Work Programme 68 – NAZARE SOARES – Jennifer Milarski-Stermšek

For the second week I invited Spanish photography and moving image artist Nazare Soares to exhibit as I had previously seen examples of her work and loved the experimental realness to her films. I also envisaged that the closeness of the gallery space would compliment moving image work.

Nazare revisited her existing moving image work Hic Non Est, created during a residency in Palestine last year, and reconstructed the work in response to the space. The rooms were set up as a visual diary of her Palestinian memories and experiences and the theme of the tree of life was repeatedly visually present, even in the form of an actual olive tree which transformed the space into an organic part of the show. This is one of the best things about CAC that it has the ability to shape shift with each show, if you brought a tree in to a conventional white cube type gallery it would very much be apparent that it had been deliberately brought in an artwork. At CAC the tree looked as if it could’ve grown out of the ground and perhaps the whole exhibition had come about around the tree.

Image © Jennifer Milarski 2014

” Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past,

but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the

medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must

conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to

the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the

”matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most

meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier

associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights”

Walter Benjamin: Excavation and Memory

The above Walter Benjamin quote which Nazare cites as inspiration for this piece is particularly poignant when seeing Hic Non Est shown in the CAC setting. Specifically the idea of the earth being the medium in which ancient cities lie buried, CAC is the medium in which Nazare’s show, along with each weekly Work Programme is buried and each artist is an excavator of that which already exists within the layers of the gallery.