The Camera is Present.
Marit Lindberg. 2017 (4:00)
(Marit Lindbergs material) 

The material that I donated to Carousell was filmed in Asia and Africa, on trips that were both upsetting and powerful in different ways. I was working mainly on other projects, but at the same time had a vague notion about letting the camera document my experiences in unfamiliar lands. I did a lot of filming, and I thought that the result would be as gripping as the journeys had been for me.

Some of the footage is from Taiwan in 2002. I had a grant to film artists' dreams about other artists' work, but got no help carrying out the project at first. I felt frustrated and lonely in a country where almost no-one spoke English. During that time, I filmed in different cities and places. Some of the material found its place in the film Flamenco in Taipei, which depicts a young dancer's dreams of another life. There were many hours of footage left over. When I watched the films I had made later, I experienced a tourist's gaze of the environments that had been new to me then: streets, architecture, people, demonstrations, musicians, outdoor theaters. It is beautiful—but what does it mean to film from an outside perspective?

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