Them, the Water and Me

Mònica Rovira

Where to begin. With desire or with necessity. With gaps or with wounded images. At the rupture, between the two movements.

There is a time when abandoned distant images return. They appear like open wounds, alive and contradictory. You listen to them, touch them and plunge into them. What do we recall? How do we construct memory? How do we express the transitory experience between different places and times? How do we work with loss? How do we resignify images? How do we make a world out of them and make room for those that do not yet exist?

There is another movement, forward, a blind jump, with the camera. When you are there, when you search and lose yourself. Between doing and not doing. When you speak, when you are silent. In different stories, at different moments. When you look inquisitively, desirously, violently, or when you are caught with someone. Affection and the look, through the body. When, from there, everything is possible.

And you are there, at that crossroads. In the tension between desire and writing. When you open gaps, embrace wounded or lost images, or those that are about to be lost, and you babble. Searching and doubt accompany you on the journey: how is the voice being made?

RESEARCH

The act of writing a diary: detaching, unfolding, surprising, constellating, imitating yourself. Fictionalising yourself. The diary as a record of your own mutation.

Roland Barthes

I have been incorporating the camera into my research processes for years now. It helps me to open up spaces of tension and relationship that can be sustained over time. Then there are latent, gravitating images, records of other moments. As a filmmaker, I take the idea of rehearsing―trial and error―as a tool to build an intimate diary from experience. How to be with the things that pass through us and how to allow yourself to be affected by situations? How to write from that place where links and fractures, longings and affections, are activated? Inside and outside. Constantly moving. 

I approach my personal archive in this dense present. Open brackets. If I look back, I realise that the camera has also been a refuge from which to transit emotionally intense experiences. To See a Woman arose as a response to an overflow, with the abandonment of a project, faced with the impossibility of deep understanding, with the mourning of a relationship. It comes from failure. It was out of necessity and desperation that I began to take notes, scribbles like rumblings in the middle of nowhere, which in time would become the guiding thread that articulates the story, a knot that unravels, a voice that becomes, in transit.

Close brackets. 

I have a folder stored on my computer called "London_2022", the video notes of a solitary journey-getaway: a trembling, visceral pulse, insistently running through the crack, outwards, in search of light. Trees, water. Wanderings, sighs and breaths. Whatever I have inside me is boiling and I want to rip it out, all of it: how difficult it is to walk there. A diary on hold, an open wound, a broken heart. 

I needed distance, to move, to be able to be with these images (and what is not understood, what escapes, what is lost). While at rest, I wonder about autobiographical narratives and non-progressive temporalities. Woolf, Duras, Lorde, Anzaldúa are there, always. I revisit Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich. I read Annie Ernaux, Moyra Davey, Kate Zambreno, Angélica Liddell, Begoña Méndez. 

And then, one day, I go up to the attic. I look for a box. I find the tapes. The first time I shot on video, the process of a film being made. July twenty oh five. Marc Recha invites me to the shoot of August Days. Come and write down what you see. Someone lends me a camera. I am a master’s student in creative documentary, and this adventure is entirely new to me. Four weeks on the road following the river, in the open air. I feel like an intruder, moving nimbly and silently between the scenes. I look at them; I touch them with the camera. I move closer; I leave. On the fly. Trees, water. It was a powerful experience. One of learning. Then, later, we would grow apart. Far away, nothing. I would abandon those images. Twenty years later, I return to them. 

From some images to others (from one diary to another), between 2005 and 2022. I recover and review other filmed moments. I put them into play and interrelate them. Images return and, with them, experiences that uncover lines of tension in the body, impacts on the skin, emotional tattoos, unanswered questions. What do these images speak of today? How to enter them? How to travel between different places and times? How do they approach and connect from this insularity? What passes through them? What repeats itself? How to make room for what was lost? How to signify the gaps? And then, now, what?

We can only show the sacrifice, and the incomprehensibility of the sacrifice. In other words, the mystery of anguish. The experience of the beautiful begins when the comprehensible, the measurable, the explicable, is suspended. The experience of beauty begins when technique is expelled by the miracle. The ineffable is the measure of the beautiful.

Angélica Liddell

What self-absorbed writing does not fulminate the mirage of being an immutable, singular first person? What face does not (re)twist and begin to be alien if one looks for too long in a river or mirror?

Begoña Méndez

Mònica Rovira is filmmaker and researcher. Graduate in Audiovisual Communication and Master in Creative Documentary Filmmaking from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Diploma in Film Directing from FAMU (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague). With Ver a una mujer (2017), she began investigating the tension between desire and writing, film language as a place from which to ask questions, the ways of narrating what happens to us. With a binding urge, she has established a triangular relationship with the other and with the camera. A practice that focuses on the vulnerability and temporality of bodies, as well as the spectral relations that wound, pass through and overwhelm images. She rehearses the writing of the self in film, shaping a voice in transit that questions identity. Them, the Water and Me (2024) is the research for a new film.