Left Hand Rotation Collective
Left Hand Rotation Collective shares with us, Janela.
A visual exploration of the tension between private and public space.
Janela by Left Hand Rotation Collective
Welcome! This is the first time we’ve had an artist collective on The Casserole Series. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?
LHRC: The collective is not associated with any individual/creator, it is structured as an anonymous and impersonal entity. Each new project is done under the auspice that the community in audience is not a spectator, but an active and essential part in the transformation of social reality. The willingness of the communities to give testimony of their particular situations helps in making the articulated action possible.
There is a strong awareness in every action by the collective of how important the audiovisual record is, both in terms of capturing it in a raw, uncut form, and the value that has, and in each videoclip’s potential to transform into units of language where combinations and manipulations [of these units] allow for complex messages to be transmitted by way of small everyday details. The camera cannot but register the specific context in which it is situated. It is through these localized captures that the collective is able to reflect upon a complex global system.
I was transfixed by this film, especially by the separation between public and private. The private spills out into the public (ex: the camera onto the street, the fixed on a subject completely daily tasks on their balcony). This was clearly shot pre-pandemic. It feels like you knew what was coming!
LHRC: The truth is that yes, filming this for three years right before the pandemic was a huge coincidence. The idea behind “JANELA (WINDOW)” is precisely that tension between the private and the public, and it gives off that quarantine feeling if we think about it now. We are interested in that friction that comes up when observing the outside from a “safe” and “hidden” place, from our homes—similar to a “voyeur.” We are constantly wondering if, at that same moment that we’re filming, there will be someone filming us.
We like to say that this film is one that was “shot outdoors,” but “without leaving home,” taking the zoom as far as it will go. We are also lucky in that we have this window offering a very diverse view of the neighborhood, of the sea, of a train station where things and situations are constantly happening, not only at different levels but also regarding the very intimacy of the neighbors.
Lisbon is a city in constant transformation, and we wanted to reflect that in the film. But after finishing it, the pandemic began, and the situation there changed even more. Now (in this compulsory time), in perceiving and valuing more than ever what it is like to make an audiovisual piece without leaving home, we decided to make a second part to the film (this time, made during the 2020 quarantine) called “THE INTIMATE RESISTANCE,” where the camera goes from filming the outside to filming ourselves inside. You can watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/416902707
The spectator can never hear clearly what is being said on the streets. Because of this, the viewer’s focus shifts onto the body. How one moves in public spaces and how the body changes when interacting in work, at play, while waiting, with friends, and with strangers.
LHRC: So as to create that relationship and highlight those tensions between the external and the internal, between the public and the private, we wanted to define those continuous dualities (INSIDE-OUTSIDE). A very simple way of doing it is to take advantage of what, at the visual level, the camera is capable of filming (which we can trick or manipulate with the zoom, bringing things that we cannot hear, and that are very far away closer). The sound we record at that moment always corresponds to intimacy or to privacy, to a horror movie we are watching, or the music emanating from our homes while we do yoga, or to a radio broadcast advertising to consumer society. This non-diegetic sound penetrates the entire film and allows us to create new narratives: filming a ship with its lights on at night, which using sounds coming from some action scene within our domestic environments, looks like a spaceship in flight.
The film shot entirely from above creates a tension between inhabitant and environment - people waiting for the train, people walking below cranes, and a ship waiting for passengers to depart. The structures seem to engulf the subjects and dictate their movements.
LHRC: It’s exactly that contrast between the exterior and the interior. It is always this play between domestic sounds and those more or less everyday situations that are being filmed. These sounds come to spectacularize some of those daily actions, turning that apparent normality, or reality, into a spectacle (mixing together the sound of a Hollywood movie with a daily record of someone waiting for a train, or a neighbor). We have a friend who said to us “this is not a film about public and private space. It leaves that dichotomy behind. And yes, it is recorded out of a private window (this becomes clear, I think, with the opening shot), but it also moves, drawing a space that, in being ‘public,’ is pierced by forms and energies very different from those that make up the traditional public/private division.”
We also have the question of how to represent fragmented space: we try and construct a geography out of fractured spaces but ones that intersect, or are connected, in various ways (for example, narratives created by neighbors at their windows, narratives that attend to the daily actions of other workers—some graffiti artist at work while others are cleaning graffiti off a wall, or tourists taking photographs of a neighbor’s daily actions from a boat). And finally, the film also functions as a three-year audiovisual diary of getting up every morning with a camera in hand, opening the window.
What is the collective working on now?
LHRC: We are preparing a workshop on gentrification – for which we have already visited 16 cities in 9 countries – in Argentina and a documentary in southern Chile (Patagonia), though we have to wait for restrictions to lift to be able to travel, probably in 2022. We are also working on a documentary on social movements here in Lisbon, an attempt to motivate people to take to the streets, to continue to fight for their rights using images of the pandemic’s empty streets, and contrasting that with audio from anti-racists demonstrations, women’s marches, demonstrations on housing laws, or climate change. Filmed between 2019 and 2020, it’s entitled RUA (STREET). You can watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/524858008
Recipe of the Week: MIGAS EXTREMEÑAS
Left Hand Rotation Writes, “This is a dish that shepherds and rural folk would eat after many hours working in the fields. With very little budget and means, they would make recipes out of whatever foods were readily available to them on any given day. In this case: day-old bread, garlic, oil, and chorizo sausage.”
Ingredients
Day-old bread - 500 g (~ 1 lb.), crumbled
Chorizo - 200 g (~ 0.4 lbs.), sliced
Garlic - 4 cloves, unpeeled
Assorted peppers- 4 long peppers (like Anaheim or Banana) or 2-3 Bell peppers, cut into strips.
Paprika - 1 tablespoon
Extra virgin olive oil - 120 ml (~1/2 cup)
Salt to taste
Break bread into small pieces and wrap crumbs inside a damp kitchen cloth. Place that to the side while you heat olive oil in a pan. When the oil is hot, add the garlic (without peeling it!), then fry the peppers for a couple of minutes before adding in the sliced chorizo. Next, add the breadcrumbs to the pan, stirring all the ingredients together. The bread will absorb all the juices from the chorizo, oil, and garlic. Cook for five minutes over low heat, stirring occasionally. Turn off the heat and let rest for another five minutes. Taste and adjust for salt. In southern Spain, this dish is often eaten for breakfast, “the most important meal of the day.”
Spanish / English translation by Camila Moreiras and Rachel Jessen.