Q&A: Pilar Mata Dupont

The piece is so visually and sonically layered and lush, it creates a mood that really gets into your head! There are the obvious influences that inform the content of the piece but I’m curious about some of the less obvious ones. I know that you and Wex editor Alexis McCrimmon were listening to a lot of Tangerine Dream (their album, Zeit, specifically) while you were editing.  Can you talk about this and maybe some of the other, more subtle things that you were thinking about as you made this work? 
Alexis got me into Tangerine Dream! "Ague" is a 14th-century English term for malaria, or an intermittent fever (running hot and cold with chills). I wanted the film to feel hallucinatory or febrile so I was trying to find psychedelic, cinematic references and the Zeit album fit in perfectly. It seems to have worked because someone who saw the film, who had contracted malaria before, told me the experience of watching and listening to the film was uncannily similar to experiencing a malarial fever.

Another, rather odd, influence was a 1970s episode of Dr. Who called The Seeds of Doom, which are as silly as they sound. Jess Bunch, my writer, and I found the very "British" tone of the dialogue helpful in developing the imperial quality and resonance in the dialogue for our film. It also influenced the characters of the Botanist and the Scientist, finding a strange plant specimen in the Amazon, gradually losing their minds as the plant takes hold of them.

The scripting and choreography of the voices in The Ague feels very theatrical. And it’s interesting because the very first work of yours that I saw, Purgatorio (2014), was a Brechtian operetta with a set as part of the installation.  Can you talk about how your training and background in theater informs your video practice and how they overlap?
I studied musical theatre back in Australia over ten years ago and worked for a while as an actor, but even before then I was influenced by theatre in my work. I’ve even co-created a full stage musical as part of Hold Your Horses, which is an interdisciplinary art collective I’m a member of in Australia.

I tend to use my work as a way to think through different concepts and the histories that are presented to us and I find using some theatricality (a language I know) helps me do that. People also seem to understand the lexicon of cinema and theatre and I like to tap into that to make my work a little more accessible.

The voiceover is done by a single actress, Emma Clarke, who does an incredible job of embodying the individual characters and making them distinctive. She happens to be a very famous voice actress in the UK, right? How did you connect with her?
Emma is one of the voices of the London tube and she also voiced the computer in the movie, Passengers (2016). I found her through someone in Columbus! I posted on Facebook I was looking for a voice actor and someone who knew her put us in touch. She was wonderful; we recorded everything in under an hour—her ability to quickly jump into a character and for it to sound grounded and a part of her is phenomenal. 

A number of your works deal with the systemic effects of colonialism and particularly the effects on the environment and landscape. You have such a unique, complicated personal relationship to colonialism as an Australian-born, Spanish-speaking woman whose family emigrated to Australia from Argentina and who lived in Brunei Darussalam in SE Asia (a British protectorate) and now lives in the Netherlands. Can you talk about how your personal narrative is the jumping off point for some of these larger investigations?
Most of my ancestors were part of European groups invading and colonizing Chile and Argentina, some were native peoples, though I don't know exactly which nation. My parents moved to Australia, another settler state, during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. We also lived in Brunei Darussalam in South-East Asia for a time. Moving countries and schools a lot was a little difficult, and by the time I was twelve I’d learned three different kinds of long division, but I think growing up as a privileged person with pale skin in those countries feeds into my perspective making work now. I’m very conscious of being the "invader", which I think is a good thing. There’s a lot to unpack there and I don’t know if I’ve nailed it yet, but I’m trying. Moving to the Netherlands has really brought it home that most Europeans have no idea, or somehow dismiss, that the incredible buildings and infrastructure they have assembled around them stem from the plunder of Southern countries and peoples. The use of the term "The Golden Age" in the context of Dutch history, used without irony, is mind-boggling.

You were reading The Southern Reach trilogy while you were here and I know you were interested in pushing a sci-fi quality in The Ague. Do you see this interest continuing in future projects?  What are you working on next?
The Southern Reach trilogy got me into the right mindset for The Ague! Thinking through the boundaries of flesh, mutation, and a sort of violent democratization through the dismantling of (biological) order. I’m only really just getting into sci-fi but what I love about it are the infinite possibilities for exploring difficult and important content. I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series and have just started on Ursula le Guin’s collection of short stories, The Birthday of the World. I also love Cleverman, which is an Aboriginal Australian superhero TV series created by Ryan Griffen. I’m not sure how much sci-fi ended up in The Ague, but it’s something I’ll be developing with work in the future. 

I have two major works moving forward, one which is more theatrical and the other which will explore a sci-fi-esque outcome. The theatrical one looks at a complex history of violence in Argentina through a rift in my own family. I plan to work through it using documentary footage and theatre actors as proxies of myself and other family members, or even a chorus of sorts, for remembered and imagined scenes. I worked on this for a little while at my first residency at the Wex and I’ll hopefully finish that in the coming year or so in Argentina.

The second is an adaptation of 19th century playwright, Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, through notorious director, Leni Riefenstahl’s notes for her adaptation of the play for film—a film she was never able to complete after WWII due to her connections to the Nazi Party. I want to use sci-fi and speculative fiction tropes as a way to deal with the highly problematic historical references I’m using, not so much as a distancing technique but a focusing one. I’ve been thinking about this work for some years now and hopefully, I’ll get a chance to develop it further in the coming years.

We met and you came to the Wexner through our partnership with the incredible Videobrasil festival in São Paulo, Brazil. In addition to giving a cash prize at the festival, they partner with residency programs all around the world and offer residencies as awards to a select number of works that are chosen by the jury. Can you say a few words about the importance of residencies for artists?
For me, residencies have somewhat formed my solo practice! I’ve spent a lot of time on residencies in Argentina, South Korea, Finland, Germany, Australia, UK as well as at the Wex over the last 10 years. It’s so important for me to have time to focus on my practice away from normal life and the places and people I’m used to. I know it isn’t as much of a possibility for many other artists due to lack of financial support from their various governments or institutions. Family and other (paid) work also make it difficult, but I would definitely recommend it as a way to get out of a creative rut!

The opportunity Videobrasil gave to me with a funded two months at the Film/Video Studio at the Wex has made some of my more technical recent work possible as I don’t have access to that kind of equipment at home. Plus, as this work was created on a small budget, I produced, directed, and shot The Ague, so having Alexis, as an artist/filmmaker who happens to be an excellent video editor, work with me on the project gave a much-needed fresh eye to the work!

The Ague was supported by the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brasil.

The film was also supported by the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Western Australia.