The Workshop
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
8:02 minutes
Gilad Ratman
Originally a multi-channel video installation with sculptures and sound, this iteration of The Workshop by Gilad Ratman is a three-channel distillation of the expansive project that follows a group’s underground pilgrimage from Mt. Carmel in Israel to Venice, emerging underneath the Israeli pavilion in the Venetian Giardini. Upon their arrival, the motley group of 30 non-actor participants then sculpt self-portrait busts of themselves, with microphones embedded and protruding from the sculptures. The intensely physical pilgrimage culminates in a collective act of performative disinhibition. The extralinguistic utterances of each individual, directed at and into their own clay likeness, evokes beyond-the-self-expression, and suffuses the work with an uncanny atmosphere. Each clay-engulfed microphone connects, through long cords and tangled lines, to a mixer and DJ who mixes and processes the incoming flow of ululations, transforming them into disjointed, yet melodic arrangements. The work considers transit, networks, site-specificity, as well as the notion of a surface, and what might lie beyond it.
Gilad Ratman’s videos and installations address the apparently untenable aspects of human behavior by exploring the need for community and by showing forms of resistance and the borders of self. Pushing narrative to its limits and allowing for a fractured chain of events to take place, the works function as a vehicle for exploring the friction between the real and the imaginary. Violating the correlation between cause and effect, Ratman’s videos undermine trust in the cinematic apparatus and open a space for the poetic and the pathetic to coexist. In some works, production and what is normally conceived as ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘the making of’ is an integral part of the work. The participants are not acting, in the sense of representation, but merely responding to a given situation, often based on physical restrictions and unfamiliar situations. A representation of Nature plays a significant role in Ratman’s work, usually serving as a ‘Petri dish’ for human interaction or a violent act. This violence, presumably, not only happens within the borders of the frame, but is also embedded in the condition of viewing and reproduced by the act of watching. Each work strives to articulate a point of view that is external and reporting in order to try and deal with the formations of identity and the borders of the ‘self’, without being subordinated to the mechanism of viewers’ identification.
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