My name is Toni Serra. I also use the name Abu Ali. I like to use both names because it shows my link between these two cultures, the Latin Spanish culture with the Arab Moroccan Berber culture. It marks my passage between worlds.
Can you explain what you do professionally and the type of work you do?
I work with video, that is to say with the image in the audiovisual movement. What attracts me to videos are the possibility, as I understand it, the possibility of video as a way that helps me reflect and understand things and to see the relationship with vision, in the old sense of the word, not only in the vision as the perceptive optical vision but to have visions, like having visions. The relationship also means to dream of visions, with mystical visions, or normal visions that we understand. Also, they provide me with different facets as a creator, or investigator. I could say to you that in general, in my work, there has been two aspects that have obliged me to see it myself.
We could say that this work is related to the concern that in social-ethical work, it is a critique also to things that socially I have found as barriers as what causes pain. And in all the media devices in the industry of visual entertainment. From news, to video games, etc etc, that support, create and construct a vein that sustains the social framework that is difficult and that causes pain, and on the other hand a slope of this social aspect that will have been an aspect of the interior exploration. In particular it is not looking for an identity, but exploring the mystery of life and the existence of the emotions that we have. Of the internal necessities that we have, they appear to be identities, have also undermined our internal exploration. There is not, in this case, one type of work that is more political. One is more poetic, we could say that.
What were the things you wanted us to learn during class?
For me, the most important was to show how images construct a veil. The images that we naturally are given stay with us and talk to us in our reality and in our dreams. But this image is constructed because we are consumers. You as college students at Carleton are in a different position in terms of simple consumption. You can actually read the pictures and see what is going through them. Reading the pictures then means learning a lot from the social rules of social interests and how they have been transmitted to you, how they are not transmitted to us.
How has your work evolved through your experiences?
It is my pure work. It has evolved based on dialogue and based on my needs and based on my mistakes. My mistakes, and my losses of the things that I have found and how I have been evolving through my life. One thing I have always been very clear on, is that you can sometimes use a difficult label as art. It always is all about dialogue that I have experienced through my life, and that is my strategy.
If not related to my life and with my feelings when I lose, when I have a concern, when something delights me with my fans, or my inadequacies, or with my anticipations and my intuition. My work has been evolving, so my work is very interested in the notion of trances and rite those trances that break reality, because I live in a small reality, I needed things to break the trances. I did not know why I chose to truth, but it attracted me a lot. I don’t remember recording preachers on the streets of Brooklyn. Sometimes they were alone and in the urban desert, and they spoke with incredible power. It’s a video called Pure Faith that I made and did not know why I recorded it. That’s why I recorded it because I did not know and I wanted to know why. It’s a bit of what you ask the vision.
Then my work was turned to the dismantling not so much to the media archeology but the disassembly, or taking fragments of films, like fragments of advertising and disassembling them and reassembling them in another order so they were not so opaque and transparent. Not the paradise they were showing but the fears with which they incite people. I started to realize that we were in an era where we find a document, but what you find isn’t something that is transparent.
First see how there is a creation of a reality that we take for reality, that is actually constructed in the same way that this Master movie is built. This veil of images. Then open up in this movie Master a series of holes to see that truth, not to see deeper layers of a deeper reality. It has been explained to us a little like this at some point but the intention is not to open holes that allow us to make reality less narrow so that it is not so superficial and so that it is not so hard, It is not only the one that corresponds to social conflicts and construction of the power of a visual discourse that ends up confused with reality. Then opening holes represents this, gaining depth make this reality become more uncertain and even more mysterious and less narrow.
The conflict is disappearing and the negation also disappears because from the layer of depth more shallow there is no transparency. From below the deeper layers as if we were in the bottom of the sea or a depth of the sea you look up and everything is transparent. And up there is the light. Then they are not denied. I look up and you say that there is no truth to conflicts. It is true that racial conflicts exist, and that there are social conflicts, material concepts, a series of things. But you already know that there are other things apart from this, and you know that from where those origins there are also conflicts.
What rituals or substances do you use to start a project or to explore an idea?
The most potent substances exist within human beings themselves. That is why we are affected by the things inside us. In fact, these things activate what is inside us. So I think that the moment we slow down, we actually slow down the movie—it’s slowing down, I’m not involved in the action and reaction of, “I have to get there. I have to get up. I have to work. I have to work.” We are able to slow down and not feel so much that we are the protagonist of the film that they sell us. There are very curious effects. We begin to see things without having to take anything. To access this there are different paths, different traditions that give you paths. But simple awareness is the state of consciousness of ourselves. People don’t talk about it anymore because it is in fact a disease—the most horrible thing that can happen to you in a system of production and efficiency and to be number one number two up. For example a simple disease already tells you what you need to do by then you get it. Usually when we have an illness we cover it immediately and take a combination of ibuprofen or acetaminophen. And whether you cover it or not, the disease is speaking for your body. The body is speaking to us. Every night we go to sleep and sleep strikes a huge blow to reality and suddenly we dream of things that make us think, “How can I be dreaming this and doing wonderful things or doing things that worry me?”
Then reality breaks down there but we say, “It’s a dream, and dreams are dreams,” and then we return to the daily grind. The same way we treated the disease with an ibuprofen, we cover the dream by saying it is not real. But the dream has spoken to us just as the disease has spoken to us. If we are attentive to the evolution of our bodies we will see the signs of old age or signs of growth. They are speaking to us. When we fall in love or enter into a relationship, we are suddenly not talking to ourselves as much. It’s as if we said, “My core is no long inside me, as if I were too small for myself. I have to be somewhere else to recognize myself in the brightness of someone else’s eyes, to see through their eyes even. So this tells us a lot, but also it sometimes teaches us to cover it up. And so life is constantly talking to us. We need a state of conscience awareness, and we already have a good substance that is going to break that daily reality very strong without manipulation.
Was there something that you wanted to explore more, but could not?
The idea of the importance of the invisible—how this reality becomes narrow and thin as paper and flat because it only moves in the visible or in conquest which can be done over what is invisible. Continuous extraction with a capital that is very extractivist basically not like the mines or the forces of work et cetera. It is a constant extraction towards the surface not only of the raw materials but also of the emotional interactions like through Facebook or social networks in which put all our feelings on the surface like a huge panoptic scenario. But in thinking the importance of the invisible—of what is not present, of what is hidden, not in terms of water we can conquer but rather something in terms of what it is good so that we can live together with what is not visibly there. Because we are future. We are what is not here yet. Our own life says—for example, I am here because there is a very important part of me—that is my partner—who is taking care of my children. If she were not, I would not be here. And what I am saying is marked by this. And you are here because maybe your parents have made an effort for you to be here. Or there is someone who has helped you to be here. This presence that we know in our dealings also individual as people. Our dialogue as within ourselves has a dialogue with others. So we can not judge everything because we are not seeing everything and that should make us be careful and affectionate with all people—even someone who might have a very annoying position. We do not know what their invisible part is. So this game of invisibility is very important and it gives layers of depth those layers reality. It never ends. We never get to the real layer.
What we learned
I learned to question my surroundings and my position in society and in a larger world.
Something very interesting that we learned from Toni is how our capitalist system has inundated us with certain images that influence the way we think, the person we are with other people, and the way make our world.
I have learned a lot about what we consider normal in the world and what really is not normal but what we have experienced throughout life.
The first image of colonialism a falling tree. In the video this starts with something falling and then at the end the tree in reverse stopping again. It’s very interesting and like that I really like how we are claiming what has been lost that has been colonized and we are giving life again.
The value of listening to others and the role that others can play in helping ourselves to break down the barriers we have built borders as Toni would say, which I think it is important.
Thanks for coming, I’ve enjoyed your classes a lot.
Many thanks Toni.
Thank you so much Toni for coming, we enjoyed it a lot and learned a lot.
And many thanks for coming Toni and it has been a pleasure.
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