The Enclave

The impotence that one feels before inhuman brutality is difficult to describe, whether it be through a verbal account or via documentation. This ineffable perception is probably what compelled Richard Mosse to create The Enclave, a project presented in the Irish pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Richard Mosse, born in 1980, spent 2012 in the eastern Congo along with video-maker Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost.

Although they were posing as journalists, when making their forays into areas presided over by armed groups of rebels they took a selective approach to capturing actual scenarios that deliberately set it apart from journalistic narration, aimed at restoring the veracity of a fact. Instead they used opposing linguistic devices that explode in a fusion of photographic images, sound and film.

The Enclave is composed of six screens, set up in a room in a way that is anything but random. Placed in crooked, off-centre and asymmetric positions they make up a performative landscape, heightened by the machismo the human presence (that includes child guerrillas holding weapons) and by the cynicism of the observer before the camera.
What attracts about this sequence of moving images is the constant presence of a palette of colours based around bright pink that seems to substitute all of the green in the surroundings, the camouflage of the soldiers, the trees, the bushes and the savanna landscape in the background. An unreal tint, generated by a filming technique that records the invisible infra-red light spectrum and clashes with the gloomy sense of foreboding evoked by the setting. What is more, the same technique was used up until ten years ago on the frontline to drive out soldiers camouflaged in the landscape.

How do you transform human tragedy into beauty? This is the question that subtends this vision of compulsive evocations, with the action passing from screen to screen, leaving one to take it up again in the next scene. From the oceanic sea one passes to the terrestrial jungle, filled with crowds on the edge of crumbling paths, that look into the camera with spectral gazes; from the refugee camps to a single wooden house, uprooted like a trophy by barefoot men with the impetuousness of a wild animal, who is probably already there just a few steps behind them. When you're not looking, you listen to see. Alongside the film images, sound ones explode. Alongside the apparently live recordings, a preponderant sound is the deaf echo that follows the shots of the guerrillas that depending on how it is used, attenuates or emphasises the degree of fiction of the work.

What we are seeing is the sinking into meta-reality, that pretends to be documentary but carries forward with total precision the possibility of restoring the immediacy of a visible nightmare through the artistic nature of a language. This suspension, determined by the fictional component, is rendered in an evident fashion by the events that little by little inadvertently occur during filming. The characters seem to emerge from the set of a war film: dramatic and ironic they seem to be the protagonists in a story that is told but that at the same time actually happens.

The refined staging of certain gestures by the guerrillas when carrying out propitiatory rituals, the improvised psychodrama in pretending to be dead in a land of real and unheard violence, is what paradoxically transforms at times this film-setting into a disconcerting hyper-realism, almost parody-like. Richard Mosse's camera becomes the objective around which the actions of the scene revolve, a kind of momentary pause from reality that paradoxically confers a sense of the legitimate onto all the protagonists by being able to describe and contemplate themselves.