title. It touches two different depths. In depth, in terms of the relationship of this concept to photographic practice. Every picture is based on a relationship, or until recently it was always based on a relationship, which happens in three points: where you are standing, what kind of instrument with what focal length you are holding, and what you see. These are the three basic elements of any image, with one more derived from them, which is how close or far you are from the object you want to capture with your lens. Nowadays, as technology advances, this coincidence of location and image capture can already be separated, for example in remote images, images from drones, but that doesn't mean there isn't an agency, an action, and an intention in these types of images.

So these elements are present in every image, but what happens in this work is that I have looked at them and linked them together to enable them conceptually as an active part of the visual narrative that unfolds in the four photo sequences that make up the work. These elements are explicitly triggered here by the specific formal technical organization that I have incorporated into the geometric structure of each image, in terms of the relationship between these three points (point of view, focal length, distance from the object) and the question of positioning and point of view. In this terrain where position, literally where one stands on the ground, is the most critical element of all, given that from here to there can mean the difference between life and death. The formal, conceptual exploration that produces the images we see in the show is the result of this process.

LCO: I think there is also an interesting element in the idea of depth, and it has a lot to do with what Alice is commenting on and explaining, which is this relationship between the gaze and the landscape with a relationship of exteriority. Strangely enough, the work is about how to insert the body into a territory, a landscape, a landscape that is a minefield. Moreover, Alice makes the penetration explicit, which implies walking through a landscape. There is an element of the landscape itself that does not move, which is the fixed point in the center of each image. So you perceive a landscape that is moving and a landscape within that landscape that is fixed, while everything else is evolving. So you are left with the inside and the outside, the penetrating and the impenetrable, which is interesting from the point of view of what has brought about a certain objectification of nature from an anthropocentric point of view, that we as humans are outside of nature to dominate it. But simultaneously, we are outside, we are also inside and engaged with nature, and nature always engages us because it is our vital space, not just an external object of knowledge, but our own nature. It is both an object of knowledge and a vital space. It's a point in the landscape and a mined area. When I go there to photograph the landscape, I expose myself to the risk that this landscape will liquidate me. So it is a constant game between this gaze, which is always outside the landscape, and a landscape that calls you in.

AM: Yes, between here and there, including however many or few steps are possible in however many intervals. And with a further layer in the sense that each photograph is always a relationship between two-dimensionality and a representative illusion of depth. These are precisely the elements on which this work is based.

AS: When war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico issued a statement that said, "there will be no landscape after the battle". I think this body of work deals with exactly that, with the landscape that remains afterwards, a contaminated landscape where thousands of anti-personnel mines and other unexploded bombs continue to cause fatalities and wound people, even decades after the wars have ended. Can you comment on this sentence?

AM: I would like to comment on something you just said: "There is always the landscape that remains. I think this "what remains" is the X of the question, and it is what is being interrogated here in the sense that the radioactive contamination of Chernobyl and the problem of explosive contamination left over from wars and conflicts both have an origin in the past, but are mostly "what remains", in the present tense. I am thinking here in the sense of Agamben's book What Remains of Auschwitz. We can also look at what remains of the Cambodian genocide, for example: a trauma remains, a lot remains, but in this case it is perhaps more deeply rooted in the history of the people, in inherited traumas. In the case of Chernobyl and the minefields, what remains is this whole dimension of the experience of trauma; what remains in a present and lasting way, of these interventions, of these wars, in actuality and sometimes in perpetuity. So yes, there is a lot left: there is a lot of landscape left to be questioned, and what recurs in my work is how to account for it, in what ways, how to look at it, and by what means.

LCO: You mentioned the Zapatista statement about a landscape being liquidated - I remembered a text by the Rilke called "On Landscape”. He says something about comparing a world without landscape, the medieval world, to the world that will conquer the landscape in the Renaissance. He says one thing that was fundamental to this paradigm shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was the conceptualization and depiction of human figures touching the earth, depicting people living on the land, no longer ethereal representations of divinities floating around. He comments on how, from Giotto to Leonardo da Vinci, the representation of human figures evolves into figures treading on the ground. The landscape appears because it is the place where the figure is standing.

And strangely, the minefield is a place where standing is increasingly risky. If we think of Bruno Latour's invocation of the human need to "land," then to land is precisely to step somewhere anew. The tension between the figures of Renaissance painting stepping on land, and Renaissance science, from Galileo to Leonardo, trying to leave the land, at least symbolically, to imagine technological dominance over the world, is somehow at the origin of the dominance over nature, which has led us here. And now we have to relearn how to tread again, because the earth is mined and poisoned. I think the symbolic element of this work is how much we, with our impressive extractive violence, have turned the land into a mined territory, and how now, after the catastrophe, we have to relearn how to tread on it. So the landscape ends, but what remains for us is to relearn how to enter and inhabit this planet that is our home, so that we can somehow regain contact with life, not with destruction.

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Alice Miceli's [Rio de Janeiro, 1980] work is characterized by an alternation between video and photography, often based on research into historical events and exploratory journeys through which the artist reconstructs cultural and physical traces of past traumas inflicted on social and natural landscapes. Her work is included in important international collections, such as the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro [Brazil], the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation [USA] and the Moscow Biennale Art Foundation [Russia]. Recently, he has had solo exhibitions at the Americas Society in New York and the PIPA Institute in Rio de Janeiro, as well as several group exhibitions and art fairs in the United States, Brazil and Europe. In 2022, his work will be presented in the upcoming edition of the 17th Istanbul Biennial.

Luiz Camillo Osório, Director of the Philosophy Department at PUC-Rio; member of the Aesthetics WG at CNPq, PQ CNPq Fellow [level 2]. Doctorate in Philosophy, PUC-Rio [1998]. Works in the field of aesthetics and philosophy of art. His main research interests are the articulations between art, aesthetics and politics; autonomy and commitment; theories of genius, disinterest and the sublime; the history of the avant-garde; the actuality of judgment and the critical potency of art in the contemporary world; curatorship, criticism and art history; the relations between art, the museum and the market.

Parallel to his academic research, he works as a critic and curator. He was curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro from 2009 to 2015, and curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He was a member of the curatorial committee of MAM-SP between 2005 and 2009. He signed an art criticism column in the newspapers O Globo [1998/2000 and 2003/2006] and Jornal do Brasil [2001] and in the Spanish magazine EXIT Express [2006/2007]. Member of the research group registered at the CNPQ - Art, Autonomy and Politics - with professors Pedro Duarte [Philosophy PUC-Rio] and Sergio Martins [History PUC-Rio].

Ana Salazar Herrera [1990] is curator at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany, writer and initiator of the para-institution Museum for the Displaced. She explores nomadic, plurilingual and cross-cultural subjectivities, proposing inventive questioning of hegemonic geopolitical mappings. From 2016 to 2020, she was assistant curator of exhibitions at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She participated in the Shanghai Curators Lab [2018], the Project Anywhere mentorship program [2020-21], and was Curator-in-Residence [2021-22] at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Germany. Ana holds an MA in Curatorial Practices from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa.

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