History-Making through Collaborative Photographic Reenactments

As the tour of the settlement came to an end, I inquired if any of the people present would be interested in reenacting some of the photographs. Again, the response was overwhelmingly positive, and while our previous reenact­ments along our journey had engendered many requests for explanations from us, the people of Sao Sebastiao did not voice any reservations, which surprised me.

A young pregnant woman, Clediane, asked to be portrayed in a set of images, which we reenacted in a street in front of a small fenced garden with a view of a larger part of the settlement (Figure 4.2). In photographing, I employ mainly analogue medium-format cameras, but I also make Fuji

Figure 4.2 Triptych. Left side: Clediane photographed in Sao Sebastiao (first loca­tion of Tonantins). Christian Vium. 2015. Center: Raimundo and Zilius photographed in Sao Sebastiao (first location of Tonantins). Christian Vium. 2015. Right side: No. 18. Caixanas (rive gauche). Indiens sauvages (homme et femme). Albert Frisch. 1867.

Source: © Albert Frisch images courtesy of Weltmuseum Wien.

instant film and digital images to be able to relay to the people portrayed how they appear in the images.

Clediane was timid but not skeptical of our collaboration. In previous archive-based photographic reenactments carried out with indigenous people in Central Australia (2014), the Brazilian Amazon (2015), and later Siberia (2017), I have often experienced that people would become very emotional in the process of embodying their ancestors (Vium, 2018). This did not seem to be the case for the people I worked with in Sao Sebastiao. I was not under the impression that they connected deeply with the people in the original photographs. Rather, they seemed to be performing a more mechanical form of mimesis that somehow was more focused on the aesthet­ics of their present appearance. Clediane was, as I understood it, enacting herself more as a representative of the Caixana than as an individual per­son. She too seemed to be (re)enacting a type—or “typical [particulars].. in which a single entity is taken as exemplary of an entire class” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 281; see also Nichols, 2008, pp. 84-85).

After photographing Clediane, I made a series of portraits with a couple, Raimundo and Zilius, on the basis of the two double portraits by Frisch (Figure 4.1, images 18 and 19, and Figure 4.2). Again, their attachment to the original photographs appeared to be rather limited. However, our col­laboration around the photographic reenactments seemed to relax them and opened up a space of dialogue between us, in which we were reflecting on who the couple might have been and how their relation was. “They look troubled, as if something terrible has happened,” Raimundo reflected as he inspected the reproduction more closely. I remembered how, during a prior elicitation in a Ticuna community further upstream, an interlocutor told me that he was certain that Frisch had executed the people portrayed once he had photographed them. While there are no indications that this was the case, it was as if some haunting presence leaked from these faded fragments of a past encounter. The particular image Raimundo was commenting upon (Figure 4.1, image 18) is, I personally find, among the most disconcerting and ambiguous in the entire Frisch album. I attribute its haunting effect pri­marily to the facial expressions of the two people portrayed. The man looks almost as if he is reviewing a spectral memory, and especially the woman, whose face appears to have been retouched to the extent that her mouth and the entire lower part of her face is disfigured, radiates a profound melan­cholia. Compared to the other portrait of the same couple, one readily sees the difference in terms of the retouching.

For both of these brief examples of reenactments carried out in Sao Sebastiao, it is important to mention that they involved an audience, which forms an integral part of the reenactment. During our photo sessions, peo­ple in the audience contribute to the conversation, suggest ways to make the photographs, and give ideas on gestures, expressions, etc. In that sense, the collaboration is expanded, and I, the people in front of the camera, and the audience all contribute to the production of the image, which is also intended for a broader imagined audience (Vium, 2014). This latter notion of an external audience is extremely important as it configures how peo­ple perform. The fact that our reenactment is captured or fixed for future reference by others is essential. This, of course, is part and parcel of pho­tography’s import: the shutter makes a temporal incision, preserving and representing an image of a situation for a future audience.

I employ photographic reenactments not to produce images that pur­port to accurately represent a given situation, but more as part of a meth­odological approach to establish a space for extended dialogue, analysis, and engagement with the archives and, by implication, with the past repre­sented in them. If anything, I hope the images will attest to the performa- tivity and representation of an event or encounter, rather than to the event itself. The idea was, simply put, to explore the potential of an embodied and performative approach to analysis that critically engages the indexical nature of the photographic archive at hand and the encounter from which it emanated. Depending on the situation, the original photographs, and the location, the method is adapted to be more or less strict with regard to how closely we imitate the original photograph.