LS: In an interview for the BBC you discussed your choice to immerse yourself and do work in the Eastern Congo this way:

“I originally chose the Congo because I wished to find a place in the world, and in my imagination, where every step I took I would be reminded of the limits of my own articulation, of my inadequate capacity for representation.”

And Gioni Massiliano said of his curatorial theme for Venice:

“I would love this Biennale to be – just like the Encyclopaedic Palace dreamed by the self-made artist Marino Auriti – a place where works of art and hallucinated dreams, ways to explain and recount the whole world and bright examples about the impossibility of knowing and explaining everything.”

Do you think that your aesthetic mission and Gioni’s theme are at odds  – or do they converge?

RM:  The theme was announced in November so I was already wading deep in the Congo with not much time to consider whether it fit the project. My work is a response to a very complex and convoluted situation. But certainly the bit about ‘hallucinated dreams’ would apply as would the ‘struggle to explain and recount.’

Joseph Conrad struggled with the same sort of problem in the Congo a century before I did. He described a very concrete humanitarian disaster in language that verges on the abstract and on heightened sensory impressionism. Heart of Darkness is written in an oppressive and sinister tone: “We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled.” Conrad pushes language almost to the breaking point, struggling to recount an elusive darkness.

LS: Is this what you were trying to do visually with the use of  Aerochrome film?

RM:  I felt Aerochrome, Kodak’s discontinued colour infrared film, would provide me with a unique window through which to survey the battlefield of eastern Congo. Realism described in infrared becomes shrouded by the exotic, shifting the gears of Orientalism. Traditional documentary evidence is pushed unwillingly into fiction, and an unsettling pink world of magical realism is formed.

Making The Enclave, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012. Cinematographer Trevor Tweeten operating an Arriflex 16mm camera mounted on Steadicam. Courtesy Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

LS: This is not exactly Disneyland. Tell me how you were able to insinuate yourself into and gain the trust of these rebel groups? And also tell me how you were able to work in a world that sounds like utter chaos?

RM:  I had been working there for three years and setting up relationships with different rebel groups and gaining their trust so that I could work with them before Trevor and Ben came.  In the first year things evolved very personally in the first year of the project. In 2012 I started with Trevor who was shooting in 16mm film and I acted in the role of Director/Producer. And then Ben Frost the composer for Enclave came. It was a very small crew. Those guys landed right in the middle of the situation. As for our method of work and collaboration, it was very intuitive — rolling with the punches — as we worked in the field.

It is actually a very Zen process, very much like Tai Chi in which you make yourself present in the situation and see how it unfolds. The Congo is an irrational place and hard to predict so you have to be OK with letting any plans go to hell. Things go wrong and so through failure, you try again, and fail. And then you fail better. I really love documentary photography for that the very reason that it is not staged. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

LS: Your work conveys both exceptional, almost otherworldly beauty, but also a world of very sinister, nearly primal darkness. I know that your preferred method of transmission is visual, but can you tell me a bit about what it is like there?

RM: It really is a world of nightmares and utter irrationality. For example, many of the rebel fighters believe that they are bullet proof and they go into battle naked. Their feeling of invincibility comes from rituals that they do that sort of combine Christianity and African (Juju). rituals that they They will mix Christian Holy Water in a bucket and it is blessed. Then they ask the “prophets” what herbs to put into it  — and while this is all going on they very often are speaking in tongues in a sort of African version of Christian Pentacostalism.

LS:  When one hears of this endless tribal warfare and violence in the Congo it is almost beyond understanding for many people. Having spent three years of your life there, what do you think is at work to make it such a hellish place?

RM: Basically I think that as a result of generations of institutionalized corruption and the lack of any type of justice, this perpetual war created a power vaccum that has been filled by 20 different rebel groups.  The people are so worn down by lack of respect that they feel no sense of civic duty or responsibility.  It is just no longer part of their world and they have descended into unspeakable savagery.

The sexual violence in itself is stupefying. A rebel group will come to a village and rape 300 women, old men, young children. I watched a massacre in November in which six people were slaughtered, defenseless women and children, with knives and spears. The women were raped before being killed. The youngest victim, a boy only 3 years old had his eyes torn from their sockets but they were still attached. That is something that I will never be able to forget.

LS: Were you ever in a situation where you felt that you should or did leave your role as chronicler and intervene?

RM: I’m not coming up with any moments when I could have intervened and I think that doing so would be a tough ethical call. A photographer has a role in telling the story. When you cross the line, either to try to stop something from happening, or to in some way try to make what is happening more evocative is not the role I should be playing – which is to record. Having said that I am not trying to be “accurate” or objective. Using a film that makes the familiar look extremely unfamiliar pink, purple and cyan landscapes deliberately turns waking moments into dreams, or nightmares.

LS: That brings me to another interesting reference you made in which you quoted Susan Sontag who wrote that photojournalists generally choose to “fly low, artistically speaking” in order to avoid confront the problems of making photographs of human suffering. They deliberately de-aestheticize their imagery, adopting a grainy blurred, black and white style, deliberately avoiding beauty.” That sounds like the opposite of what you do?

RM: Yes that’s right. As I said I do the opposite which is to “aestheticize” if you will, human suffering. My approach has sometimes been dismissed as morally irresponsible. I find it fascinating that colour can provoke such a response. While my work is documentary in spirit, I have struggled with the idea that documentary photography, regardless of the photographer’s concerns, arrives pre-loaded with an implicit assumption of advocacy.

If you just continue to serve up anodyne images to the mass media you are certain to fail in getting people’s attention, or getting them to react. The point at which documentation and art intersect is my sweet spot. And anyway, I don’t think that there is such a thing as truly objective reporting, whether it is written or images. My choice of the Aerochrome film was in part to show just that, the always present “authorial” hand.

LS: Speaking of “authorial” hands, or editorial choices, how did you and Ben Frost, the composer go about choosing the sound that would go with the images?

RM: Again, it was very intuitive working with Ben.  We don’t sit down and say this is what we need. We were always having huge surprises. In one case Ben turned a very boring field recording of natural sounds into something amazing by mixing it with the sound of elephants in the distance, and artillery fire. His composition for “Enclave” has a very primeval ambience, a bleak hovering. It is very sensitive and I really love it.

LS: Thanks, Richard. You are both a brave man for committing yourself to spending such a long period of time in such a dangerous place, and a brave artist for the aesthetic choices you are making. Good luck in Venice.