Vergil: Your video and after that what changes is an expansive project. It consists of 586 fictional names that appear in a credits sequence over the span of 35 minutes. Could you tell me a bit about how this collection of names began?
Neven: I think of the names more as a population, one that is in a constant state of flux and potential, rather than as a finite collection, as you have phrased it. The 586 names that appear in the video are only a fraction of the larger population, which is at this point somewhere around 2000, and is always growing!
Vergil: How did this population start being generated?
Neven: I started writing down names about a year ago, when I was on a nine-week residency with 65 other people, in the woods of Maine. When you are with such a small group for such a long period of time, a lot of strange behaviors will start to emerge. There was a group of us who developed this absurd joke where we would start calling each other the most incorrect names and act as if nothing had changed, maybe as a way to create a surface of unfamiliarity between us while in such intense proximity. Ideas for work always come out of humour for me, or are propelled by it, and so the persistence of the performance of this joke allowed me to start thinking about names as units for writing, for experimentation with language. All summer I wrote little clusters of names down on scraps of paper. By the end of my time at the residency I had written about 1000 names, and had input them into an Excel spreadsheet, which I am continuing to manage and expand.
Vergil: It is interesting that you say the initial gesture was meant to create distance between people, because in watching the video I find that they function much differently, even in a completely opposite way. When the names appear in the video, and are given their duration on screen, they seem to have a gentle gravity to them, causing me to lean in towards them, and I start to speculate about the potential lives to which they are attached. I was surprised that the names had this effect on me, since I usually pass over credits without paying much attention. I was even more surprised that other people were actually sitting there with me reading names for such a long period of time, quite intently! (laughs)
Neven: One reason that I think the video has this effect is due to the relentlessness of its structure, in that it is constantly creating and suspending the expectation of its own narrative. Credits are a familiar language to us from entertainment, and are understood to exist either before or after the spectacular orchestrations of a story. I was anticipating that, when the viewer first encounters the credits, they would bring with them a desire to witness that spectacle, which in turn would create a potential willingness to remain within the holding pattern of the credits until its supposed arrival. It is a kind of hooking mechanism.
Vergil: This expectation of action is also intensified by your occasional use of conjunctions, which suggests the credits are concluding, such as writing “and introducing” before some names, or simply “and.” The video feels as though it is simultaneously ending and beginning the entire time.
Neven: Yes, and there are also the short musical jingles that play every 5-10 minutes that add to those feelings of resolve or beginning. After these jingles, the credits disappear briefly but then, of course, they return and persist, in earnest!
Vergil: How cruel! (laughs)
Neven: (laughs) Yes, I suppose it is a bit of manipulation. But I think, or hope, that once the viewer lets go of that expectation of the work’s narrative, a new kind of readership or literacy starts to be performed in its wake, one that is potentially both pleasurable and alienating for the viewer. I made the piece anticipating a type of viewer who would be actually quite comfortable with skimming over vast amounts of information than they are with rigorously unpacking the orchestration of narrative content. The work tried to make a point of respecting and harnessing these emergent surface-level literacies rather than fight against them. This meant navigating a non-communicative model for the artwork.
Vergil: Behind the names, there is your background nature imagery, which consists of short shots dissolving into one another. There are trees, rocks, a river, a rainstorm, a sunset and some geese. The only event that really happens is a brief encounter with a deer, which quickly gets chased off into the woods by an eager dog.
Neven: The nature imagery covers the span of one full day and one full night spent in the woods of the Gatineau, in Quebec. I began at 6 in the morning and ended at the same time the following day in a rather manic state. Without the presence of people or events in the imagery, the names are able to remain as unruly as possible. As there is no visible group or narrative to whom they could possibly be assigned, they are free from the task of performing obediently as tools for identification and can take on a new trajectory. The background imagery functions as a kind of foil for these characters and imagined collectivities to push off against.
Vergil: There is a moment as the sun is beginning to rise where we hear you singing a song. You sing the lyrics “it’s a wasteland, but it’s our wasteland” a few times and gently strum an acoustic guitar. Is this work a lament?
Neven: No. It’s a summon.