| Most family histories today feature stories of migration and displacement, of foreign origins or relatives and friends scattered across the globe. The works of the young Dutch-Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel similarly address this phenomenon. Taking as their starting point the history of a single member of the artist’s own extended family, his films and slide projections weave through cities, countries and continents, introducing, along the way, an extraordinary cast of central and peripheral characters. In the process, Pijnappel’s works ultimately transcend the personal, offering a broader reflection on the nature of relationships, the gaps between reality and aspiration and the complex nature of contemporary identity. |  |
Pablo Pijnappel – Andrea Tarsia
Most family histories today feature stories of migration and displacement, of foreign origins or relatives and friends scattered across the globe. The works of the young Dutch-Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel similarly address this phenomenon. Taking as their starting point the history of a single member of the artist’s own extended family, his films and slide projections weave through cities, countries and continents, introducing, along the way, an extraordinary cast of central and peripheral characters. In the process, Pijnappel’s works ultimately transcend the personal, offering a broader reflection on the nature of relationships, the gaps between reality and aspiration and the complex nature of contemporary identity. Combining footage shot by the artist, home movies and images appropriated from mainstream cinema, his works also offer a meditation on time, space and the moving image.
In many ways, Pijnappel’s work is concerned with the act of storytelling and with exploring the stories that we tell about who we are and where we come from. Rather than creating linear narratives, however, he combines literary traditions of authors such as Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene with the Structuralist experimentation of filmmakers like Chris Marker. Each work involves a personal and physical journey, narrated in succinct statements scripted by the artist that are nonetheless open and leading in their meanings. These are juxtaposed with home movies, excerpts from mainstream Hollywood films or simple drawings, images that don’t directly illustrate the words spoken but bear a more allusive relation to them. The result is a web of impressions that weave together fact and fiction, the intensely private with the public, the specific with the generic and that equate the flicker of film with the imprecise incidence of memory.
Pijnappel’s work, 1921–1977, 1979–, was made when the artist discovered a box of old home movies shot on Super-8 film. He edited these together to narrate the story of Pijnappel’s grandfather, who fled Nazi-occupied Germany in search of his mother and who eventually settled in Brazil. The images are accompanied by a narrative written by the artist that extends to describe his own inverse trajectory from Brazil to the Netherlands in search of his origins. The title of the work refers to the years in which Pijnappel’s grandfather was born and died, as well as to the year of the artist’s birth.
The work Andrew Reid focuses instead on Pijnappel’s stepfather, and interweaves two parallel narratives: the first being a series of recorded telephone conversations between the artist, based in Amsterdam, and his stepfather, Reid (normally based in Columbia), who is setting out to travel to Holland to be featured in the work. With each phone call, the likelihood of Reid making it to Holland decreases until it becomes clear that he in fact never made it. The second narrative is the story of Reid’s extraordinary life, scripted by Pijnappel and set to a montage of scenes from films such as Black Orpheus, Fitzcarraldo, Romancing the Stone and Taxi Driver. Like the work itself, which is, in some ways, a testament to Reid’s absence, the scenes selected by Pijnappel are in fact all transitional shots; shots from between key actions that therefore never capture the main event. A third set of images, which simply shows views from the windows of Pijnappel’s studio in Amsterdam, captures the passing of time as the artist waits for the arrival of his stepfather.
Pijnappel’s Walderedo focuses instead on the artist’s biological father, Walderedo Ismael de Oliveira Jr. The film is again composed by two narratives: one follows Pijnappel’s travels to see his father in Tokyo, where he finds him married with two young children, working as an artist and suffering from depression. The second narrative travels back in time to Brazil and to Walderedo’s own father, a noted psychoanalyst who mixed in artistic and intellectual circles of mid-century Brazil. As with many of Pijnappel’s films, past and present collide with strange echoes of each other.
Connected to this film is a slide installation, A Dog in the Park. This work consists of sketches drawn by Walderedo Jr. that Pijnappel photographed and arranged to suggest a number of possible narratives. Mostly drawn during the artist’s stay in Tokyo, the main characters in the narratives allude to events and locations that connect Pijnappel with his father, yet also provide the dreamy, open-ended narrative of comic strips.
