Latina visual artist and filmmaker Pilar Mata Dupont (b. 1981) has a complex and multifaceted practice spanning film, installation, performance, and photography. Her research driven delves into the fallibility and malleability of narratives of history and memory. Her Argentinean background and upbringing in Australia, Argentina, and Brunei Darussalam – all settler states or former colonies – serve as a lens through which she frames her work, and her home of eight years in the Netherlands has become a recent focus of investigation.
Using temporal strategies of looping, fragmentation, and dislocation, she re-imagines histories, memories, and texts, creating alternative readings that question the construction of dominant narratives that shape Western society. Drawing from her background working as an actor and singer she uses a playful lexicon of theatre and cinema in her work as a bridge to varied audiences.
Las Hormigas - Las Hormigas (2022)
Performance
running time: 60mins
First performed as part of solo exhibiion Las Hormigas/The Ants at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts October - December, 2022, curated by Sarah Wall.
Courtesy the artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY
Performance photography by Nicolee Fox and courtesy of Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Directors’ notes:
Las Hormigas began, rather naively, as a truth finding mission into my migrant family’s past. Over nearly a decade, I lived with women in my family living in Australia, Argentina, and France, filming documentary footage, interviews, and collecting oral histories. As I grappled with finding a form for these stories, my own began to infiltrate, as I navigated the ethics of dealing with the contesting truths, trauma, and fragmented histories I encountered. Beyond the question of generational healing and beyond the fact of trauma being held in the body and passed to subsequent generations, through this kind of work I believe that the fluidity and embodiment of experience and history can be represented by the interweaving and overlaying of these multiple ‘truths’; through mimicking the forms of memory itself.
Las Hormigas features multiple short scenes developed from these stories told by the women in my family. My intention is to capture the fragmentation and looping of traumatic memory, as well as the coping mechanisms that dark, absurdist humour offers in dealing with those memories. This fragmentation means the narrative, time, geography, and characters themselves are not stable or clear; they change from performance to performance, and scene to scene. The performers’ moments of vulnerability, hesitation, and confusion that you will witness are real…mostly. They are reflections of this concept, played out as the performers determine the dramaturgy (dramatic composition), collectively choosing the next scene live in front of the audience.
My decision to work with my family’s memories through the proxies of the performers and co-creators, Maree Cole, Cezera Critti-Schnaars, and Daisy Sanders, is a way of thinking through the blurring of collective and individual identities within violent or difficult histories – each collaborator bringing their own experiences and knowledges into the process. The performance slides between time, character, and geography, rejecting a linear historicism and mirroring the way in which traumatic experiences are transmitted from one generation to another, reverberating across time and space. Far from settling accounts of the past, Las Hormigas speaks to the cacophony of voices and emotions that complicate them.
Director: Pilar Mata Dupont
Performers/co-creators: Maree Cole, Cezera Critti-Schnaars, Daisy Sanders
Dramaturg/co-creator: Caro Duca
Sound Composition/Design: Tom Hogan
Scenographer: Rhiannon Peterson
Lighting: Joe Paradise Lui
Costume: Nicole Marrington
Stage Manager: Jasmyn Day
Musical consultant: Sharon Ogle
PICA performance technician: William Gammel
Las Hormigas has been supported by the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts and has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
A Table Read (performance and video work) - A Table Read (2021/2022)- a 60 minute performance/58min two channel video by Pilar Mata Dupont co-created with Petra Ball, Ratri Notosudirdjo, and Lili Ullrich.
This two-channel video installation presents edited footage of a live performance at de Hillevliet with WET, Rotterdam, in 2021. The performance was titled A Table Read after a key stage of pre-production in both film and theatre in which actors meet and read through the script for the first time – used by Mata Dupont to provide a way into examining the performative nature of memory and remembrance. Its narrative is composed of fragments of memories and experiences, shared with the artist by the female members of her family. Mata Dupont interweaves their stories of political activism and exile, intergenerational conflicts, tensions, and longings, with reflective and deeply personal confessions written by the artist during her collection of this material.
Featuring three actors, the performance scenes were not chronologically organised but slid between place and time, decided upon during each performance by the actors. The actors switch between roles – sometimes performing as the artist, sometimes the artist’s relatives, and at other times playing themselves attempting to piece together and organise the circular sequence of events.
Text by Sarah Wall.
CREDITS -
Written and directed by Pilar Mata Dupont
Co-produced by Pilar Mata Dupont and WET
Performers: Petra Ball, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Lili Ullrich
Dramaturg: Nicola Unger
Music: Petra Ball and Tom Hogan
Costume: Rico Dyks
Assistant Director: Lili Ullrich
Director of Photography: Erika Roux
Sound recording: Nick Thomas
Camera operator: Marta Hryniuk
Second camera operators: Sophie Bates, Erika Roux
Lighting: Jorg Schellekens
Sound design and mix: Jacco Prantl
Colour grade: Ryan Cherewaty
Graphic Designer: Maria Smit
Funders/supporters
CBK Rotterdam
Stichting Droom en Daad
Australia Council for the Arts
Department of Local Government, Sport, and Cultural Industries (DLGSC), Western Australia
WET
De Hillevliet
La Maruja - Who is La Maruja, the figure recurring in Pilar Mata Dupont’s new body of work?
According to the disparaging feminine noun in Spanish, she is a gossip, an obsessive consumer of telenovelas, a housewife whose life is defined by domesticity and pettiness, cooking and cleaning.
She is little María, the diminutive, the affectionately addressed.
She is Pilar’s great-great-grandmother María Cristina, who had few choices in life, married into the Mata family in Argentina, and died under mysterious circumstances in the early 1910s at around age 30 in the years following the removal of her son, Fito.
She is a mute, anonymised figure in the stylised Edwardian dress worn by women of that class at that time in Argentina – modest coverage, peachy tones, delicate lace, a dash of latex to reference the medical. Played by Pilar herself, she is like a character from an Alejandro Jodorowsky film: exaggerated, impossible and theatrical. She is like a woman in a Lucrecia Martel film, trapped in a state of suspension while history is being processed.
She is the version of Pilar almost named María Pilar by her parents. She is all the Marías in Pilar’s family – her mother, her dad’s cousin... She is like a figure in a multi-generational story by Gabriel García Márquez in which names recur in family trees decade after decade.
She is an archetype of mothers, of women, of the overlooked and reviled and mistrusted, the stifled and the choked. She is the illness suffered by María Cristina. Was it mastitis – a feminine infection, fatal if left untreated – that killed her? Or some more mundane, less symbolic ailment?
She is all the misinformed theories about women’s bodies, starting with the ancient Greek assessment that the female body is structurally hysterical and more subject to disease than the perfect, divine male form. According to Hippocratic theory, she has an animal physiology of weepy softness, seeping bodily fluids and strange fumes. For Aristotle, she is a violated, inverted, monstrous kind of male. Such theories have a long afterlife. She has a body defined in hierarchical relation to the male. She is all the projections of misogynist desire and control.
She has veins that run with specifically female blood, and she feels specifically female pain, that of maternal separation from Fito. While the hallmark of human biology is variation and irregularity, each of her cells carries genetic information inscribed with XX chromosomes. She will die of a curable disease, whose symptoms she can already feel.
In her final years, her family ranch in the grasslands of Buenos Aires province is renamed Destierro – exile. Portrayed as a haunted farmhouse in the Gothic tradition, Destierro sits uneasily on the land of the indigenous Querendí.
She is a vessel for women’s testimony, passed down and down, through stricken eras and troubled family trees.
Beyond any individual, she stands as a compromised, mythic matriarch trapped in a personal history, a familial investigation and a saga of psychology and place. A horror aesthetic creeps through, without any of the genre’s usual catharsis, violence or conclusiveness.
Sixty years after her death, and more than four hundred and fifty years after the establishment of Spanish settlements in the region, Argentina would be consumed by a military dictatorship, another wound in the country’s traumatic history. In decades long after, Pilar collected interviews from family members about María Cristina, gathered footage at Destierro ranch and resurrected these collective memories in a newborn story of her great-great-grandmother’s life and death. The figure of María Cristina is remembered, reinterpreted and imagined once more.
Text by Lauren Carroll Harris, commissioned by MOORE CONTEMPORARY. Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/La-Maruja
Pilar Mata Dupont - (2018) three-channel video with sound, color 16: 16min running time Edition of 5 Filmed in the hauntingly beautiful Pilbara region in Australia, Undesirable Bodies challenges Euro-centric notions of beauty with a striking three-screen video. Using invasive species of flora as her protagonists, Mata Dupont explores conflicting contemporary issues at Jirndawurrunha, the immediate area surrounding a natural freshwater spring in Millstream Chichester National Park, sacred to the Yindjibarndi people. Planted through this sacred site by a British settler family in the early 20th Century, these persistent weeds evade total eradication, creating a pervasive 'colonial garden' visited by numbers of tourists every year. This film was created at Jirndawurrunha, a sacred site on Yindjibarndi Country in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The filmmakers are grateful to the Yindjibarndi people for their generous support of this project. We respectfully acknowledge and thank the traditional custodians of the land, the Yindjibarndi people, and their elsewhere past, present and future. This film was supported by the Film / Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA, and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brasil. Undesirable Bodies has been commissioned through FORM's residency program in which the not-for-profit arts organization invites artists to explore distinctly Western Australian narratives. The program brings artists to often remote parts of the State to create new works which challenge and expand notions of Western Australia. This project has been assisted by Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Western Australia. Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/Undesirable-Bodies
Pilar Mata Dupont - Attending to Agnes 2018 Seecum Cheung, Maike Hemmers, Pilar Mata Dupont, Isabelle Sully, Flora Valeska Woudstra Three-channel video 46: 00min running time, color, sound Over one year, Rotterdam based artists Seecum Cheung, Maike Hemmers, Pilar Mata Dupont, Isabelle Sully, and Flora Woudstra developed a multi-channel film, presenting their varied viewpoints and voices collectively in responding to Agnes Goodsir's painting, Girl with Cigarette (circa 1925), and her accompanying life and oeuvre. Finding each other through similar situation to how Goodsir once found herself - that is, living in a city that is not their own after having moved to study - the group decided to undertake a residency in Paris, visiting and working in spaces Goodsir frequented and treating her as a metaphorical host and tour-guide to collaboratively develop a feminist practice of solidarity, intimacy, conflict and friendship across geographies and through the social infrastructure of the film. As the project instigator, producer, and arch-director of the film, Pilar Mata Dupont's filmic input - intervals of three-channel video between artists' 'chapters' - concerns itself with the process of the collaboration that has taken place while situating Agnes Goodsir as the host for the research undertaken. Seeking a polyphonic outcome to a process of thinking through and with the group, Mata Dupont's filmic intervals, A Process in Three Channels, also delve into the cacophony created when disparate interests, goals, and practices are compelled to converge. These disparities manifest consistently across the chapters of the film - all of which have been autonomously produced by the other artists within the group - yet somehow, amidst a collection of insistent, individual voices, they begin to align through their difference. This juggle between personal and collective ethics is literally documented in Isabelle Sully's contribution, As Soon As Conditions Become Normal Again, which uses the condition report of Agnes Goodsir's painting in the Bendigo Art Gallery Collection as a means to write one for the film itself. In so doing, Sully uses the vocabulary of the original document - a vocabulary that is at once explicitly sexual and obsessionally administrative - to inscribe a feminine subjectivity between the lines of an institutional requirement. Flora Woudstra's chapter, Minor Intimacies, also structures itself around an initial reference: a reading group organized by the artist with the group in order to collectively think through notions of solidarity and intimacy. The resulting content of this conversation has been distilled into the prose visible in the video work and accompanied by the closely tracked hands of the artists, which signals traces of affect, uncomfortability, and boredom within a setting of constructed intimacy. Yet such a setting is turned on its head in the work of Maike Hemmers, whose chapter, Cushion Carriers, instead works with notions of comfort to question the relationship between support and soft sculpture, textiles and the home. The resulting video work is a series of translations. Four, heavy textile sculptures filled with cherry pits are introduced to a staged setting within the group, utilized for a filmed exercise in holding and stabilizing between participants in a Paris apartment, and eventually projected onto Hemmers' own apartment in Rotterdam to be filmed again. While Hemmers works with traces of an immediate history, Seecum Cheung approaches the proposition of the film from a more trans-generational perspective. Her chapter, In the Frame, focuses upon a young actor. Her only instruction is to look directly into the camera and to think of all women who had not received the recognition that they'd deserved in their lifetime, past and present. Filmed in the famous Le Dôme Café in Paris and outside the former lesbian club, Le Monocle, places Agnes Goodsir reportedly frequented, Cheung's contribution insists on a feminist politic of looking backward to move forward. In the true spirit of the confused chronology of the film, interwoven throughout are contributions and performative interventions from fellow artist, Helen Zeru Araya (ET), graphic designer, Maria Smit (AU), composer, Natalia Domínguez Rangel (CO), a rigorous film crew that refuses to stay outside the frame and a number of intermediary agents woven consistently into the social fabric of the work - such as Rachel 'Cherry' Dunn, the subject of Girl with Cigarette, and Agnes Goodsir herself. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body as well as the Centrum Beeldende Kunst (CBK), Rotterdam. Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/Collaborative-work-Attending-to-Agnes
The Ague (excerpt) - 2018 HD video,
colour multichannel sound
continuous loop
The Ague focuses on Kew Gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens, London. In the nineteenth century, these botanical gardens represented the nerve centre of the British Empire; where plants taken from all the empire were primarily studied for their commercial applications. Today, Kew houses the world’s largest seed bank, conserving the most endangered wild plants for future use. Mata Dupont transports us into this botanical world through a case study of the Cinchona tree and an adaption of Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens’, in which Londoners wander through the gardens in a dreamy state of semi-consciousness. In her adaption of the story, the scientific claims of the gardens acquire increasingly irrational traits, whereby truths and misinformation, colonial histories, and our ecological future coalesce. Anke Bangma - Artistic Director, TENT Rotterdam
This film was supported by the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA, and the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brasil. This project has been assisted by Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Western Australia. Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/The-Ague
The Embrace (excerpt) - "Pilar Mata Dupont subverts the male-dominated master discourse of 'national division and reunification' by means of a sophisticated psychological drama of women. The crux of 'The Embrace' is not so much a subversion of a sign by merely replacing a male couple with a female couple. Rather, it occurs at the moment in which the embrace, symbolizing reunification, is transformed and caught in an awkward and unsettling facial expression, devoid of affect. Here, the 'theatre of the Cold War' does not rely on deep feelings such as revulsion or love; it suddenly becomes severed from it's historical origins due to the light-hearted enjoyments and the indices of calculation of losses and gains."
From an essay by Park Chan-Kyong: Mediacity Seoul 2014 - The Collaboration among Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers
In 'The Embrace (이상적인 포옹)', Pilar Mata Dupont has animated reunification monuments from North and South Korea to play with utopian ideas of reconciliation, and the significance of 'the embrace' as representation of reunification in the South Korean national narrative. The two figures from the 'Three Charters for National Reunification' monument embrace in joy, only to have their bliss dissipate and a new, and unexpectedly uncomfortable, era to emerge.
The work references DPRK propaganda, K-pop, texts by Andrei Lankov and Lee Eung-joon, and the romantic notions of unification used by artists, filmmakers, and writers in South Korea during the late 90s and early 21st Century; the 'Sunshine Policy' era of soft-line attitude to the North. The work was developed after two years of research including stays in North and South Korea, and through conversations with North Korean refugees and refugee workers in Seoul and South Korean peers and collaborators.
This project has been assisted by the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Culture and the Arts, and commissioned by the University of Western Australia.
Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/The-Embrace
Purgatorio (excerpt) - Single channel video
2014
Infinite loop
Edition of 5
Purgatorio won the Residency Prize to the Wexner Center for the Arts in the USA at the 19th Festival of Contemporary Art Sesc Videobrasil in October 2015.
With references such as the 1980s/90s PBS television specials of Sondheim musicals, The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weills, and Kafka’s The Trial, Purgatorio sits between video art, theatre and parable.
Purgatorio is an Orwellian musical retelling of Dante’s Purgatorio from The Divine Comedy, relating it not only to current Australian asylum seeker policy but to global issues with seeking asylum and the idea of ‘processing people’. The work focuses on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that ensues, and runs on a loop, so the character of the ‘Applicant’ (or Dante) must relive his musical interrogations again and again.
The Brechtian Master of Ceremonies, ‘The Guide’ (based on the character of Virgil in the Comedy), leads the ‘Applicant’ through the levels of purgatory as a dapper people smuggler. A chorus of nine performers play multiple all-singing and dancing parts including the roles of politicians, border security, and case workers.
Purgatorio was created during a residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, between April and July, 2014, and was developed through interviews with Macarthur Diversity Services Initiative, local asylum seekers, refugees, refugee advocates, the UNHCR, and people from the public relations division for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The libretto was written through these interviews by Mata Dupont and set to music by her frequent collaborator, composer Ash Gibson Greig. Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/Purgatorio
Mountain (excerpt) - Mountain
2015
Single channel projection with sound
8:11min
Edition of 5
My photographic series, The Madman is a Dreamer Awake, and video work Mountain investigate Sigmund Freud’s connection to the neighbouring villages of Berchtesgaden and Schönau am Königssee, in Bavaria, Germany, where he often spent his holidays between the late 1800s and 1929. In a rented house in Schönau, Freud wrote his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams in 1898. The mountains in the region, particularly the Obersalzberg, are infamous as the base for the National Socialists. Hitler and Freud are reported to have been in the small village of Berchtesgaden at least twice in the 1920s at the same moment, a relatively unknown historical fact.
In making Mountain, I have explored theories Freud examined in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), specifically his theories about mass psychology and the supplantation of the super-ego with the will of the Tyrant. His personal connection to the historical character of Hannibal, and neurosis about reaching Rome, alluded in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), are also reflected in the work. The footage was all taken from a boat launched at Schönau am Königssee steered through the mountains to St Bartholomew. This trip was one Freud did almost daily, in a wooden boat rowed by ‘four strong local women’, while on holiday in the region.
Mountain was originally commissioned as part of a group residency at the Freud Museum London, conceived and curated by Andrew Nicholls in 2013. The research and development of this film was supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts.
This work won the main prize at the Plymouth Contemporary Open art prize in July, 2015. For full credits please go to: https://pilarmatadupont.com/Mountain
Shuffle (excerpt) - 2017/18
Panoramic video for LED screen
available in three-channel projection
colour, sound
8:06 min
Shuffle is a surreal drama of the appropriation, conflation, and international movement of art forms, and their places within colonial histories. The film hinges on the tension created between the porcelain pieces, earth plinths, and Dancer; the precarious balance between the percussion of the tap steps and the tenuous structures. The dance begins cautiously, but becomes confident and dangerous in the Dancer’s efforts to engage with the structures - the objects move and shake, and the earth plinths begin to crumble.
When they collapse, ceramics shatter, and together they create a new landscape, seemingly broken, but in fact a new arrangement made from the same material, suggesting a resilience. Through the Dancer’s vain attempts to destabilise and destroy within this museum-like context, they have only co-opted the materials for their own creation.
We would like to acknowledge the Badimia people who are the traditional custodians of the land where the red earth used in this artwork is sourced. We would also like to pay our respects to the Elders past, present, and future of the Badimia nation.
The original form of this work was commissioned by Transport for New South Wales and produced by Cultural Capital for Wynscreen, Sydney, Australia.
The reformatting of this work for three-channel projection was supported by the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA; the Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brasil; and TENT Rotterdam, Nederland.
Full credits at: https://pilarmatadupont.com/Shuffle
