Tomás Camillis: The theme of technology is central to modern discourse, being more often than not either elevated in a utilitarian optimism or dismissed in a romantic idealism. It is also one of the major themes in your work, but in your approach, I don’t sense any moralism — more of a detached enchantment. The decision to utilize the camera as your artistic vehicle not only mirrors your chosen theme but also allows you to maintain this quality of aesthetic contemplation, or visual neutrality, even when you film factories of huge machines with immense power.

Ali Kazma: My biggest concern is being able to give the subject I’m shooting the right distance through the image that I create, determining thus the space you give for it to express its inner essence in interaction with its surroundings. I need to create enough freedom, yet enough contextual frame so that we see what is happening correctly when this subject expresses itself. I usually keep a static camera because when you start to move it, you’re immediately involving a subjectivity that imposes its heavy-handed gaze. Of course, I’m imposing, but I also want to adopt its perspective.

TC: This is an aspect of your work that seems deeply modern: the understanding that we are always subjected to a certain circumstance where things matter, for they shape us too. It’s not about dominance over the subject.

AK: It’s hope. My modernist position is one of hope, that it is a possibility to shape a life through things, through space, and maybe even for the better.

TC: And therefore one of the centerpieces of your work becomes the idea of transformation, about how we shape ourselves by shaping the world around us. This is, for me, the central theme of modernity. Looking at your work, I was reminded of Goethe’s Faust, that to become an Übermensch needs to overcome his loneliness and shape the world around him, to be shaped by it afterward. He then manifests this landscape of factories and ports, industries and cities and gardens. This is also your world, the one you convey through the idea of collective transformation.

AK: But collective transformation through individual transformation. In my works, very rarely you’ll see someone treated as part of a crowd, even when I film in huge factories. I don’t approach someone as the stereotype of a worker but look at each one — even when doing similar things, they always do them in their unique ways. This progress is, to me, an individual quest. But I am not so naive as to propose we can all make progress through this type of planning. In many ways it has failed, modernity’s project. But I don’t think we can discard it completely. We have to find another way to bring the idea of transformation for the better. There is no other human project for me.

TC: The development of modernity reached a state of hyper-individualism that is unable to propose a new project for the future, even if isolation is a big part of the individual’s transformation process. And even when you film people in isolation they’re never truly alone, but always in a certain environment, in a dialogue with things.

AK: We are always in some context, or another.

TC: In modernity, there’s always been a tension between art and the industrial revolution. John Ruskin even evoked the Gothic artisan to contradict the belief in technological progress. But in your work, there’s no difference between technology and craftsmanship because you show us how even factories with huge infrastructures are, at heart, artisanal too.

AK: I won’t say all industrial production gives the workers opportunities to somehow realize a potential within themselves — I’ve seen terrible working conditions in many places. But I am interested in situations where this might become possible, where every person who touches an object can learn from the object, transforming themselves through it. Between distinct individuals, we see a whole variety of approaches to the same work. So how could we expand this possibility to the majority of the people who transform things? Therefore, I try to understand the complications of life in the factory as a micro-unit of society.

TC: Your approach to artist’s studios, or spaces, also belongs to your interest in the individual scale of transformation. The private libraries of this work are like microcosms. Looking at Orhan Pamuk and Alberto Manguel, one senses this solitary digestion of the world, almost like demiurges in a quest to organize their universes. To see Pamuk is to contemplate someone who truly belongs to a self-created environment. But there’s a symmetry because Manguel is, in return, trying to discover a place fitted for this eventual harmony. Another symmetry is the tension between their microcosm and the collective sphere — the ships coming through the Bosphorus, in their ordering of our global society, mirror the order being realised in their libraries.

AK: I have observed the differences in people, in their thinking, their rhythms, their way of creating value or conceiving the world, and the relationship to solitude is one of the defining characteristics of anyone I meet. Being able to enjoy solitude and building something from it is a necessity for any individual to better transform anything. Alberto and Orhan are world builders — as you said, they are building their own environments. I have worked and lived with artists, and observed their lives. Some of them take from the raw materials of the world to transform it. Others sit at a desk and create from texts and books, from the written experience of others, like Alberto and Orhan. When you see Pamuk’s working, from morning till night he’s alone, but always surrounded by the texts of others or of himself. This is a world built seemingly on solitude — but it’s full of others. Manguel is the same. So this solitude is actually an incredibly enriching experience to build meaningful links with others. And then you get out of that solitude and engage with others, and it spreads. Manguel’s solitude has produced numerous works, books, and essays, this huge private library in Lisbon that is becoming public, this obsession of one man in his solitude is now a resource for our society. I find this extremely valuable, the private nature of the public sphere.

TC: In this work, I even had the sense you’re shifting the supposed hierarchy between public reality and individual imagination: we’re witnessing the world being transformed into representation. Modernism saw art as the hammer of the world, in trying to shape it. But now it has become even more the allure of multiple reflections, the exercise of simulacra so dear to Borges, his childhood spent in his father’s library that became his truest reality, and his mirrors and mazes also present in this work. Are you searching for some deeper truth, or do you see your work more as an experimentation on symbols and imagination?

AK: Both, I would say. For sure it’s an exercise in symbols, meanings, language, objects and materials, all the possibilities we have within this amazing place that we tend to overlook. But I remind myself of the sky you see as a child, this past fascination of the world. It gives me great joy to play with everything the world has given me. But like all good plays, it’s a serious play, with the goal of figuring out how to live in this world, for myself. How to manifest a certain rhythm, and with what values and priorities? How can I balance the private and the public, the poetic and the scientific? I question myself, and try to engage the world not only through symbols, literature and the possibilities of my body, but also through my art — in them, I seek not the ultimate truth, but a truth I could live with.

TC: To propose perhaps new concepts of truth that are outside the traditional dualities of our thinking — the one and eternal truth that is opposite to the simulacra of empty games.

AK: I think it’s both. Just the love of play, devoid of any deeper motive, perhaps degenerates into a lesser form, as we see in a lot of artists where the joy of play takes over. Because then eventually you lose even the joy — a difficult situation for any creative person.

TC: In this work, we also see the writers engaged in restful activities. But for you, even the moments of quietude are filled with action. The understanding of how labor changes our sense of time is a major topic of your work. Historically, the labor of agriculture introduced the idea of suspension: waiting for the crops to grow. After the Industrial Revolution, we’ve become shaped by the everlasting rhythm of the factory, which hinders rest. How do you think your work deals with the accelerating nature of our society?

AK: As a maker of images, you should be on a very strict diet of them, not having an over appetite for seeing and creating. For me, one good work of art is perfect enough for a week. We have to keep a little bit of our brains, their capacity to recreate meaning. Some would say I work a lot, but rest is also needed, even though I cannot just turn my mind off. But I can read certain types of books that rest my brain in a good way, creating an activity that keeps the main activity away. And then I devote myself again to thinking about and making images. Especially when younger, I had to learn to pull away and distance myself, because that is how the other part becomes meaningful. The films need to rest, too.

TC: The classical delimitation of Mediterranean Europe, from the Hellespont to the Pillars of Hercules, only preserves western Turkey and disposes of the whole of Portugal. But in this work, you suggest a symmetry between Lisbon and Istanbul, perhaps substituting the purist fallacy of the European garden for the continent as a porous cultural center. And still, you chose to outline this territory through the practices of two introspective writers.

AK: A celebration of attention.

TC: It’s almost as if they’re reinventing, through the inner articulations of their libraries’ symbols, the whole continent. As the ships approach the Bosphorus and the Atlantic seagulls land, they bring Pamuk and Manguel the tools necessary for them to dream Europe into being. Perhaps nationality is just another fiction.

AK: We could also contemplate many other ports, but I choose to see these countries as the eastern and western gateways of Europe. I want to look at history from a vigorous perspective, suggesting something different from this hyper-capitalist madness we are living, limiting ourselves to the fear of the immigrant, to this repression through right-wing agendas that say Europe’s gone, it’s lost, that all is barbaric and civilisation’s done. I seek doors not be shut down but kept open, through which this Argentine can come to Lisbon, bringing here his solitude. I want to remind those who are demoralised and let down that we have the right to ask for this solitude, and invest in this other idea of culture that permits the possibility of curiosity, respect and the cultivation of attention, that we can discover and develop things we can share. We have to fight for this better Europe, but not with guns: writing, reading, remembering, preserving, even if it seems we are losing at this moment, for a fight is never about that one specific time, but about creating and preserving memory. That’s why I wanted to show these portraits from two edges of Europe, seeing that even today these people are still living like this. So it’s possible to continue, creating meaning in our time.

TC: Fighting through an expanded idea of idleness.

AK: Robert Walser, perhaps, wrote about how Cezanne spent his time in contemplation, complicating things that looked simple and simplifying things that looked complicated. A good life, for him, and his definition of joy — a writer’s happiness.

TC: An infinite process. And therefore, I would like to approach your concept of rhythm. If artistic composition presupposes our capacity to understand the whole of reality, rhythm is more humble and mysterious, more contemplative and less intellectual. In your work, especially through the relationship between different temporal planes, we reach a sense of transcendence. We see workers that, in their labor, overcome themselves to inhabit the harmony of all things, great and small — the rhythm of Pamuk’s writing, for example, mirrors the movements of the Bosphorus boats. Do you believe in universal harmony?

AK: Universal harmony could exist, I suppose, in an ideal world, but I’ve never seen it in history or even the possibility of it in a future society. You only dream for others when you presuppose that a certain world harmony could exist, preventing an inquisitive posture and forcing yourself on the other. But my way of imposing a kind of harmony on the world is a very humble gesture: a quest to discover harmony within my own life, never daring to push it onto a bigger platform. It takes so much to create just one individual who can maintain a good rhythmic harmony with his surroundings. It’s so difficult to create an adequate context for it to happen. In Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard says it had taken the Wittgenstein family two generations of horrible work, building armoires and steel and pollution to produce this one Wittgenstein — not Ludwig, but the pianist — who was the fruit of all things. It’s an exaggeration, but a point I find interesting. So when you find an Orhan Pamuk or an Alberto Manguel, someone who is trying to create this personal harmony against the odds, it’s like discovering an upside-down pyramid in the desert. Most people have drifted away from this. I choose to work with these individuals to remind us of the possibility of such a quest.

TC: A beautiful image, the inverted pyramid, for its power and delicacy. Nature took billions of years to produce human consciousness, a thing as sophisticated as it is fragile, so easily broken down through superficial rhythms. I would like, therefore, to end our talk with death. The sense of awe present in your works gives me the feeling that our greatest goal is the creation of things whose duration will outlive us. Both Manguel and Pamuk, for example, are searching such monuments capable of preserving order and eternity. Is the tension between the precariousness of life and the idea of eternity important to you?

AK: Neal Stephenson, a writer of baroque science fiction, talks about this captain who has gone through much peril, sailing through stormy seas. But in his ship’s cabin, he keeps a mirror, and has fragile glasses to drink his sherry and cutlery that allows him to eat in a gentlemanly way. And he’s furious when discovers dust on the table. In a way, we are always trying to create order in a world destined to die. Knowing my own end, I try to discover a good way to spend the time I have. My work tries to understand the activities that wish to prolong, stop or delay this decomposition, that try to maintain that beauty, that order, developing the rhythm and the context that gives me a chance to create meaning in the world. And I’m attracted to people who do the same.

The interview with Ali Kazma took place in connection with his exhibition Lisbon-Istanbul. Two Portraits on the Edge, on show at Galeria Francisco Fino until May 3.