Evan Apodaca with HereIn
Still from Monumental Interventions, 2023, video, 13 min.
[Image description: With a decorated naval ship docked in the background, the toppled bust of a military memorial appears to be mid-sentence, its eyes wide and its mouth slightly open.]
Evan Apodaca wears a lot of hats. Though he is perhaps best known for his work in film, he is also a musician, an historian, a sculptor—the list goes on. At the heart of his practice as a media artist, however, is his commitment to unearthing stories the world isn’t always ready to hear.
His most recent multi-platform video series, Monumental Interventions: Selections From Secret City (2023), examines the detrimental effect of the U.S. military’s presence on San Diego. Using archival footage, recorded interviews, and facial-motion technology, Apodaca animates the faces of toppled statues, busts, and military memorials, in an effort to explore, in his words, the narrative of the “military’s disfigurement of San Diego.”
At the Woodbury School of Architecture, Apodaca has also recently installed a series of public sculptures, titled Reruns (2023), each installment of which is a cyanotype print of old newspapers on stucco walls that retells the story of a labor strike led by San Diego shipyard workers in 1941.
In his conversation with HereIn Contributing Editor Justin Duyao, Apodaca explored his perspective on the poetic potential of documentary filmmaking, the fine line between political propaganda and interventionist art, as well as the histories that the world chooses to remember and those it chooses to forget.
HereIn Journal: I wanted to ask you about your chosen medium. I understand you haven’t always been a video artist or documentarian—can you tell me more about why you seem to have gravitated toward video art? Do you see that as the best way to tell stories like Monumental Interventions? What’s kept you coming back to it?
Evan Apodaca: I was doing a lot of sculptural installation work that incorporated sound elements, especially when I was in Chicago for school. I think when I started to get into video, it was a result of getting out of school, post-undergrad, and seeing that there was a gap between myself, what I wanted to talk about, and how the audience would engage with it. The art world was feeling very exclusive, at that moment, and I was really turned off by that.
When I moved to San Diego, that’s when I started to get into documentary film. It’s really direct. In order to master the medium, I had to learn how to communicate things without being vague—for me, that was an existential juncture that answered the question of how I wanted to be an artist.
Installation view of Monumental Interventions, 2023, video, 13 min., San Diego International Airport
[Image description: Against a wall of earthen tiles, a screen displaying a film hangs before a large, colorful graphic, which superimposes the faces of military busts onto a camouflage pattern.
I think video is one of those mediums that has narrative potential in ways that connect with audiences. Everyone watches videos, everyone has an opinion about film. It’s already inherently connected to the public. In the case of Monumental Interventions, I’ve seen that as really important. As a video piece, it plays best in public. It doesn’t really play well otherwise. Even as a theatrical piece, the way the text is being spoken, it taps into a kind of engagement that’s very direct.
HereIn: I can tell that you are really sensitive to issues like accessibility and making sure the stories you’re trying to tell in your work actually come through to your audience. It’s not enough just to make something that’s powerful; it has to actually land where you intend it to.
Apodaca: I’m always thinking about efficiency, conciseness, and effectiveness.
Still from Monumental Interventions, 2023, video, 13 min.
[Image description: Before the towering cityscape of San Diego’s downtown area, the mouth of a toppled memorial for a navy pilot—its shimmering silver bust on its side, separated from its pedestal—lies agape.]
HereIn: You have described documentary as a poetic form of art, too. Can you reflect on that? What about filmmaking and video art is poetry to you? Do you see yourself as a visual poet, in any way?
Apodaca: In a very basic way, I think the tool of narrative is highly underutilized in the art world. I think it can easily be seen as a binary, where something that’s narrative comes off as didactic. It doesn’t have a sense of mystery. But I think that’s not true—documentary films can take on many forms. While the medium can be seen as strictly nonfiction, fact-based storytelling, if you look at some of the more recent work from filmmakers like Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean documentary filmmaker—if you look at his writing, especially—it’s poetry. And though it centers around a real story, the writing, the narration, it’s pure poetry.
In the case of Monumental Interventions, the individuals I interviewed are voicing real opinions, speaking to real historical facts; but the way those facts exist in the context of the space where the piece exists, say a public space like an airport, that adds poetry to it. It’s funny, because the scenes themselves are fictitious, the interviews aren’t really the voices of fallen military statues; but the ideas are real, and there’s a lot of hard truths embedded into the story. I enjoy playing between those two worlds.
Reruns, 2023, cyanotype on stucco, 48 x 36 x 2.5 in. each
[Image description: On the edge of a sidewalk, before a wall of shrubbery, three large blue artworks are staked into the dirt.]
HereIn: I love the way you said that. To add another layer of complexity, you’ve said, before, that your work isn’t propaganda, nor is it inherently political or polarizing; but I know a lot of people have criticized it as hyper politicized, “woke,” etc. For you, it sounds like, even though it is poetry, it is art—it’s not strictly non-fiction, documentary work—you do a lot of research. You do a lot of work fact checking and you always make sure you’re telling a true story. Here, I’m also thinking about your work with Reruns, too, which leans heavily on newspaper archives.
Do you find yourself holding yourself back, when you’re working on these pieces? Are you ever tempted to make a statement, on behalf of history? Do you prefer to let the archive speak for itself? Or do you prefer ambiguity?
Apodaca: Sometimes it isn’t until after making a piece, after seeing how it manifests in the world, that I can really learn what the piece is about. None of it is strictly propaganda, but my work does represent a very distinct perspective. I’m not shying away from that.
It’s funny, I think propaganda can be very idealistic, especially as it relies on images and ideals that aren’t based in reality. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series from the early 1940s, for example, was all government-funded and was extremely effective at manufacturing consent for war. This period of effective propaganda needed to be extremely idealistic, in order to be effective. Interestingly enough, Capra is actually known to have been inspired by the effectiveness of Nazi films from that era. That idea started to make me think about the ways my work deals with the idea of truth.
Reruns, 2023, cyanotype on stucco, 48 x 36 x 2.5 in.
[Image description: Against the rough texture of stucco, a cyanotype of a newspaper is smoothly printed in a hazy blue. The headline reads, “Defense Strike Spread Threatens.”]
HereIn: I like that point you’ve made about how propaganda is fiction. Whereas your work seems to imagine an alternative history, in a revisionary sense, propaganda is usually utopic, idealistic. It isn’t neutral, it’s always infused with a political stance.
Apodaca: I’ve been writing about this recently—this delicate space between fact and fiction—and I’ve been really interested in what it means to tell a story and to find that it’s been rejected or ignored by the general public. Does that make it unworthy of being “factual”? Especially when it comes to censorship, what does that do to the psychology of what we think is real or not real?
HereIn: Reruns is such a great piece to have exhibited alongside Monumental Interventions, because, in both projects, you’re looking through public archives and determining what histories have survived the test of time and been retold and which have been deliberately forgotten or erased. In a way, your project is in the middle of that moment where a story either goes viral or it’s erased, almost like you’re participating in or are at least affected by the same forces your work is investigating.
Reruns (detail), 2023, cyanotype on stucco
[Image description: In a detailed shot of a cyanotype newspaper print on stucco, the surface of the print appears to be slowly chipping away, revealing the rough gray beneath.]
Apodaca: The Reruns series is a great example: I printed it on stucco, and you see this material everywhere in Southern California, which kind of contrasts the scarcity of archival materials. Archivists and people that maintain materials like [newspaper articles] from many years ago, they’re basically a God-send in society. Their work is remembering, which is a kind of work that requires someone sifting through piles of refuse to find that needle in the haystack. The material of newspapers themselves become trash, after all, which can make it easy to forget stories almost as soon as they’re printed.
In light of that idea, in retelling the story of a labor strike that took place at the height of WWII, in San Diego—which is very unique, considering the backlash that the workers got was directly from the Navy—Reruns essentially re-tells the exact kind of story that is going to be quickly forgotten, in a city where wars are commemorated.
HereIn: Even today with news being digitized, those histories are even more liable to being discarded. Even though there is a permanent digital record, the notion of an archive as a physical space with a beginning and an end comes apart with the internet. It’s just so much bigger than that. There’s so much more room for noisy headlines, like an ongoing war, to completely dominate a story like a labor strike against a branch of the military.
Apodaca: Right, the current news is way more ephemeral. Even the op-ed I recently published in the [San Diego] Union-Tribune, I don’t even know where to find it online.
HereIn: That’s such a good point. All the more reason why the work you’re doing to point people back to the archive, back to facts that might be easily overlooked—that kind of work is really important.
Before wrapping things up, I wanted to ask: What’s next for you? What’s on the horizon? What are you working on?
Apodaca: There are a lot of projects happening, all of which are in their early stages. One is an experiment with approaches to stories about communism in East L.A. My grandmother’s father, who migrated from Mexico to the Southwest, was known to have had communist ties. And that has interested me for a long time.
I’ve also been doing these prints on paper that incorporate drawing with chalk pastel. The result is mixed-media pieces that play with the idea of news headlines as trauma, but that pay homage to the many ways working class people repurpose newspaper materials.
I’m also working on a feature film about an extreme right wing vigilante group in San Diego, in the early-to-mid 70s, that was an offshoot of the Minutemen and was funded by the FBI. I’ve done a number of interviews, so far, and have been going to locations where specific events happened within the story to try and retrace that history. It’s been an extreme test of patience and longevity, in keeping to the story. Really, I’m in a gathering phase. While it feels much more like a standard documentary, at this point, I’m trying to answer the question of what a documentary about this topic might look like.
That’s another thing about this video work I do, it’s all about patience. It takes a lot of time. Monumental Interventions started in 2017 and it’s only just now in a place where I can show it. Tracking people down, gathering all the necessary information, it takes a lot of time.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by HereIn and the artist.