A R C H I V E2 0 0 1  
19th
  Sebastian Diaz Morales
The persecution of the white car
 
  Netherlands 2000
MiniDV, 25:00, colour and black&white, stereo
 
Try to remember. What were you doing there, she asks him. They appear to be in bed and with her help he tries to remember the details of a trip. After spending hours in airplanes, airports and emigration offices, he arrives at the place where he will stay for nine days.

Where is it? The question arises. Perhaps we will never know. It could be anywhere from Maputo to Sidney, Sao Paulo or Jakarta. Judging by the sunlight it is some city in the south. Their conversation is like an exercise in remembering as well as forgetting certain elements of the journey, subjectivity being the key to the development of the narrative. The place has no history, apart from the hints given away by the architecture; the story is frozen, and like an ice-cube in the sun, melts slowly through the description of the male voice. I just want to remember what I was doing there, he says, and I am only able te remember it, when I close my eyes.

Wandering around the city the narrator-camera travelling at eye level shows us a sequence of scenes of everyday life that lasts as long as a morning journey to work. The poetical gaze sublimates any overt political allusion, overwriting these disturbing encounters of his wanderings with the dream-like chronicle of an invisible tourist. The juxtaposition of images tends to oscillate between the real and the fictional, the figurative and the abstract. The camera's capacity to erase bits of it, functions as a form of censorship, and while the dream may have a physical expression, we are looking at the blindfold description of a place without a name. Through streets and intersections, from the roofs of buildings or from inside cars, we are in the place of the main character, and see through his eyes. Someone in front of us is drving a white car.

– Nuño Sacramento


Recorded in Durban, South Africa. Voices Sebastián Díaz Morales, Boukje Jansen

Sebastián Díaz Morales 1975 Rivadavia, Comodoro, Argentina.
Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands


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