Ikon Arts Foundation

Primarily through film, artist Damir Očko probes the relationship between voice, music, narrative, and artistic subject. In The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice (2010), for example, a deaf woman uses sign language to tell a story, while Očko assigns a sound to each of her gestures, giving her an audible, musical “voice.”

With We Saw Nothing but the Uniform Blue of the Sky (2012), a human voice becomes the actual subject of the film. To black and white scenes of anonymous people strolling and playing on a beach and images of a hazy room illuminated by yellow sodium lights, a man with a speech impediment reads an epic poem. As the viewer focuses on his words and his efforts to pronounce them, his voice itself becomes the protagonist of the film. “His effort of pronouncing words and sentences (exhaustingly rehearsed for weeks) not only provide the main conceptual and esthetical frame for the whole work, but also emphasizes the acoustics of words and their meaning: to say poetical and political weight of the vocalized word,” writes Očko.

We Saw Nothing, but the Uniform Blue Sky, 2012 (film still)

Last fall, Očko was invited to exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in conjunction with Croatia, la voici, a festival of Croatian culture. The exhibition consisted of three films (The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice, We Saw Nothing but the Uniform Blue of the Sky, and SPRING (2012), commissioned especially for the Palais de Tokyo) and was titled The Kingdom of Glottis. According to Očko, the exhibition centered on voice as a subject, and the title refers to a region called Glottis – a kingdom ruled by the human voice.

Here, Damir Očko tells us more about his creative practice and the significance of voice and music to his work.

“It is about human voice that projects itself onto bodies, which are in some way alien, external to the voice itself,” you wrote about the video SPRING. Can you say more about the role of voice in your work?

Voice came into my work once I started to question what kind of a “filmed” subject is going to evolve from what I have been filming before. Up to the certain point, I wasn’t really interested in the human subjects I was filming, but rather in their presence within the frame of the film – sort of a sculptural presence of body, rather. It was also a very limited presence.

When I tried to break this, I asked myself “what is the most human thing a filmed subject can do?” Clearly I thought the voice is the right answer. So the first time I worked with a voice, it was actually kind of a voiceless voice (the deaf girl that used gestures to speak and sing). This was important because the way I understand the voice is that the voice is not just the physical act of voicing, but rather a political territory on which we define ourselves as humans.

Music is also important to your work. Why the fascination with sound? What does sound lend to your visual work?

I always make a distinction between music and sound. For me, music is also a political and polyphonic territory that I have a lot of interest for. For sound just for the sake of the sound, I have a little interest. That is why I rarely use the word sound when I speak about my acoustic projects or the relation between music and my films. Music, film, process based works, at the end it all comes down to the same thing: duration. The space of duration is the space I like to work with.

Untitled (SPRING score), 2012

Tell us a bit about the process of composing music for your videos.

I often work with an American composer, Alexander Sigman, with whom I have a very creative relationship. I follow what he does, and somehow his thinking is very much in line with mine. I also work with a lot of “sounds” that either I record or collect. The end result is a complex sampling, mixing, appropriating and placing the “right” acoustic structure in the right place. My selection of “sounds” and processes is also very precise and I think a lot about instrumentation and context of what and why I use something.

Score (UB poem), print and collage on paper, (2012)

You reference historical events and cultural figures in some of your work (John Cage, Neil Armstrong, Alexander Scriabin, Ivan Kožarić). Can you talk a bit more about the ideas that inform your work? From what or whom do you draw inspiration?

Even though my work leans somehow on references, it is mostly an influence or need to have narrative pinpoints present in the work. My recent works however negotiate narratives with less historical references and rather generate their own referential system.

How do you select which medium to work with?

I think that film plays a central role in my practice. And from there on it expands in various media. I never think too much about the media itself. I do whatever it takes to find a right frame for what I try to project. I sort of try to stay away from any media discourse and rather focus on the content.

The Body Score Untitled (triptych), photo-collage, (2013)

In the past, you also created installations. Is installation something you are still interested in?

Something shifted when I started to think about the space of the film as an absolute space. At that point the need to work with installations reduced. I still think about space and how to install the works, what is the projection in the exhibition, how to construct the space of the exhibition around the projection and so on. So in a way installation is still present, but it has become something much more focused and subtle.

What is the significance of your work on paper? Are these complete works themselves, or do you consider them supplemental to your other work?

There are different types of works on paper I do. Some are related to films, either as pretext, scores, instructions for performers or research-based materials transformed into works on paper. Others are unique works unrelated to the films, such as the group of collages “On ulterior Scale”. I make films perhaps once per year, and all the other types of works are important for me because I need to processes thinking on paper or other media before I even engage with the film crew. Later I try to bring different complexities of my work to the exhibition, in form of scores, maps, clues…

On Ulterior Scale (Untitled), pastel and collage on paper (2010)

Can you tell us a bit about any current projects you are working on?

I am currently working on a new film. It is quite a challenging project that will be a little bit different step for me. What I am very interested now is to find the right way to speak about very difficult topics, such as violence, through poetry.

Interview by: Elaine Ritchel (@elaineritchel)

Images courtesy of the artist, Yvon Lambert / Paris and Gallery Tiziana di Caro / Salerno.

An interview with the artist recorded at Galeria Trapez in Budapest (2013)