text:
National University of Tres de Febrero
Aníbal Y. Jozami
Martín Kaufmann
Carlos Mundt
R&D SECRETARY
Pablo Jacovkis
ACADEMIC EXTENSION AND STUDENT WELLBEING SECRETARY
Gabriel Asprella
DEPARTMENT OF ART & CULTURE DIRECTOR
Diana B. Wechsler
National University of Tres de Febrero Civic Association (ACUNTREF)
IMAGES TO DISBELIEVE IMAGES
On the BIM third edition
We believe in technical images, even today, when we are witnesses to the way synthetic images, especially digital simulations, have developed. When faced with a photograph or a video, and also with television and film, we see the world, not the image. We still look on in fascination. It amazes us that it is still valid. This can be seen in everyday life: if the photograph in my passport is damaged, I can't cross any borders. A technical image of myself is of more value to me than myself.... Keep reading
We believe in technical images, even today, when we are witnesses to the way synthetic images, especially digital simulations, have developed. When faced with a photograph or a video, and also with television and film, we see the world, not the image. We still look on in fascination. It amazes us that it is still valid. This can be seen in everyday life: if the photograph in my passport is damaged, I can't cross any borders. A technical image of myself is of more value to me than myself.
We are naïve when faced with technical images, and doubly so. If we believe them it is because we understand that they carry with them the truth of a world of which they are a document, as if the Truth existed. So we believe that there is one Truth, not variable, dynamic versions of the world. Perhaps it is because of this that we find it hard to understand an image as an image, because we cannot understand that there is no Truth to refer to. This becomes particularly dangerous when we live, increasingly, surrounded by screens. They educate us, they form our structure of values and, in chorus, they display a version of the world that imposes itself as truth. As video became more popular in the 1960s, it entered the underground scene with a hopeful discourse of diversity. Paradoxically, we are in an even worse place today; that previously unimaginable instrument, that potential tool of liberation that is the internet, is used by girls to share their makeup tutorials and gratuitously expand a culture that objectifies them. This is coherent with the social system in which we live, a model that denies its ideology and presents it as a natural truth. Thus we accept the injustice it is based on and which the vast majority of humans are prey to.
Art is not capable of transforming this reality, it cannot change the world, that is what politics should be for. Art simple forms new relations between things and, in the best of scenarios, as a result of this it might produce in someone a previously unlikely reflection. It sounds scarce, but in reality it is no small thing. That's why at the BIM we unfurl a multitude of thinking images, screens that vibrate full of ideas. They are images that know they are images and which invite the spectator to see them as such, that show that there is no truth to refer to. The dialogue that is struck up between them could take infinite directions and, if it is authentic, produce the seed of a new knowledge. Let's hope this growth helps us to be less naïve and more free.
Gabriela Golder y Andrés Denegri
T&C TeC Jury SELECTED
The 'Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero', the 'Instituto de Investigación en Arte y Cultura Dr. Norberto Griffa' and 'CONTINENTE' are glad to announce the call for entries to the Premio Norberto Griffa a la Creación Audiovisual Latinoamericana.
The price will be granted in the frame of the 'Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM)', that will be held in the City of Buenos Aires between the 3rd and the 13th of november of 2016.
The 'CONTINENTE' team gratefully thanks everyone who respond to the call. More than 650 works were received from the entire Latin continent and the selection was extremely difficult to made. >
In the frame of the 'BIM 2016' a jury comprised by distinguished referents in the audiovisual art discipline will choose the selected works. The prices will be: the first prize 'Premio Norberto Griffa a la Creación Audiovisual Latinoamericana' (40 thousands argentine pesos), the second prize (30 thousands argentine pesos), the third prize (20 thousands argentine pesos), the 'Premio Arcoiris a la Creación Argentina' (10 super 8 film reel), and the mentions considered appropriate.
1. Coming out, Florencia Aliberti (Argentina/Spain, 2015)
2. Plantas Trepadoras, Julieta Averbuj Benlloch (Argentina, 2013)
3. Destellos, Ernesto Baca (Argentina, 2015)
4. Umwelt, Toia Bonino (Argentina, 2015)
5. Vertières I II III, Louise Botkay (Brazil, 2014)
6. Ghosts of Concordia, Cristóbal Cea (Chile, Estados Unidos, 2016)
7. Lumbre, Christian Testoni/Nicolás Delgado (Argentina, 2016)
8. Impresiones para una máquina de luz y sonido, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Mexico, 2015)
9. Los Átomos Indigentes de mi Carne a la Deriva, Salvador Cresta (Argentina, 2014)
10. Santa Teresa & Otras Historias, Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias (Dominican Republic, United States, 2015)
11. Geografía nómada, Fernando Domínguez (Colombia, 2015)
12. Los ojos serán lo último en pixelarse, Patricia Domínguez (Chile/Spain, 2016)
13. Monica's Fetish: An experiment in video-suture, Rodrigo Faustini (Brazil, 2015)
14. Mi reino no es de este mundo, Tatiana Font (Argentina, 2013)
15. Rhizomatic Directed Simulation, Alexandra Gelis (Colombia/Canada, 2014)
16. Ana men Chile, Rafael Guendelman (Chile/Palestine, 2015)
17. Jagata, Daniel Jacoby (Peru/Spain/Netherlands, 2016)
18. Paisaje para una persona, Florencia Levy (Argentina, 2014)
19. Tomorrow will worry about itself, Tomas Maglione/Jorge Espinal (Argentina, 2015)
20. Resistfilm, Pablo Marín (Argentina/Canada, 2014)
21. Fish Point, Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina, 2015)
22. Mala Testa #2, Wagner Morales (Brazil/France, 2016)
23. Ezeiza, Cristina Motta (Argentina, 2013)
24. Campo Adentro, Melina Gutman / Gala Negrello (Argentina, 2015)
25. Composición nro. 1, Rodrigo Noya (Argentina, 2016)
26. Tierra en movimiento, Tiziana Panizza (Chile, 2014)
27. Distancia, Joaquin Pedretti (Spain/Argentina, 2016)
28. Cuarteto de cuerdas, Valentín Pelisch (Argentina, 2014)
29. Toponimia, Jonathan Perel (Argentina, 2015)
30. Ñores (sin señalar), Annalisa Quagliata (Mexico, 2016)
31. La Quema, Tomas Rautenstrauch (Argentina, 2015)
32. Y Bera – Aguas de Luz, Jessica Sarah Rinland (Argentina, 2016)
33. El Ruido de los Trenes, Cristián Saldia (Chile, 2015)
34. Morfología de un sueño, Malena Szlam (Chile/United States/Canada,2014)
35. Alexander, Pavel Luiz Tavares de Carvalho (Brazil, Rusia, 2015)
36. Placa madre, Bruno Varela (Bolivia/México, 2016)
37. A Idade da Pedra, Ana Vaz (Brazil/France, 2013)
38. 359 Diapositivas. 2013-2016, Leonardo Zito (Argentina, 2016)
Shai Heredia
is a filmmaker and curator of film art. In 2003, she founded Experimenta, the international festival for experimental cinema in India. Her film I Am Micro (2012) received critical acclaim and won prestigious awards, including a National Award from the Government of India. Her latest film, An Old Dog's Diary (2015), won the first BFI London International Film Festival Short Film award. Heredia was a grantmaker with the India Foundation for the Arts, where she set up the curatorship and arts practice grant programs. Heredia is based in Bangalore, where she teaches at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and runs Experimenta India.
Bonet works in the areas of video, cinema and digital media. Since the 1970s, his work has developed between reflection and practice, and between the context of the visual arts and that of the moving image. His creative work extends from film sculptures and multiple projection pieces from the 1960s to the film 133 (1978-1979 with Eugènia Balcells), at a crossroads between structural cinema and found footage practices; of video/alter-television essays like Duchamp (retard en video) (1986-1987) to the return to origins that entail multi-screen installations like Usession (2002) and The Perception of Doors (2014);and, lastly, the feature films Throw Your Watch in the Water (Variations on a Cinema Intuited by José Val del Omar) (2003-2004). Bonet is co-author of two books that constitute great reference works, En torno al video ("About Video") (1980, with re-editions in 1984 and 2001), and Práctica Fílmica y vanguardia artística en España, 1925-1981 ("Film Practices and the Artistic Avant-garde in Spain, 1925-1981") (1983).
Javier Olivera
Argentine visual artist, filmmaker and teacher. Since 1990, he has developed a body of work that includes painting, photographs, single channel videos, video installations and artist books, exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Latin American and Europe. His work deals with the relationship between memory and culture as constructors of identity. His films, mostly audiovisual essays, have been screened at festivals and exhibitions internationally. He has a broad range of experience in the field of teaching in Latin American and Europe.
Priya Sen
Nicolás Testoni
Toia Bonino
Pablo Mazzolo
Hernán Khourián
Michaela Grill
Christian Delgado
Nicolás Grandi
May Adadol
Elisa Arca
Yuki Aditya
Orit Ben-Shitrit
Carmen Gil
Dor Guez
Israel / Palestina
Eve Heller
Valérie Jouve
Dew Kim
Hangjun Lee
Tomonari Nishikawa
Jean-Gabriel Périot
Greg Pope
Olga Shishko
P. Adams
Maarit Suomi-Väänänen
Peter Tscherkassky
Priya Sen is a New Delhi based filmmaker and artist who works across film/video, sound and installation. Her films like to play with narrative modes within the potentials of realist documentary, but as a productively de-familiarizing enterprise. She has worked with non-fiction and experimental media practices as a member of the Cybermohalla Ensemble at Sarai–CSDS, and taught at different institutions. Her films have been presented at the Flaherty Seminar 2019, among other festivals and venues that include The Kitchen NYC, BFI London Film Festival, Berlinale, and Outfest LA.
Writer, curator and entrepreneur in culture, new media and technology. Founder of Alta Tecnología Andina - ATA, dedicated to art, science and technology projects in Latin America. His multidisciplinary research encompasses media archeology, cybernetics, digitization, archives and the impact of technology on memory institutions. He is a lecturer at LUISS (Rome) and Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has published in journals such as AI & Society, Third Text, The Information Society, Telos and Leonardo and has curated art and technology projects internationally for over two decades.
Christian Delgado and Nicolás Testoni have collaborated on the creation of videos
and video installations since 2004. Their work has been exhibited in festivals such as
FidMarseille (Marseille, 2008), Videobrasil (Sao Paulo, 2011), and IDFA - International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam-, and has received honors in the Festival Latinoamericano de Videoarte (2014) and the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Buenos Aires, 2016).
Ana Gallardo is a self-taught artist, born in Rosario, Argentina, and currently living in Mexico. Her works propose a way of exercising the artistic practice as a transformative space. Her searches as an artist and the vicissitudes of her private life co-exist completely, searching for the way in which life and work can act – each one – upon the deficiencies and the empty spaces of the other. She deals with different planes of violence and currently is focusing on the violence of aging. In parallel, since the beginning of the 1990s, she has been carrying out independent projects directing at giving visibility to practices that do not enter into the commercial and institutional circles, and to connecting artists of different generations. Currently, she coordinates La Verdi in the neighborhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires and La Verdi CDMX (2014 / 2021), Imán together with Nina Fiocco, LlP and Error in Mexico and Puebla.
Born 1975 in Adrogué, Buenos Aires Province. Graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (former Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte, IUNA) and in Psychology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). He has received support from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2006 and 2010) and distinctions at the Salón Nacional in the New Media category (2011 and 2012). In 2015 he obtained a grant from the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA) to make a documentary feature film. In 2015 his films were shown in the cycle El cine es otra cosa, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), and the International Independent Film Festival, Mar del Plata (2012).
was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires. He studied Image and Sound Design at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. His work explores the concept of Real, through the film as a medium. His films have participated in festivals in Rotterdam, New York, Edinburgh, as well as in Chicago Underground, and were shown at S8 Coruña, Xcentric (Barcelona), Mass Art (Boston), FAMU (Czech Republic), and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMbA). He has won prizes from Ann Arbor, Media City, BAFICI, and BIM festivals, among others.
He holds a Bachelors degree in Audiovisual Communication from the School of the Arts (FDA) at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), a Master in Creative Documentary from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra and a Doctorate in the Arts from the School of the Arts at UNLP. He has won various awards and grants, nationally and internationally. His works include: Áreas (2000), Las sábanas de Norberto (2003), Puna (2006), Esplín o errar o sin embargo (2007), Memoria (2010), Los silencios y las manos (2014) and Acá y acullá (2018). He also serves as a professor in the Masters program in Documentary Film at FUC and in the School of the Arts (UNLP).
Michaela Grill (1971, Austria). She has studied in Vienna, Glasgow and London. Since 1999 she makes film/video works, installations and live visuals; various performances in Austria and abroad. Lives and works in Vienna.
Sophie Trudeau and Michaela Grill started collaborating in 2015 and are known for the high emotionality of their live performances. The audiovisual duo from Montreal, Qu/bec, also presents installation work that focuses on the intimate relationship between image and sound.
work together since 2004. Their videos and video installations were exhibited at several events, such as Image contre nature (Marseille, 2009), Videobrasil Electronic Arts Festival (São Paulo, 2011), and International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam, 2014). Recently, they were awarded distinctions at the Festival Latinoamericano de Videoarte, Buenos Aires (2014) and the Bienal Regional de Arte, Bahía Blanca (2015).
Nicolás Grandi (Buenos Aires, 1978) is an audiovisual producer, transdisciplinary artist and educator with experience in schools, universities and community spaces in Argentina and India, where he lived for 5 years. He has a degree in Cinematography from the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires. His artistic, pedagogical and research projects are focused on generating proposals with cross disciplines and with a special focus on transcultural dialogue. Among his latest projects are "Faasla" in collaboration with Priya Sen presented at BIM 2020; "La Poética de la Fragilidad" and "De Sidere 7", transmedia projects in collaboration with Lata Mani, "Laboratorio del Vínculo - Fanzine transmedia" in collaboration with Ignacio García Lizziero and Yanina Rodolico. He has been invited to present his work in masterclasses, festivals, exhibitions, museums and universities in Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia. He is currently director of the Cátedra Audiovisual en Otro Mundo and teaches in the Electronic Arts program at UNTREF.
is a moving image theorist and curator based at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, United Kingdom. Recent publications include Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2013), and Long Walk to Life: The Films of Lav Diaz (2015). In 2012 May directed the 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival: Raiding the Archives. Other curatorial projects include It's Called Love and Every Cruelty Will Cloud It - On Unknowns and Attachments (Phnom Penh, January 2017), and Forces and Volumes Screening Programme (BIMI Essay Film Festival, London, 2015; Asian Artists Film and Video Forum, MMCA, Seoul, 2015).
(Lima, Peru, 1987) holds a Master's in Contemporary Art and New Media from the Université de Paris 8, and is a graduate in Audiovisual Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She has worked in communications for various institutions in Peru and France. In 2011 and 2012 the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú awarded her two prizes that allowed her to carry out research into video in the artistic sphere and its use in religion.
is a film enthusiast based in Jakarta, Indonesia. His writings have been printed in several film publications in Indonesia. He is a member of Forum Lenteng, a non-profit organization working within the framework of audiovisual media studies as a learning tool for local community. He is the festival director of Arkipel - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival and also the program manager of Media for Healthy Papua, an audiovisual workshop project about raising awareness on public health issues in Papua. Both projects are initiated and organized by Forum Lenteng.
Lucas is an artist and researcher in digital media. He works with media such as video, film, installation, site-specific works, audiovisual performances and interactive projects. His work has been exhibited in more than 40 countries. He curated Sónar SP (2004), Life Goes Mobile (2004-2005), ON_OFF (Itau Cultural 2012-2017), the Multitude project (2014) and Visualism, Art, Technology, City (2015). He is one of the creators of the mobile media art festival Arte.mov (2006-2012), Labmovel (2012-2016), Prenúncios + Catástrofes (Sesc Pompeia, 2018) and AVXLab (2017-2021).
He was an artist-in-residence at the Caiia-Star/i-Dat Center and completed his master's degree at the University of Plymouth, England. He holds a PhD in Science from FAUUSP and teaches the Visual Arts course at FAAP. He has just finished the feature film Lavra, which deals with extractivism in Minas Gerais.
works with video, photography, performance and choreography. She utilizes movement and bodies to implicate the powers that be, their mechanisms of domination and the potential for violence. Born and raised in Israel, Orit is based in New York, where she was awarded a NYFA fellowship in Film/Video. Recent shows include MACRO, Rome; El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe; the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the Haifa Museum of Art; as well as exhibitions in Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Russia, the United States and China.
Artist, teacher, theorist. BFA and MA in Literature. Works as director of the Department of Art of the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. She has participated as an artist, curator and lecturer at events on new technologies and art in different cities in Colombia, the Americas, Asia and Europe. She combines her teaching with the creation of interactive multimedia projects and her main focus is on real-time video and large-format projections onto three-dimensional objects. In 2004, she founded the audiovisual project retroVISOR, and in 2012 La Quinta del Lobo, a multimedia scenic collective. Both projects work with music, the audiovisual and the scenic arts and have received various awards. Her most recent work, The Mangrove Tales won a MidAtlantic Arts Foundation award and the Large Format Multidisciplinary Scholarship of the Teatro Municipal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 2016.
born in Jerusalem, is an Israeli/Palestinian artist working in photography, installation and film. His work interrogates personal and official accounts of the past while revealing histories that were previously absent. His practice raises questions about contemporary art's role in narrating unwritten histories, and re-contextualizing visual and written documents. The artist's cultural heritage, Christian Palestinian and Jewish Tunisian, is reflected in his artistic interest.
Born in 1965 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, he works in a crossover of film and the plastic arts. This artist's works —with intense production since the late 1980s—appear in numerous prestigious collections, such as the Tate Modern (UK), MoMA and Guggenheim Museum (USA), Fondation Cartier (France), Colección Jumex (Mexico), Inhotim (Brazil) and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (España). He is the author of nine feature films: The Man of the Crowd (2013), Otto (2012), Elvira Lorelay - Alma de Dragón (2012), Ex It (2010), Drifter (2007), Accident (2006), The Soul of the Bone (2004), Two Way Street (2002) and The End of the Endless (2001), which have participated at renowned international film festivals such as Cannes, Locarno, Sundance, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam.
began studying filmmaking when she was 17, attending the State University of New York (SUNY) Department of Media Studies at Buffalo and New York University. She received her BA in German Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies from Hunter College in 1987 and an MFA in filmmaking from Bard College in 1993. Her award-winning work has been widely shown, both in the United States and internationally, at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Collective for Living Cinema, the New York Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Cinematheque Ontario, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Louvre, the Viennale and the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna. Eve teaches workshops throughout the world on analog filmmaking and works as a German/English translator specializing in texts about cinema. She currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Hyde Park, New York.
(1964, Saint-Étienne) studied anthropology and subsequently went to the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie de Arles, before becoming a photographer and filmmaker. She belongs to the generation of French artists who moved away from the great humanist tradition of photographic reporting, without necessarily rejecting its essential elements.
Valérie Jouve's photographs and films take as much from contemporary art and creative documentary as anthropology and sociology. Showing architectures and people in movement, they question the presence of the body in the city and the ways of inhabiting space. The two classic themes of the landscape and the portrait are associated in such a way that, in the density of urban situations, highly choreographic scenes take place.
(aka HornyHonydew) is a South Korean artist based in London. He works with sculpture, moving image, installation and performance. Dew's performance practice involves sexuality, religion, k-pop and the body as forms of knowledge and research. He exhibited work at Camden Arts Centre, London, and Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul. He recently graduated from Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture, and completed the residency program at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
(1977) is a filmmaker, independent curator and Program Director of the Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS). He programmed Letterist Cinema, film performances and expanded cinema events, retrospective programs of Okuyama Junichi, Michael Snow, among others. He initiated Asia Forum 2009 at EXiS, an annual platform for Asian experimental moving images. Recently he curated the opening commemoration screening program Cinematic Divergence 2013 and live film and improvised music festival Mujanhyang 2014, both for the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, and Embeddedness: Artist Films and Videos from Korea 1960's to Now (2015), for the Tate Modern in London. He performed with many musicians, such as Jérôme Noetinger (France), Dickson Dee (China), Martin Tétreault (Canada), Kracoon (Indonesia), Will Guthrie (France), to develop live filmic language as filmmaker.
Chip Lord is a media artist who has worked with video since 1971. With Ant Farm he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. His work blends documentary and experimental practice and he often collaborates with other artists.
Carla Macchiavello is an art historian who has published on contemporary Chilean and Latin American art with an emphasis in video, performance, and artistic practices aimed at social change. She is assistant professor in Art History at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York, and received her PhD from Stony Brook University. She has curated exhibitions on recent Latin American art and is co-editor of Más allá del fin / Beyond the End, a publication of the art and science program Ensayos in Patagonia.
was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Berlin. Between 1964 and 1968 she studied in Alexander Kluge's Film Department at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. From 1970 to 1979 she was a film critic for German publications and taught film at the Universität Ulm. Since the 1990s she has been a professor in the Film Department of the Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne. She is a member of the German Academy of Arts (of which she has been president since 2015, the first woman to hold this position), a member of the European Film Academy and of the Deutsche Filmakademie.
films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on the art making process. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. He served as a juror for the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2012 Big Muddy Film Festival, and the 2013 Dresdner Schmalfilmtage. He is a co-founder of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He teaches in Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Marco Pando (Lima, 1973) is an artist that lives and works between Amsterdam, Berlin and Lima. He has a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Between 2005 and 2006 he participated in the renowned Rijksakademie residence in Amsterdam; and more recently - in 2018 - was chosen as artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Germany.
Pando was born in Lima but grew up in Cajamarca. This migratory movement from the Andes to the capital of Peru led him to question the construction of identity and its relationship with the colonial past. Since then, his work revolves around the experience of the diaspora and the migratory flows that define the contemporary world.
was born in France in 1974 and directed several short movies, both in video and cinema. He develops his own editing style with archives. Between documentary, animation and experimental, most of his works deal with violence and history. His works, including Dies Irae, Even if she had been a criminal?, Nijuman no borei and The Devil were shown worldwide in numerous festivals and were honored by many prizes. His first feature, A German Youth, opened the Panorama section of the Berlinale 2015, was released in France, Germany and Switzerland and was honored by many prizes.
after dabbling in punk rock bands and absurdist performance, founded film collectives Situation Cinema (Brighton, 1986) and Loophole Cinema (London, 1989). Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art, film and slide works since 1996. Works include live cinema performance pieces Light Trap and Cipher Screen as well as 35 mm film productions and slide projection events. Collaborations include work with sound artists Lee Paterson, John Hegre, Lasse Marhaug, Okkyung Lee and bands including Sult and Ich Bin N!ntendo.
is a visual artist working with photography, sculpture, film and video. His most recent exhibitions include Medos modernos (Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo, 2014), The Brancusi Effect, (Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2014), Canto escuro (Museu do Trabalho, Porto Alegre, 2014), MODERN (White Cubicle, London, 2015), The Violet Crab (David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2015) and A mão negativa (EAV Parque Lage, Río de Janeiro, 2015). He is one of the artists included in Incerteza viva ("Living Uncertainty") / 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016).
María Ruido is a filmmaker, visual artist, researcher and teacher. She lives in Madrid and Barcelona where she works as a professor at the Universidad de Barcelona. Since 1998, she has been developing audiovisual projects about the social construction of the body and identity, the imaginaries of work in post-Fordist capitalism, and upon the construction of memory and its relationships with the narrative forms of history. For a number of years and currently, she works around the news forms of the decolonialized imaginaries and their emancipatory possibilities.
(Russia). Curator, researcher of media culture. Since 2015 she is senior curator of the Cinema and Media Arts Department at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Founder of the Center of Culture and Art MediaArtLab, that researches different aspects contemporary art involving media technologies. She has curated numerous international events, festivals, and exhibitions, including MediaForum - Multimedia Art Festival (since 2000), one of the official programs of the Moscow International Film Festival; as well as the exhibition Transitland. Video art from Central and Eastern Europe for 20 years: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 2009 (Moscow, 2010); Viewer, Gary Hill exhibition (Moscow, 2010), and Expanded Cinema (Moscow, 2011). She is the author and curator of the project Projections of the Avant-garde, that received the Innovation award, and the exhibition House of Impressions. Classic and Contemporary Media Art (Moscow, 2016) at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art.
P. Adams Sitney (born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1944) founded at 16 years old the journal Filmwise, devoting issues to avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas and Marie Menken. He soon joined Jonas Mekas as an editor of Film Culture, where he edited Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision (1963). The following year he interrupted his studies in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at Yale University to take the first International Exposition of the New American Cinema to Europe. He presented similar series at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1965), and in Europe (1967–1968). After directing of the newly created Anthology Film Archives in New York and moving to the position of director of the library and publications (1969), he taught at several universities and retired, after thirty-six years, from Princeton in 2016. He is the author of Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1972, 1979, 2002) and four other books and the editor of six volumes.
Maarit Suomi-Väänänen is an award winning media artist and filmmaker. Combines the expressive forms of visual art to optical possibilities. Praised as fascinating and open to a multitude of interpretations, Suomi-Väänänen´s works have toured nearly 50 countries and presented in numerous exhibitions, biennales, festivals and broadcast, including the YLE Finnish Broadcasting Company, IDFA Amsterdam and Anthology Film Archives NYC. Her works won two main prizes in Canada
Born in 1958 in Vienna, Austria. He lived in Berlin between 1979—when he began filming—and 1984. He studied philosophy (doctoral thesis: Film as Art. Towards a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography, 1985-1986). He was a founding member of Sixpack Film. Tscherkassky organized several international avant-garde film festivals in Vienna and film tours abroad and, since 1984, authored numerous publications and lectures on the history and theory of avant-garde film. In 1993 and 1994 he was artistic director of the annual Austrian film festival Diagonale. He edited the books Peter Kubelka (1995, with Gabriele Jutz) and Film Unframed. A History of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema (2012). The book Peter Tscherkassky, by Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein (eds.), was published in Vienna in 2005, in German and English.
Sami van Ingen
is a Finnish experimental filmmaker whose work is distributed by and screened at some of the most central institutions in the experimental film world. Besides his practice as an artist van Ingen also curates and teaches experimental film as well as is involved in film restoration and research.
Gerald Weber
was born 1965 in Vienna, Austria. He studied film, history and geography. In 1996 co-founded Projektor, a discussion forum on film, video and new media. Since 1998 is the assistant manager of sixpackfilm, an international distribution & sales agency of Austrian short and experimental films and videos. Weber is a curator of film programmes, and occasionally gives lectures and makes publications on film and music.
Luciano Zubillaga is an artist and scholar whose major works take the form of transdisciplinary research in the intersections of art, philosophy and technology with publicly engaged practice. He recently exhibited work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Louvre, Paris. His TCOET films were screened at Bienal de la Imagen en Movimento (BIM), Buenos Aires and the Post-Cyber Feminist International, London. Luciano lives and works in Suzhou, China where he teaches experimental moving image.
Curated by Andrés Denegri and Gabriela Golder.
Video Trans Americas
The Permanent Imminence of the Fatal
Having seen
(Recovered Images)
Whether it's a question of thinking about the future or expressing it, even perceiving it, we do no more than activate a kind of inner cinematographer… the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind... 1
There's anger in the destiny because the grey wolf is coming. So what? Because it will break down all the doors, because it will bring out the dead so they devour the living, so that there are only dead and the living disappear...2
We've seen it all. The images of the horror, of the torture, the places of detention and extermination, a river of corpses, we've heard the witnesses, the testimonies, we've attended the trials, the protests for justice.
No, we haven't seen a thing.
Forty years ago the bloodiest civic-military coup in our history took place.
The start of the last dictatorship, 24 March 1976, entailed not only the rolling out of the military government's political and repressive plans, the breaking up of revolutionary projects, the practice of State terrorism, and the systematic abduction of people, but also a profound transformation of Argentina in economic and social terms. Hunger, destruction of national industries, unemployment, poverty.
30,000 disappeared. 30,000 men, women, children and elderly, dead without a grave.
Ten years ago, at the Museum of the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero we held the exhibition Ejercicios de memoria (Exercises in Memory). Through their works, thirteen Argentine artists put forward processes of reflection as exercises in memory. Thirty years had passed since the coup. Exercises to remember. To retain images, words, sounds, gestures so as not to lose the memory.
On that occasion, we decided to invite three Chilean artists. It would have been incomplete to think about ourselves without thinking about everyone, on both sides of the Andes, with similar methodologies, the Plan Cóndor as the plan for our continent.
To know you have to imagine, says Didi-Huberman3. To remember you have to imagine, he insists.
The unimaginable is an excuse. Images are clues, fragments of memory, possible testimonies, networks, roads or destinations. Images and sounds as triggers of processes of reflection in dialectic coordination with documents.
Without closure, without the possibility of total understanding, in its hesitation, the image proposes that it be investigated. And questioned. And announced. The image that thinks is erected in perpetual search.
No, the horror cannot be represented.
The marches fill up Plaza de Mayo every 24 March; the pavement, the memorials show what others seek to erase, the very existence of the disappeared.
Murals, books, texts, music, films, graffiti, infinite exercises in memory. The memory is present and it is intact, despite it all.
A thought that forms a thought that thinks.4
The third edition of the Biennial of the Moving Image (2016), forty years on from the civic-military coup, invited ten Argentine artists to create a work that would propose a new space of reflection, personal perspectives migrating between times and materialities. Once again, Exercises in Memory. .
Because more images are always necessary, there are ten more exercises that will be added to others. An echo, a collective construction, an insistence, an exercise. Ways of announcing one's presence, forms of not disappearing.
Exercises that are written on bodies, in thoughts. Exercises like screams.
Gabriela Golder, octubre de 2016
1 Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, quoted in La evolución creadora, Buenos Aires, Cactus, 2007.
2 Pizarnik, Alejandra, "Los poseídos entre lilas", in Pizarnik: Poesía completa y prosa selecta, Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1993.
3 Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All, quoted in Imágenes pese a todo: memoria visual del Holocausto, Barcelona, Paidós Ibérica, 2004.
4 Godard, Jean-Luc, "Capítulo 3a. El precio de lo absoluto", en Historia(s) del cine, Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2007.
Untitled (Memory Exercise)
4' in a loop
HD | Color | Stereo
Memory exercise: to gaze from an unmarked grave.
Four memories
Gustavo Fontán
HD | Color - B&W | Stereo
Once again the military, my father says. A radio that no longer can hide the screams. The awareness of horror. The mothers marching. Four memories, 1976-2016.
From Within
HD | B&W | Silent
I try to think about possible internal exiles. About the fear and silence of those of us who stay put and see nothing. I turn to my own memory, I work with biographical facts. Like a personal journal, I summarize how those years passed for me, exposing not only personal situations, but scenes of silence and denial of the reality we were all living.
Subversion Loop
Found footage | B&W | Stereo
Décollage about Videla's speech on what they used to refer as "subversion".
Ignacio Liang
4' 30'' in a loop
Offices of the mind. Borda asylum inmate. Friend remembers and mixes in the fractals. Police doing dirty work. Cellars of slaves and bats. From season to season is the message. Natives killed by men in uniform. Sadly they toss them into the broken poem. Cats on the tin roofs dance, superintendents lie, blue recorders, disappearances between seasons. Children rotting in bin liners in the morgue. Mnemic prints. Dogs and beatings. Martyr.
Child dies, gendarmes and narcotraffickers. Pickets remember, organize and fight. Police gunshot. Tortured raped multiple times is forced to abort. Ignacio and Mariel play between naked dials at love. Announcer and postmodern decoys. Souvenir picket. List of corrupt murderers between dials. Inmate doesn't want police ever again.
5-T-2 Ushuaia
4K | Color | Stereo
Adolfo Scilingo was the only military officer to confess the dictatorship crimes. Among the details he gave of the way the genocide worked, throwing prisoners from planes into the water to their death, Scilingo specifies the models that were used in the flights he participated in: a Skyvan and an Electra. Of the five Skyvan bought in 1971, two were destroyed during the Malvinas War and the three ones left were bought in 1982. Only the three bought in 1973 could have been used in the flight that Scilingo describes. Those three Electras are at present in Argentina. This film of Jonathan Perel searches cartographically the traces of those planes.
The Last Landscape - Memento Mori (Remember You Will Die)
Juan Sorrentino
Memento Mori projected on a kinetic syncope of landscapes in transformation, as an ubiquitous poetic exercise that repeats the act of turning on and off the recording mechanism of a camera. Intimacy with the agony of birds, in silent flight; with the impressions of their length, as a gradual resonance in states of conscience or panoramas. Contemplation of an exile to the last wasteland of existence, to the edge of death itself as heavy, immobile vertigo, that falls down with all human nature. The memory gliding naturally up to the sudden void of historic, unlimited courses. The vision of a freedom spilt from itself, in a paradoxical, simulated key, towards a final conversation, hastened and unpunished.
Confidential Report
16 mm - HDV | B&W | Mono
Video made with words taken directly from the "Archives of Terror" of Asunción, Paraguay, containing evidence of Operation Condor. Most of the documents found were written on typewriters, and transcribed police reports, statements of prisoners, records and internal memos. The inclusion of an instruction on how to use a typewriter produced by the Navy of the United States of America is an allusion to the participation of that country in military coups during the 1970s in South America. Forty years after the dictatorship, the found files are the basis to preserve the memory and to prosecute those responsible for terrorism and acts of corruption committed by dictators on behalf of the state.
Magdalena Cernadas
04' in a loop
A force erupts causing irreparable damage.
Unknow People / Forgotten Places
Martín Oesterheld
HD - XDCAM | Color | Stereo
The testimony of anonymous revolutionary activists of the 1970s is heard in a recently aired interview. In their account, they place me with my parents in a southern district of Buenos Aires, at Sarandí and Isla Maciel, where their political action took place. They recall me as the only 4-year-old boy that shared the daily armed struggle with them. Through my presence, in the account of these unknown people, the video portrays an imaginary journey in a time previous to my own memories.
Based on a series of journeys around the American continent by Chilean artist Juan Downey, the Video Trans Américas installation (1976) invites you to experience a moving electronic map of the Americas. The video installation is based on drawing the outlines of the American continent that stretches across the floor and walls of the room. Around the room are fourteen television monitors organized in pairs and set out on pedestals in the place according to where they were filmed. The Border, Uros 1&2, Nazca 1&2, Inca 1&2, Cuzco 1&2, Lima/Macchu-Picchu, Yucatán/Guatemala, New York/Texas 1&2 connect both places and regions, cities and valleys, jungles and deserts, as trajectories between and within them, giving shape to diverse landscapes on the continent that are natural and built, human and animal, political and ecological. Through the simultaneity of the images that show diverse aspects of one or more places, the manipulation of the recordings and the spatial position of the monitors, Video Trans Américas presents a plural, complex continent, unravelling in space and time, changing through the trajectories of the spectators themselves. The installation is characterized by constant movement and the impossibility of fixing a single identity for the Americas. This movement of coming and going is articulated both through the technology and through the opposites that coexist in the montage. On the one hand, setting out the videos in pairs physically imitates the bipolarity of our way of seeing, the distance between our eyes and how these organs capture different aspects of the same object. While that uneven information is then made into a relatively "unique" image by our cognitive system, stabilizing its object, in the installation Downey highlights the difference and similarity between what each channel shows. Instead of producing a synthesis of images, the bi-channel organization of the videos forces us to exercise a gaze that is double, unstable, suspended between different spaces. The physical symmetries of the installation tend to decentre the gaze as the sequences of the videos coincide and, in turn, highlight the differences between places and a single site. The positioning of the monitors also helps to disperse the gaze to other points in the installation through peripheral vision, broadening the possible routes taken by the spectators and establishing at the same time connections between distant places. Dispersion and coming together, co-existence of different times, technologies and knowledges: Downey's electronic map emphasizes the impossibility of capturing a single vision of the Americas, its inhabitants and histories. Furthermore, movement also operates in the installation by means of polarity and interstices, embodying the notion of "trans". The images of the videos vary among the documentary registers that border on ethnography, the postcard-like idyllic images of landscapes, the gaze interested or absorbed whether in the majesty of some ruins or the movement of ants, and abstraction. The videos bring together and contrast the fixed and the mobile, the organic and the fabricated, civilization and nature, past and present. But they do so fluidly, opening interstitial spaces through the ruin, through the mountain transformed into a terrace for crops, through inter-ethnicity, and even through video as the transitory medium that has captured, in a technology on the verge of extinction, a past that is faraway but still resonant with out present. Downey conceived the Video Trans Américas project as a practical and at the same time exploratory way of creating connections and greater communication across the continent. During a series of journeys he would make recordings on video that would then be shown along the way to remote communities. The feedback could be implemented socially, putting remote people and places visually in contact with each other and "glimpsing a culture in its own context and in the context of other cultures, and finally, putting all the interactions of space, time and context into a work of art." Although at the end of his first journeys Downey criticized his own intention of objectively recording others and the capacity of video to bring about social change, he also found in this format a ductile medium for exploring both perception and interconnections among cultures and identity as something constructed, hybrid and unstable. Forty years on from the first version, the installation Video Trans Américas continues to invite us to try a different perspective, in movement, and experience the Américas from the point of view of change. Carla Macchiavello Many of America's cultures exist today in total isolation, unaware of their overall variety and of commonly shared myths. This automobile trip was designed to develop a holistic perspective among the various populations inhabiting the American continents, thus generating cultural interaction. A video-taped account from New York to the southern tip of Latin America. A form of enfolding in space while evolving in time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context and, finally, editing all the interactions of time, space and context into one work of art. Cultural information would be exchanged mainly by means of videotape shot along the way and played back in the different villages, for the people to see others and themselves. The role of the artist is here conceived as a cultural communicant, as an activating aesthetic anthropologist with visual means of expression: video. New York, 1973 springtime (before the expeditions). Juan Downey Onandagas, Cherokees, Navajos, Apaches, Hopis, Aztecs, Olmecs, Mayas, Incas, Mapuches, Alacalufes share in common one nature, one death and one time. Indigenous people in the Americas were accustomed to contemplating themselves reacting to their own culture, to enhancing spiritual processes through a dialogue with the unknown. This myth becomes contemporary in the piggyback ride that closed-circuit television entails: to observe oneself observing increases the mind's concentration. Arriving at the Mexican border, 20 July 1973. Juan Downey I, the agent of change, manipulating the video to decode my own roots, had been deciphered for all time, and I had become a true descendant of my land, less international and more poetic. An unexpected level had been reached on those strange paths of the heart! New York, May 1975. Juan Downey
La Frontera II
PortaPak | B&W | Mono
Juan Downey created this exhibition as summary and encounter of various cultural and social levels of the Americas. The presentation of the result shows the most masterly use of video we have ever seen. The exhibition includes seven groups of tapes, presented on video and two parallel monitors, synchronized in image and sound, to create a total, profound experience of the specific place that is being seen. It will be ordered geographically on a computer-designed map of the Americas, in proportion to the room where it is shown. Each location will appear in its relative situation, and the altitudes will also be shown by the height of the pedestal of each monitor.
New York / Texas
New York / Texas II
Macchu-Picchu
Uros I
Uros II
Nazca I
Nazca II
Inca I
Inca II
La Frontera I
The question of fear is a gaudily well-trodden terrain. In the everyday we tend to relate it to our present condition and no doubt we say: we live in fear today. This is immediately followed by a consensus that fear is a phenomenon of our hyper-informed age. In this respect, the mass media plays a fundamental role at the service of power, for whom it is desirable to have a meek society, placated by a conspiracy of fears. It sounds coherent, but wasn't fear widespread before the internet, before television, before radio and newspapers? It's true that the presence of the media intimidates us, but what then can we think of the idea of God, dead today but nonetheless omnipresent? And what of that vast, overwhelming Nature before him? And as part of that, the Other, always lying in wait.
Fear has always been there, it isn't something that is experienced in a given set of circumstances; fear is a constitutive part of what makes us living beings, part of our soul, as Aristotle would say. That's why its administration is such an effective form of control. God has to be feared, the Bible says it literally, time and again. The insistence is such that no quotations are required. It is undeniable how this text, conveniently bastardized by all Judeo-Christian ideology, is today overwhelmingly in force. That obscurantist fear resonates effectively even in our postmodern arrogance. It maintains its strength as an ideological tool, it conditions with power our political future. God can punish the human; he will do so if the human does what he is capable of doing. In the human resides a great fear of the Other, because he knows first hand the danger that this means to him. Homo homini lupus. This is why he invents God, to subject himself to a higher power that controls his acts. But divine punishment does not always arrive on time, so an instrument of this world is necessary. We fear so much our neighbour that as well as creating a God—or, at least, the story of one—we create a powerful monster to whom we concede the authority to exert strength, a Leviathan to protect us from the Other, but which also controls us and subjects us in the exercise of an economy of our fears.
Nature, the Other, God, the State. How to flee from the fear (phobos) that we carry with in us. The perfect trap from which we can't escape is part of our being. Perhaps the most we can do is become conscious of this circumstance, and from there, take decisions within the narrow margin of possibilities that we outline ourselves with the intention of not being totally subjected. This is what freedom is about. Art is not capable of transforming this reality, it cannot change the world, that's what politics is for. What art can do is combine things innovatively, produce relationships and perspectives outside of dominant trends. The encounter with that different thing that is the work of art can arouse new reflections in the spectator that potentially lead to growth. In this sense the present exhibition, bringing together works that approach the question of fear from different angles, can be understood as a thinking tool to feed that conscience, to broaden the margins of action and increase our freedom in some way.
The exhibition is distributed over three spaces in the MUNTREF Contemporary Art Centre. In the first room are works by Chip Lord, Kamal Aljafari, Johan Grimonprez and Marco Pando. Most of these work with the film imaginary, retracing an artificial university that is confused with the reality we live in. The spectacle, designer of illusions and fears, is reinterpreted by sensitive, critical perceptions. A watchful perspective also appears, akin to the point of view of security cameras, that is to be found at the opposite extreme to classic film diegesis. As a counterpart to the fiction transmitted, these contemplative images tremble with anguish and anxiety over the passivity that forms them. How could nothing happen?
In the central corridor, connecting the first room with the second, ten flat screens are lined up, containing a series of video works produced by the UNTREF. On the fortieth anniversary of the last civic-military coup, these are pieces tackle different issues raised by the dictatorship and state terrorism. These works are the continuation of an exhibition that CONTINENTE organized ten years ago with the title Exercises in Memory—Reflections on the horror 30 years after the coup. For this new edition a group of artists were invited to work with audiovisual media from a wide variety of diverse perspectives, and asked to make a four-minute video. They are Hernán Khourián, Carlos Trilnick, Juan Sorrentino, Jonathan Perel, Martín Mórtola Oesterheld, Ignacio Liang, Ana Gallardo, Christian Delgado with Nicolás Testoni, Gustavo Fontán and Magdalena Cernadas.
A sequence of fears pertaining to modernity itself is intertwined in the second room. The works of Orit Ben-Shitrit, Natacha Nisic, Luiz Roque, Dor Guez and Valérie Jouve are laid out as a chorus that outlines variable connections between everyday insecurity and the atomic catastrophe; the hegemonic nature of the State and the destabilizing power of finances; the personal journey and war.
Recollection
Kamal Aljafari
Archives | Color | Stereo
Recollection is composed entirely of footage from the Israeli and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1990s, primarily of the so-called bourekas genre that dramatized tense romantic relationships between Mizrahi male "thugs" and Ashkenazi female elites. Jaffa provided the perfect setting to construct new Israeli narratives on top of the emptied Palestinian ruins. As Aljafari explains, Palestinians were effectively "uprooted in reality and in fiction." In Recollection all protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty setting formed by the town. It seems that someone is returning to Jaffa, as he might to any place after a catastrophe. "He knows everything. He is myself, my grandparents who were on their way to Beirut and returned because there was a storm, a photographer, a composite of every figure in the margins. Memory itself, filming. The memory of all the background it rescues from the screen." Recollection digs this cinematographic hypothesis: how can we return to haunt and populate space in a troubling, feverish dream?
From Satin Island
Johan Grimonprez
A haunting collage of disaster and beauty, set to a shimmering track by Lights Out Asia. Johan Grimonprez in collaboration with acclaimed avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, based on an abstract from his latest book Satin Island.
The Sick Man of Europe: The Architect
4K|Color|Stereo
Dor Guez's 2-channel video installation comprises the second of the five-part project The Sick Man of Europe, a term taken from the end of the 19th century to describe the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Guez uses it to examine the military history of several states in the Middle East through the stories of artists who were recruited to the army and took part in various 20th-century wars. The wars left their mark on the artists, who stopped creating work once they became soldiers. The video The Sick Man of Europe: The Architect focuses on the story of Kemal P., an architecture student who was recruited to the Turkish army just after he graduated. A two-channel video focuses on thirteen of Kemal's photographs from 1939 that document the Turkish Republic's Victory Day Parade in Ankara in August of the same year, and the funeral of the secularizing republic leader, Kemal Ataturk, that took place a few weeks later. By photographing buildings, monuments, and squares, Kemal P. follows the architectural changes that took place in Turkey through its transformation from an empire to a republic, from Ottoman to Turkish. Parallel to documenting the historic evolution of Turkey, a story of friendship unfolds in the photographs between Kemal and Muhammad, both revealed as great admirers of Ataturk and the new, secular Turkey.
Movie Map
Color - B&W | Mono
The Movie Map project contains photo diptychs of San Francisco movie theaters and a nine minute video piece. The four diptychs each pair a photograph of a movie theatre with a digitally composited collage that brings the fictional space of the cinema into the public space of the street. The project uses the term "mapping" figuratively to imply the geographic dispersion of the neighbourhood theatre as a site of the imagination. In the video a fictional mapping of San Francisco is inscribed by two intercut chase scenes: Steve McQueen driving a Ford Mustang in Bullitt and James Steward following Kim Novak in a 1956 DeSoto from Vertigo. Bullitt and Vertigo contain the two most notorious chase sequences that use San Francisco as a backdrop and they were made about ten years apart: Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958 and Bullitt by Peter Yates in 1968 (Chip Lord).
IN TRANSIT is an observed portrait of spaces of air travel. It is an around-the-world journey from San Francisco to Shanghai; Beijing to London; Frankfurt to Mexico City to Los Angeles in 21 minutes. Flown, shot, and edited by Chip Lord.
17' 17'' in a loop
Two years after the Fukushima disaster, Natacha Nisic travels to the area and films the landscapes, the villages and the beings who have suffered the devastation of the tsunami and radiation from the nuclear power plant. Thanks to a device made up of a 25-metre tracking shot and 30-centimetre wide vertical mirrors at different intervals, the artist makes it possible for the view to encompass at the same time the field and the counter field, the before and after. When the camera passes in front of the mirror, a mobile image of the counter field moves in a horizontal tracking shot in the opposite direction along the width of the mirror. Without special effects, a play is produced of one image within another, of a movement within another, of a landscape and its opposite. The device makes it possible to conjugate the time of the movements and of the spaces in a single gaze.
VIVE LE CAPITAL
Pascal works on Wall Street and surpasses greed to become a prominent philanthropist. Greed surpasses Pascal because he works on Wall Street.
VIVE LE CAPITAL is a deliberation on a love/hate relationship with money. The plot pirouettes between the protagonist's soliloquy in French, and dancers who respond in various transgressive behaviors. Three of them travel to the time of Cosimo De Medici and visit the roots of our banking system; they also pay homage to the French Revolution by embodying John Law, the first Ponzi schemer in history who indirectly caused the bankruptcy of Louis the 14th's monarchy. The film is set to investigate the connection between art and finance (Medici period) and finance and revolution (French revolt).
Original documents and texts from the history of the building at 14 Wall Street influenced the film, as well as other sources, which include: Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, Erich Waschneck's 1940 film Die Rothchilds and Japanese Butoh—a dance form that challenged Noh tradition and the integration of Western motifs into Japanese culture.
The site for VIVE LE CAPITAL is 14 Wall Street—the former Bankers Trust building. BT's fraudulent activity was recorded and used as evidence in a trial that led to its dispersion in 1998. Transcripts and court documents from the recordings of the trial are integrated into the script. Other references include the book, The Ascent of Money—A Survey of the History of Finance. It inspired the time travel to the period of the Medicis and to the time of the French Revolution. A visual cue I used for the French Revolution scene is Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People.
Ben-Shitrit incorporated terms from the book Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri into the script, to strike a convoluted viewpoint of both liberal and conservative tone. Finally, the film Die Rothschilds has a small appearance in the 360° spinning blue vault scene. This Nazi propaganda film frames the Rothschild family as responsible for altering the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo.
MEN DIE AND THEY ARE NOT HAPPY
The three scenarios in MEN DIE AND THEY ARE NOT HAPPY focus on three aspects of the state: The Law, The Leader and The People. Each of the three scenes deals with: subconscious pathology, political/religious rhetoric and an abstract life and death scenario, respectively. Each scene is bookended by a Dance of Violence—an actor battling an invisible force in a red room. The silent narrator, also a dancer, carries the action from the dance into the next scene.
The first scene, The Law, displays ten people standing in line in a judgment-day scenario. Each of them exhibits an exaggerated nervous behavior, which points to their personal subconscious pathology. The Law's representative—a female guard—stands at the door. Her presence is forceful yet still, except for one dramatic look at the People as they churn, mumble and click like a machine.
The second scene depicts a political/religious Leader delivering a persuasive speech that spans various manipulative techniques. His rhetoric is delivered in Urdek, the language of despair, which is a language I composed from riffs on German and the Berber dialect of Moroccan Arabic.
The third scene depicts the People in an abstract death and rebirth scenario. The oldest of the ten characters is born and the first reality he faces is that of couples bandaged together, struggling to move.
The title for the piece is taken from the play Caligula, written by Camus in 1939. As a result of the death of his sister and mistress, Caligula goes on a journey seeking the impossible. He returns disillusioned and filled with rage, his realization emptied him of the will to exist. He unleashes destruction on his surroundings, as a way to secure his own.
In making the piece, I considered the intensity created in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamzov. This intensity is the result of two formal treatments—the protagonists consistently inhabit constrained spaces, and time is also constrained by compression in the book.
Every Day Words Disappear | Michael Hardt on the Politics of Love
In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it is better for the Prince to be feared than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, asks what it would mean to base a political system on love, rather than on fear. How can we transform a society that is increasingly defined by a permanent state of war and cultivated by an industry of fear? How can we realize the paradigm shift necessary to move away from a reality that depends on the exploitation of people and the cult of privatisation of public resources?
Hardt looks for an answer in what he calls "the commons," by which he refers not only to natural resources, but also to the languages we create and the relationships we conceive together. In the dystopian city-state Alphaville, of Godard's eponymous film, all words and concepts relating to the idea of love and affection have been banned. When actress Anna Karina tries to express her feelings, she has to reinvent the words, for the concept of love is foreign to her.
Like the protagonist in Alphaville, Hardt suggests that we need to redefine the tools with which we act together politically. Hardt embarks on a journey to identify the transformative powers of the ongoing struggle to re-invent democracy. Within this struggle he understands "the commons" as an antidote against a society run by fear; an inspiration for a paradigm that is based on dialogue and cooperation.
16 mm in a loop | B&W | Silent
Spider proposes to recreate the physical experience of cinema and film outside its more usual context, the movie theater. In this sense his work allows the viewer to have a cinematic experience in a museum, changing the nature of the relationship between body, image and the space that both share. "Spider" reclaims an active audience as it frames itself in the line of the so called "expanded cinema": the work leaves behind the idea that the audience just receives images, and it provokes an engagement with the materiality of film.
Palestine's acute territorial complexities are well-known. Getting around there is, in itself, a red-hot political question. Valérie Jouve decided to film a road movie there: we follow, from Jerusalem to Nablus, a puppeteer accompanied by his mute rag double and a teenager, and their cheerful relationship. There are the landscapes, portrayed by the tracking shots from their pickup, in which the cities, hills and the wall blocking the space spread out. And their encounters. A false fluidity, affected by the freeze-frames—photographs, in fact—shaken, punctuating the film.
Une ville de l'avenir
Jumps to Paris, 2011 and the city of the future that we live in today, where Alphaville appears as an airplane movie, and image technology and image architecture form a waking dream. We emerge from the underground city, only to be caught in a car chase shoot out, and an escape into love. This is an underground world, below the corporate landscape of surveillance and control where airplanes fly closely by tall buildings. Using footage from Godard's Alphaville (1965.)
Sound design by Jim McKee and Music by Pollo Del Mar.
Mapping a City of Fragments v.2
B&W | Stereo
This installation uses montage to combine spaces shot in many locations into a fictional city. It begins with a dystopian view of the future city from 1965, and is arranged as four repeating, but different sequences, set against corporate facades and the march of time—the reality is too complex for oral communication, it is a visual reality about movement, fear and daily life, with a passionate kiss and a train leaving the station. And as we approach the turn of the millennium, a hope for a shared life in the city.
Projection 0
HD | Color | Silent
Between two analogous projections, the landscape and the sunlight are torn apart by an artificial, transparent surface. Instead of looking at the landscape, the spectator feels observed by it. Recorded with a camera that records at up to 2,500 frames a second (the usual is 30), this work deals with forms of representation of the image. Like a Magritte painting, reality is fragmented and deformed by means of simulations.
A German Youth
Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires
Marco Pando: reconstructing the cinematic fabric as performative experience
Fundación Universidad del Cine
The Thinking Eye (1st Program)
The Thinking Eye (2nd Program)
Abbreviated Poetronics: An Introduction to Gianni Toti
Anthropologies
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF
Minispectacles 1-50/100
Films by Dew Kim, Luciano Zubillaga and the Church of Expanded Telepathy (TCoET)*
VER: Overview of Latin American Audiovisual Creation.
Auditorio Caseros 2
Phantom Schoolgirl Army
Cipher Screen
Before and After Le Paradis
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
Crazy May
Sreenings + Q&A: Films by Dew Kim, Luciano Zubillaga and the Church of Expanded Telepathy (TCoET)*
Cine Cosmos
Refracted Journeys
The Imperative Eye
Remembering History, Reconstructing Memory
ON FILM - Probings into Analogue Cinema by Sami van Ingen
Two Programs about the Austrian Avant-garde Cinema
Documenting Everyday
Traces Places Spaces: A Film Retrospective
Recent Works in HD video
Essence of Humour
What's Clear Becomes Crystal - CFMDC Shorts
Anthology of Russian Video Art
Perceptive Fugues
In and Out of Time
I Will Not Put All That Together
CONFUSION-DIFFUSION: An Audiovisual Essay with Live Performance
Floros Floridis
Latency/Contemplation. Artist Films and Videos from South Korea since 1960s
The Metamorphoses of Eros
The Fathers & Sons Program: Special Screening
Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires |
My films paint a bleak portrait of humanity: concentration camps, Hiroshima, prison, reprisals, revenge, oppression, violation, death. However, my work as a filmmaker is not to burden, depress, or lecture my audience with these images. On the contrary, I have found that watching humanity at its weakest builds a feeling of resistance. And moreover, that within this resistance lives resilience, a love of humanity in its fragility, and most importantly, hope. I realized a few years ago that I only questioned violence produced by the systems to which I was personally and deeply opposed. It is much easier, of course, to judge the acts of adversaries. Why was I so ready to find excuses for actions committed in the name of convictions I deemed to be "good"? Just because the impetus was an ideology closer to my own, did that somehow make one act of violence more justified than another? Upon reflection, I realized that associating with the victim was still ultimately a one-sided point of view. To be truly objective, one must truly examine and question the motivations and thought processes of the so-called wrongdoers as well. This raises unresolvable and even unbearable questions. While considering these ideas as human beings neither rewrites history, nor excuses the crimes committed, it does open a door to a more complete discussion about the nature of the acts, and our own humanity, albeit the gloomiest part. With this in mind, I dove headfirst into my research of revolutionary violence. As years passed, I narrowed down my research to emancipation movements in the sixties and seventies, until finally I chose to focus on the history of the Red Army Faction, a left wing German terrorist group. Terrorism is no more than failure and destruction, blindly spreading death, and discrediting its own revolutionary ambitions. My question all along was this: how could anyone deliberately choose this kind of violence? This question is even more pointed when the terrorists are not of some marginalized, disenfranchised group, living on the fringes of society. In the case of the Red Army, we see a group of "normal" German youths with rights, resources, and a bright future ahead of them. They held the proverbial keys to a country that, in the 1950s, in the crippling aftermath of the world wars, was still immersed in total reconstruction. A German Youth is a real story of failures and fears. A story told through powerful, historical images. During my research about the RAF, I watched over a thousand hours of archives, fascinated by the deep link between the story and the images.
A German Youth tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (or Red Army Faction), a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today's society.
Fundación Universidad del Cine | 120'
This programme brings together seven films by Marco Pando made between 2003 and 2016. Educated in Lima and Amsterdam, Pando raises the concerns immigrants, as well as showing strong ties with cinema culture, as his family were the owners of the first cinema in his home town of Cajamarca. This also led him to create interventions in the moving image.
The technique used in the first films consists of scratching celluloid fragments (the leader strip for inserting the film to be projected in the cinema) that are first painted and placed horizontally so that each one creates a frame in the animation. Being highly artisanal work, there are elements that also arise spontaneously as he works on the material, and these give a near performative character to the work. Pando's work was transferred to celluloid by The Eye Film Institute (Netherlands), thus recovering the "materiality" lost in the process of digitalizing and editing his animations. The final result is a hybrid film between digital and cinematic; this produces a construct impossible to define in a single way, as it also includes "pre-cinematic" elements, such as drawing by hand, and it maintains the traces of the strips of celluloid used as recycling material, thus creating a kind of mise en abyme of the film material.
In Pando's work there is a certain nostalgia for the loss of the ritual of going to the cinema, especially in the provinces where cinemas have been sold or converted. In End of Cinema, the author reconstructs images of the façades of old cinemas that ran on coal to power the projectors. In turn, The King of the Hills was an installation in which the film of the same name was projected by Pando himself inside a tent that imitated the shape of an old cinema.
Although the nostalgia is perceivable in this artist's work, there is no desire to keep the filmic material separate from any process that impinges on its "purity". On the contrary, the production of his first films reflects the interchangeable character of the supports. One could perhaps draw a parallel between the migration of the supports and the geographic migration evoked in films like Tourist Hitchcock, King of the Mountains, Butterfly of the Border or The Boat.
The performance in which Pando begins his role as projectionist is prolonged in films like The Boat and the recent 8 Hours Work and—less explicitly—in the animated film White Lung City, where the author's alter ego tours the city of Lima, drawing the outline of a lung. In The Boat and 8 Hours Work, Pando moves the fantastic, confusing, irrational and highly dreamlike aspect of his animations to the production values in the field of live images.
End of Cinema
35mm | Color | Stereo
During the 1980s economic crisis in Peru, many cinemas closed down for want of an audience. This occurred at the same time as the appearance of VHS and other home video formats. This animated film presents, by way of visual memory, twelve old cinema façades that reflect their particular architecture. The stop motion animation was produced by using recycled cinema coal, which was used in the past as an energy source for projecting 35 mm films.
King of the Mountains
35 mm | Color | Stereo
The longing of many provincials to go to the city is reflected in the music of Lorenzo Palacios Quispe (Peruvian cumbia), known as Chacalón or "the Chicha Pharoah". The singer became an idol, and his lyrics became part of the popular memory of provincial migrants living in Lima. The video is based on the cartoon of Lorenzo Palacios Quispe, which contained simple, fun drawings of this popular icon. By scratching on pieces of the celluloid with a knife and colouring with felt-tip pins, the images of this cartoon were transferred onto fragments of 35mm celluloid to turn them into an animated story. This was originally presented as an installation, using an old Russian-made projector and accompanied by Chacalón's songs.
8 Hours Work
16mm | Color | Silent
During a month's residence in an abandoned building (Plattenbau) in Hoyerswerda in eastern Germany, the author created a performance titled 8 Hours Work, as a show of solidarity with coal miners. The performance consisted of remaining standing for eight hours, holding a red carnation in his right hand. This flower (rote Nelke in German) is the symbol of the German Socialist Party, and in the context of the performance represents the balance of forces and conflict of powers between east and west.
Tourist Hitchcock
In this animation, Alfred Hitchcock wanders the streets of Cajamarca and lima. He is seen posing or taking photographs like in tourist postcards. He visits spaces that have had political connotations because of protests or terrorist attacks. In Cajamarca, Hitchcock is seen chasing the author, who then hides in the old family cinema. Hitchcock is shown in this work with a knife, an analogy with the tool that Pando uses to work on the celluloid. In the final scenes, Hitchcook is chased by young petty thieves who take the form of birds, taking another symbolic element from Hitchcock's films.
Butterfly of the Border
The vignettes that make up this animation reflect the issues of the voluntary exodus that many people experience in crossing the border from Mexico to the USA. The personal experience of a relative of the author's is used as a starting point to represent, by way of metamorphosis, the personal and collective implications of this move.
The Bug Man
The cockroach is an insect that survived the Jurassic era and is resistant to exposure to nuclear radiation. The beetle, which fascinated the ancient Egyptians, is related to the idea of transformation and rebirth. The symbolic transformation of the bug man that moves from the city to the countryside can be seen as a process of survival and rebirth of one insect into another (from a cockroach to a beetle), but also as the sociocultural transformation of a citizen into a political candidate. The idea of transformation, associated with Kafka's work, refers to a desire of the author to transform himself.
White Lung City tells the story of the author's alter ego, "the man with black lungs", who tries to avoid the environmental contamination produced by the smoke from the factories and the rubbish on the streets in Lima city centre. The mapped perspective of the city shows the outline of a lung that the character leaves on it.
16 mm | Color | Silent
Historically, the boat was an element that symbolized the adventure of discovery of an unknown paradise, hard to access. In contrast that this idyllic vision, this performative work symbolizes in an abstract way the journey of thousands of immigrants to the lands where the first colonization plans were laid. For this project, the author collaborated with immigrants living in the Netherlands, who symbolically moved as a group, forming the outline of a boat, from the shores of the North Sea to the city of Amsterdam, to then make their way back to the starting point.
Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires | 120'
Planned for television, the Juan Downey videos that make up the series The Thinking Eye. Culture as the Instrument of Active Thought (1981-1989) revolve around some landmarks of western culture and its systems of representation throughout history, taking in architecture, design, music and popular culture. Presented as essays, the videos present a critical and parodic view of the issues covered and the ideologies and power forms connected to them. This criticism is presented through a mix of personal narratives, conventions of documentary language and post-production effects, manifesting a consciousness of the mediated nature of our knowledge. These elements, both personal and technical, break with any expectation of linearity and veracity, rendering problematic the notion of transparency and objectivity that would connect video with a mirror, one of the central motifs of the series.
After returning to New York in 1974 from the journeys that make up the Video Trans Américas project, Downey did a performance based on Las meninas which started off a series of installations, dance and video actions based around mirrors, the baroque, corporality and the work of Velázquez.
This set of works became the basis for a new series centred on western culture, which originally included thirteen videos. Echoing linguistics and semiotics studies, psychoanalysis and the deconstruction of representation, the four videos that were completed oscillate between issues related to art (the signs, the action of the metaphor, the mirrors, the counterpoint), different power systems and reflections on the eye that looks and thinks. As the title The Thinking Eye suggests phonetically, the eye is part of an "I", of a subject that is also a body that produces knowledge. One characteristic of the series is Downey's recurring appearance as narrator, actor, artist, image, person and director, while his voice and his memories interrupt and create narratives, making the spectator's relationship with the recorded images more complex. While The Looking Glass (1981) focuses on mirrors, reflexes and self-reflection in western culture, Information Withheld (1983) revolves around the ambiguity of the signs and their transformations in moving between cultures. Shifters (1984) takes the linguistic concept of "shifter" as a symbol of mobility and translation to reflect on the relations between architecture, power and coloniality. Although J.S. Bach (1986) focuses on the life of the German composer, the subject is shown in counterpoint, in more than one line, its complexity translated into parallel images. Hard Times and Culture: Part One: Vienna "fin-de-siècle" (1990) is part of the last series that Downey managed to plan before his death. Based on a George Kubler quotation: "an epoch of staggering difficulties above which painting, poetry and theatre flowered imperishably…", the video explores the crisis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the changes brought about by psychoanalysis, linguistics and the arts at the change of the century, and establishes links with the Gulf War at the time of the recording and other forms of imperialism, crisis and cultural creativity that continue to exist in the present.
Maidens of Honor
Umatic ¾ | Color | Stereo
Maids of Honor is a brilliant essay on illusionism, mirrors and perception in art, life and video articulated by Downey as a subjective interpretation of Velazquez's eponymous Baroque masterpiece. Through a theatrical reenactment of the painting's pictorial tableau and a re-articulation of its complex perspectival structure, Downey brings to life the spatial dynamics, illustrating the psychological tension of the relationship between viewer subject. Placing Las Meninas in an historical context, Downey relates the painting's thematics to Spain's economic and political systems of the late 17th century.
Portapack | Color | Stereo
The Looking Glass is a multilayered essay whose visual complexity parallels its subject: the meaning of reflections, illusions and mirrors in Western art, culture and life. In his analysis of the rich iconography of the mirror in painting, including Van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding portrait, Holbein's Ambassadors, and Velázquez's Las Meninas, he reflects on the psychological tension in the relation of the artist, the subjects of the paintings and the viewer beyond. Exploring perceptions of pictorial space, he uses computer graphics to diagram art historian Leo Steinberg's analysis of perspective systems in Las Meninas. In a subjective illustration of the mirror as a reflection of the subconscious, Downey recalls his own experience of viewing Las Meninas as a young man in Madrid when he immersed himself in the "baroque space of the picture, in a total art experience... similar to orgasm."
Information Withheld
Betacam | Color | Stereo
Information Withheld, part of The Thinking Eye series, deconstructs the information contained within the image in a spectacular decoding of the discourses of television and fashion. Foretelling the Baudrillardian prognosis of a supremely ironic culture in which use value and exchange value annul each other within a vertiginous spiral of commodities, Downey exposes the intercultural, global appropriation of the economy of images through the spectacle/metaphor of the fashion show which is seen at the conclusion of Information Withheld.
(The Eruption of Dream Into Study: Notes On the Art of Juan Downey, 1989, John G. Hanhardt).
The third in Downey's innovative series The Thinking Eye; exploring the nature of perception and the idea of reflectivity, Shifters completes the trilogy begun with The Looking Glass (1980) and Information Withheld (1983). Broadly based in the linguistic principles of shifters, the tape weaves together seven different narrative threads: Napoleon, a cat torturer, Egypt, a silent melodrama, a Leo Steinberg essay on art history, imperialist architecture, and "la working class"; each section commenting on power and the abuse of power. The work represents a bold example of the new narrative trend and, like the two previous tapes in the series, stretches the objective documentary format. The obvious contradictions of the tape, particularly in its political views, make this a thought provoking work; the visual flair of the artist renders it lush to the eye.
(Juan Downey: 20 Years, 1989, Anne H. Hoy)
J.S. Bach is a resonant, personal documentary on the composer that begins with Bach's last years and ends with Downey's note of the death of his mother. In continuous counterpoint are the transfiguring power of Bach's music and the gritty reality of his life; the nature and biography of this man and of the video maker who identifies with him and has played his music since childhood; and the shifting, symbolic relations of art and life for both creators.
Hard Times and Culture: Vienna, 'fin-de-siècle'
Hard Times and Culture is Downey's last single channel piece, is a series of tapes on the nexus of cultural creativity and economic, political and social forces. Downey subjectively documents periods in which economic hardships coincided with intensified creative output in the fine-arts, literature and culture at large. Part One: 'Vienna Fin-de-Siecle' focuses on the Austrian-Hungarian Empire one hundred years ago, when its decline inter-locked closely with the emergence of modernism in the arts and psychoanalysis."
(From the catalogue Frames of References, The Rockefeller Foundation, Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship Award 1988-1999).
Gianni Toti is considered the father of video poetry and one of the most important international video artists. His diverse biography as a poet, writer, author of films and theatre pieces gives a profile of an organic intellectual who indefatigably confronted the theoretical depth and cultural activity with publishing initiatives and with militant intervention through his activity in the Roman resistance, and then as a journalist and special envoy of the newspaper L'Unitá. The willingness to experiment with new languages and his vocation for the logical-syntactic disassembly of the word, something that marks his poetry, led him to discover video, pushing to extremes the electronic image as the sum of all the arts. Toti made some video poetry in the research and experimentation sector of the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), thus kickstarting a career in which he would go on to create (more abroad than in Italy) thirteen works, best defined as VideoPoemOperas, given the synthesis of musical, imaginative and poetic languages that characterize them. In the 1990s he participated actively in video festivals and manifestations in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Peru. Toti takes Latin American thought to the symbolic and figurative domain of electronic language, passing through the area of semantics from literature to cinematography, always keeping in mind the fusion of all the arts, with the perspective of the total work of art and of "syntheatronics".
This selection is intended as a brief introduction to the work of Gianni Toti, showing some short but representative works of the different stages of his videocreation. The selection begins with the documentary PlaneToti-Notes, made by researcher Sandra Lischi, a close friend and collaborator of the author, portraying Toti's fascinating life and his particular form of creating. The next work Order, Chaos and Phaos is part of the series The Scientific Imaginary, for which Toti was inspired by recent scientific advances, from comets discovered at that time to medical computerization. This work deals with new mental models, including particularly the theory of fractals. This is followed by two short pieces, Tennez Tenis and L'originedite, which show the abstract development of his experimentation in video poetry in the 1990s. The last work in the selection, Plant song to Pachamamacoca, was made with Marko Mormil and Elisa Zurlo, and is an allegory inspired by figures of Latin American culture, with which Toti had a very close relationship.
This selection complies some of the works from the exhibition Poetronics: Gianni Toti and the Origins of Videopoetry, which took place in Lima, in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) and in the Casa de la Literatura Peruana, and which will be shown in 2017 in Buenos Aires and Bangalore.
PlaneToti-Notes
New media researcher Sandra Lischi made this video portrait of Gianni Toti as an experimental documentary, introducing his peculiar intellectual and personal universe, as well as stages in his creative process, which he called "poetronics". In Lischi's words: "Poetronics is created, therefore, from the articulation of verbal languages, of writing, of images; but above all, it is the result of the combination of these elements with each other, and with other 'text' fragments (musical, theatrical, cinematographic, pictorial quotations or creations?)" In this short documentary the images of Gianni Toti, his house overrun with books and notes, blend with the anecdotes, stories and reflections of the filmmaker.
Order, Chaos and Phaos
U-matic | Color | Stereo
In 1986, Totti produced with the support of the Society of Computer Music and the City of Sciences and Industry, Paris (La Villette), a series of video creations that discuss everything from the relationship of cosmic theories and the final structure of the universe to the study of the human body. The images of man and machine dialogue harmoniously in these works. Many of these works were made from discussions of Toti's with recognized researchers. Order, Chaos and Phaos is a piece about the new mental models of emerging science: fractals, strange attractors, cosmic knots; confrontation between the old and the imaginary new, in the prospect of a unitary model of artistic and scientific creativity.
Tennez Tenis
Betacam | Color - B&N | Stereo
Toti's collaboration with the RAI –in this case, through the site in the Lombardi region—would lead to this work, made to mark the 900th anniversary of the Università di Bologna. Valeria Magli plays the unbeatable 1920s tennis player Suzanne Lenglen in this videoballet that fuses dance, sport and music (with an original soundtrack by John Cage). The work was projected for the first time in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, located in the heart of the University, on 12 October 1990. The years of collaboration with the RAI would later be looked back on with a very critically, renouncing the public network's work and its continual refusal to give space and support to thought and creation.
L'Originedite
This work, the title of which is a play on "origin" and "unpublished", is Toti's first computer graphics video. In it he asks questions about this new experience, this binary universe made of zeroes and ones that dance and compose new forms. A challenge, a provocation, this is the numerical image, to which Toti responds with punches of humanistic culture, scientific imaginary, poetic and artistic references. The synthesis images were made at the Atelier Brouillard-Précis, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture and Francophonie, the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (DRAC PACA), the Municipality of Marseille, and the Office Régional de la Culture del Centre International de Poésie de Marseille. The synthesis images were created with the Anyflo programme, developed by Michel Bret.
Plant song to Pachamamacoca
Betacam | Color - B&W | Stereo
Made by Marko Mormil, Elisa Zurlo and Gianni Toti. The coca gospel, according to the Pacha Maria, the Quechua Madonna, is a legend "for travellers" and "workers of the wind". It is the story of Galchovang, Mother Earth, and of the hero Sintana, of their daughter Bunkejim and her brother Miuiva, of María Teyuna and of the Shaman "hidden bird", of hallucinations and "cocatronics", as told by Mama Quilla and Madre Luna. A short poem sung in the language of the Incas and played on the quena, the Indian flute. A "plant song" of the "little sacred plant" and of the "false ideological consciences" of coca contradictions, beyond the now archaic myths and prejudices about erythroxyline. A short poem for the Cuca Cuca excocaculturally "pachamamacocadanced".
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF | 120'
For this section, we wanted to examine the idea of plural anthropologies through contemporary artists' creations, and explore with them the potential of the moving image to de-articulate or reinvent our relationship with what is seen or shown, the acts or traces of what makes us human, and through this question strategies and premises of the image.
Frequently the subject is the mark left by the colonizations of the last century and the systems of reference from which the significant elements of civilizations different to western ones were apprehended and transmitted, but this is a vaster issue, that of the devices of the perspective and the possibility of capturing what is real.
In the case of João Vieira Torres and Tanawi Xucuru Kariri, this is an invisible ritual for non-initiates, and instead of putting ourselves in the visibility of this ritual and making us believe in the possibility of objectifying it through images, artists generate the conditions of an inner questioning, make us go through an immeasurable question: what is the inner experience of the other?
Iván Argote, in turn, uses a strategy of symbolic confrontation in the register of a furtive activism. We see a clash between two bodies: that of the artist, who films himself against the petrified mass of a statue of Christopher Columbus, the figure of a history that sealed the destiny of a whole continent, which he then attempts to set fire to. His body in action, the trembling image and the hesitation of the flames indicate a possibility of the perspective, that of questioning the world and making it hesitate from the moment when one lights on its solidified masses, its certainties and its imposed truths.
Ana Vaz makes a film poem around the ecology of the signs that, through repetition, function like so many other remains-fetishes of a colonial past: fiestas, exotic birds, power and class relations… The setting out of the signs and their accumulation then designate the near melancholy possibility of other possible appropriations, at once previous future and utopia, a call to resolve a contradiction of history impossible to overcome.
Marco Godoy's video intervention also plays with a displacement of signs and contexts, those of an Eduardo Galeano poem broadcast over loudspeakers in the middle of the Bolivian jungle, thus producing the allegory of a place prior to the exploitation and dominance of a corrupt humanity, or resistant to its advance.
Lastly, Mathieu K. Abonnenc's film maintains a complex dialogue with Michel Leiris's diary Afrique fantôme (Ghost Africa) and the possibility of a contemporary anthropology, whose political, scientific and artistic questions are prolonged to the present day. "The film reveals the destiny and memory of archives through a fantasy, which designates a state of relations among peoples."
No definitive answer is given here; there remains only an oscillation between the marks of the past, those of memory and objects, and the paradoxical desire for a questioning that is at once existential, political and aesthetic.
The International Encounters Paris / Berlin are one of the main manifestations, in France and Germany, dedicated to the contemporary practices of the moving image. They offer a space for discovery and reflection between new cinema and contemporary art, and constitute a unique platform in Europe, in which artists can meet, establish interchanges with a broad public and start new projects. Over the years, different places have been associated with this manifestation, especially the Gaîté Lyrique, the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. These encounters constitute a real intercultural forum, with the presence of guests from the whole world, influential cinema and contemporary art figures, artists, researchers, managers of institutions and emerging structures, who talk about their experience, their reflections and about artistic and cultural contexts under transformation.
Toré
Tanawi Xucuru
HDV | Color | Stereo
There is that
which I see
which is shown to me
which I can't see
which I don't see
I was invited to film a ritual. One that can be shown to foreigners. A child of the tribe watches Disney's Fantasia on TV. He is interrupted. What does the child experience when he dances?
What am I able to see from what is shown to me? Shot in the Xucuru-Kariri, in Alagoas, Brazil.
Iván Argote
The video, set in Barcelona, shows the artist performing an iconoclastic action. During the night, using fire and a bottle of absinth, Argote sets on fire a statue representing a bishop showing the way to a native. The statue is on the pedestal of the Columbus monument, in the Christopher Columbus circle at the end of the Ramblas, close to the harbour. By setting this symbol on fire, the artist shows all his disapproval of the European vision of colonization, in which Colombus is a hero.
Occident
Antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A film-poem of an ecology of signs tracing a colonial history repeating itself: celebration and power relations, objects and fetishes, roots and branches, power and class relations in a struggle to find one's place and one's seat at the table.
On 13 November 2014, loudspeakers and a power generator were set up in the Bolivian jungle, near the river Mamoré, a tributary of the Amazon. For hours, El sistema (The System), a text by Eduardo Galeano was played on a loop over the loudspeakers. The uncontrollable and unpredictable forces of nature make the area of Trinidad a sparsely inhabited region, one of the few areas that is still resisting the development of progress, progress understood as a destructive force.
IX B Sector
Mathieu Kleyebe
Sector IX B discusses the conservation of an anthropological collection assembled by the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, one of the main operations of colonial collection, through the rereading of the work L'Afrique fantôme by Michel Leiris. The film, shot in Africa, mainly in Senegal, reveals the destiny and memory of archives by means of an imagined story, designating a state of relations between the peoples.
Minispectacles is a series of one-minute films, cinematic haikus. The first Minispectacle parts are Touché, Douché, Souché. Minispectacles 4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and of desire.
Minispectacles 2xAgainst goes against with the French Resistance and Occupy Oakland. Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish, the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post. Minispectacles 6xAlbuquerque Straight visits a man and a lynx on the Route 66. Minispectacles 6xAlbuquerque Straight visits a man and a lynx kitten on the motel on the Route 66. Minispectacles 6xGood Night wishes good night to north and to south and to west and to Speed Market. To be continued all the way to Part 100. Woman with pocket camera.
There is more work in the pipeline, waiting to be finished. I have been shooting Minispectacles since 2005 on my travels around the world. I will create one hundred Minispectacles in all to have a feature length film in my hand. They are suitable for showing on monitors or as projections, in series or individually, as multi-screen installations or consecutively. Woman with pocket camera/ Man with a movie camera.
Minispectacle 6: Along
Pocket camera | Color | Stereo
4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and desire.
Auron Impressions.
Minispectacle 7: Along. Spring in the Puddle.
Minispectacle 8: Against
2xAgainst goes with the French Résistance and Occupy Oakland.
Minispectacles 10-13: Solo
Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish, the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
2xSolo lets fly about children and young families. French leaves.
Minispectacles 14-15: Duo
2xDuo is about falling and feeling.
Duo is navigating with a toddler between Paris-Helsinki.
A man and a tree.
Minispectacles 16-17: Trio
Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish,the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
2xTrio is contemplating with twins in a medieval castle in France. Trio inhales and takes a breather.
Minispectacles 18 Quartet
Halloween in Toronto, Kensington with French Fries, Middle Finger and Trash Can.
Quartet has post boxes in party mood.
Minispectacles 19-24: Albuquerque Straight
Minispectacles Albuquerque Straight visits a man and a lynx in a motel on Route 66.
Minispectacles 25-30: Good Night
Minispectacles 6xGood Night wishes good night to north and to west and to Speed Market.
Minispectacle 1: Touché
Bottle bobbing.
Minispectacle 2: Douche
Super 16mm | Color | Stereo
A bomb explodes in a backwoods, spraying toys.
Minispectacle 3: Souché
The blueberry bushes shake. There are ducks picking blueberries. Then a disturbance.
Minispectacle 5: Along. A boy in deep waters at the Suez Canal
Centro Cultural Recoleta | 60'
If video has historically been at the crossroads, those tensions that its influence brought into being have gradually deepened in recent years. Not just because of their immediacy and virality, video forms since the digital expansion are increasingly contaminated, evasive, and mimic more our sensorial experience. The South Korean Dew Kim and the Argentine Luciano Zubillaga, both immigrants, reduced the distance separating them by using video, as well as other practices, to create a production space where contamination is the form of collaboration, and of collision, par excellence. And if telepathy is a communicative property that goes beyond the senses and physical forms, the expansion they propose is another way of opening that intangible dimension that can only be inhabited at present by a video image that, like that which both propose, crosses the barriers of identitary belonging and faces up to the drift of plural voice and body. That temple profaned by expansion is made up as much by post-identity cyborg sex, which never renounces eroticism and sensuality, as by a documentary contemplation as a perplexed hallucination of contemporary life. In the middle of that, the stain glass of the church that they gradual construct modifies the light, and if it has K-pop colour and looks close to being a video clip, it ends up being a videocreep with freak performance included. So it is that in the meeting of Kim and Zubillaga all genre's overflow until porn and technology devours it, until the post-human extras and their waste become a loop where everything is the vertigo of the gaze.
Diego Trerotola
Through performance, architecture and moving image, TCoET encourages audiences to explore movement, time sense and sexuality within the imagination of post-human philosophies. TCoET works with performance, humour and expanded telepathy as a mode of direct knowledge in moving image as research.
Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga started working with the concept of TCoET for the 7th Conference From Humanism to Post and Transhumanism held at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. The 2015 conference activated an ongoing collaboration exploring language, sexuality and religious sensibility. Their work entitled "Expanded Telepathy" will be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book, Shifting Layers: New Perspectives in Media Archaeology across Digital Media and Audiovisual Arts (Mimesis International).
In their work the rules of production are not defined, as they are in traditional filmmaking, and not set under linear protocols of collaboration. Filmmaking is approached as an invisible architecture, where entanglements of expanded telepathy (ET) could potentially undo the solid grip of language and colonial syntax. The linear matrix of montage gives way to possible assemblages of time as transdiscipline for sculpture, philosophy and space design. In fact, image movement or time-sense is only needed to access the "nth" dimension of space. The combination of feeling and thought of high tension leads to a higher form of psychic life.
http://tcoetelepathy.tumblr.com
Paradise Lost + David's Sling
HD | Digital animation | Color | Stereo
Performance-based k-pop video connecting religion and Israel's biblical missile system. A visitor to Vatican city witnesses the apparition of Israel's biblical missile in the sky while singing to the secret dimension of religion. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.
In Take Me to Church, electronic cyberspace connects a sadomasochist experience with Christian practice: a man exploring voluntary kidnapping becomes confused between fear and sexual pleasure. He realizes that his sexual desire is a kind of death and the ceremony is sacred. For George Bataille, religious sensibility always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish. We see an energy in the story which, when harnessed to a devotion to something or someone, gives the devotee, the submissive, the masochist, the martyr, an ability to do something special, to step outside the limitations of the human. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.
Kokakolachickenwings
Zairong Xiang
In the film Kokakolachickenwings, thinker Zairong Xiang and artist Luciano Zubillaga collaborate telepathically to propose a film/text that has no beginning and no end. Sounds, indeterminate voices, algorithmic subs and various translations converge by the potency of montage, connecting brain 1 (intestines) with brain 2 (head brain), in the context of cooking, reading and making a film. While cooking, an android voice in the style of Optimus Prime confides: "The theme of the conversation is Instability-of-Human-Reason". Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Zairong Xiang
Me gustas tú
Performance-based k-pop video about love, sexuality and war. A decommissioned Royal Navy submarine in a former British imperial dockyard becomes the main theatre for HornyHoneydew a cappella style singing. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.
Superhomosexuals
Daniel Bohm
Cyberspace grows without limits, yet mental time is not infinite. Webcam star Alan do Oro opens up a world to come, where flesh, sexuality and intimacy meet the immense possibilities of cybernetics and the posthuman. Sensuality is in slowness, and the space of information is too extensive and fast to elaborate upon it intensively and deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic science fiction and organic cybertime lies the fundamental matter of contemporary porn. Performed by Alan do Oro. Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Daniel Böhm
Auditorio Caseros 2 | 120'
Abecedario/B
Colectivo Los ingrávidos
16mm - HD | B&W | Stereo
I Went to Cappadocia and I Thought of You
Larissa Figueiredo
HD | Color | Stereo | Silent
Fragments of Sunday
Benjamin Ellenberger
Super8mm | B&W | Silent
Solitude (On Light and Duration)
Pablo Mollenhauer
11' 51''
Mi Horizonte
Carlos Marulanda
Roberto Niño
OAXACA TOHOKU
S/T (cazadores)
Los puntos internos
Sergio Subero
At that moment when the center cannot hold the question of who we are and what anchors us, collective life emerges with particular acuteness. This program features outstanding recent works from artists in Asia, made in the past decade, which respond to the persistence of the desire for collective existence in the face of antagonism and atomization, and signal the need to think and feel collective existence beyond the established logic of community. The practices of the artists Revereza, Widasari, Sen and Arunanondchai are migratory and multi-contextual. Fittingly, their aesthetics range from experimental film, vérité, performative documentary to media art. Curated for Experimental Cinema in Asia Network (ECAN) by Shai Heredia, May Adadol Ingawanij and Yuki Aditya.
DROGA!
Super 8 mm | B&W | Stereo
A Super 8 tourist film about the Los Angeles landscape through the lens of Filipino immigrants, examining cultural identity by documenting the intersections of American pop culture and Filipino traditions. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.
Otty Widasari
Part of the short film anthology Indonesia 9808, in which 10 artists and filmmakers take stock of 10 years of life in the Reformasi period after the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998. Otty plays herself in this video, which stages an impromptu conversation between two women and two men—girlfriends who go way back with each other and husbands who came after. Who were these thirty-somethings a decade ago? Why were they with the student activists in the thick of the insurrectionary crowd? And were they really part of those epoch-defining events? Laughingly, this provocative yet tender video asks where real life is lived and what binds us to each other.
Noon Day Dispensary
Filmed at the government-run free dispensary at Savda-Ghevra Resettlement Colony in Delhi, as part of a fellowship exploring urban resettlement, this video was amongst several others that were produced spontaneously, attempting to reclaim the style and philosophies of cinema vérité. Through the "performance'' of the filmmaker and her frame, it bears witness to a moment in the transition between being illegal occupants of the city, to being legally resettled, and the range of negotiations and subjectivities that accompanies this shift.
Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3
Korakrit Arunanondchai
A pulsating assemblage that crosses moving image tableaux with camera drone and algorithmic images, mor lam with hip hop, and a dandyish voice-over addressing either a spirit or an invisible spectator known only as Chatri. The voice uttering 21st-century stream of consciousness could be that of the artist-persona or it could be that of the drone. Infusing post-human technology with animistic spirit, the mythical naga snake with Angry Birds, Korakrit's protean work embodies connective ether binding beings across spaces and times. While highly contemporary in its infrastructural aesthetics, the work makes visually contiguous an incommensurable range of political and religious affect in present-day Thailand. In this sense it figures the desire for collectivity for an imploding country with beguiling sincerity.
Tiempo Aire
Bruno Varela
Super 8 - VHS - Video 8 - mini DV - 3GP - Avchd | Color - B&W | Stereo
Deshoras
HD | Color | Mono
Proxemia
Leonardo Gracés
Weddel Blizzard
Ignacio Masllorens
Sin Títulos
Digital | Color | Stereo
Video Standard | Color | Stereo
Fundación Universidad del Cine | 60'
Film is an extended medium of either 16 mm or 35 mm diameters in width. Each film has a specific weight, thickness and length that depend on its duration. To measure the mass and volume of film, we can use gallons (gal), kilograms (kg), milligrams (mg), grams (g), and litres (l). Measurements of filmic material are technological realities but do not necessarily define what we call the cinematic; we only need a projector to see (like mammals) that which has been growing every day on para-filmic material since the 13th century, as Hollis Frampton briefly wrote in For a Metahistory of Film (1971). It is not only the celluloid but many materials that pass through the projector, however. The perforations used for transporting and steadying the images are a clue to show that this is film material.
Filmmakers and archivists convert the thickness, length and weight of film into time. Through filmmaking and archiving a feeling for film's physical substance develops, time-consciousness becomes tangible; observing the material is the same as watching the clock. As per Gilbert Simondon's text Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958), the enslavement of labor(ers) through repetitive practice has contributed in making the manipulation of material and shape in natural accordance more ambiguous. Repeated futile efforts and the chain reaction of experience through time meet in an antiphonal action whereby material and shape become transparent. The abstracted images revealed despite the velocity of the chemical agents are residual of the laborer's experience (Hangjun Lee, February 2015).
Hangjun Lee, Alan Courtis
16 mm | B&W | Live sound feed: Alan Courtis
Phantom Schoolgirl Army is based on a collection of military photographic portraits, and elaborates on the story of North Korean spies disguised as high school girls during the Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion of 1948. The South Korean government used this legend as anti-Communist propaganda.
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF | 60'
Cipher Screen is live art cinema using two prepared 16 mm film projectors and a live sound feed. This work harnesses the mechanisms of film and cinema; the projector, the film material, the darkened room and synchronized sound. The imagery begins with loops of completely black film. Two projections are superimposed on the screen and black emulsion is slowly abraded creating star-like piercings, then more linear scratchings, lines crisscross the screen with increasing density, diagonal lines appear, creating an unstable, mutable graphic architecture. It ends with the projection of the ripped, textured, scratched and torn celluloid base in the shape of two crossed frames.
16 mm | Color - B&W
Presentation of the author's personal self-portrait, Le Paradis (which gives its title to the session and is constructed from two films, by Marguerite Duras and Straub-Huillet, respectively), together with three works that tie political questions with the filmmaker's own life, and share in common one of the defining features of María Ruido's work, namely the use of (family and institutional) archives to construct historical counter-narratives that vindicate a history (with a small h) in contrast to authoritative, totalizing accounts; the small histories of each person, true subjects of history, as important histories in contrast to what is written in history books and in the stones. The session is made up of the self-portrait Le Paradis (2010) and Internal Memory (2002), Ruido's first visual essay, telling the story of the process of her parents migration to Germany in the late 1960s; What Which Cannot Be Seen Must Be Shown (2010), which deals with film and media censorship in Spain to support the official story of the Transition; Duty-Free Zone (2009), a film that deals with the changes from industrial capitalism to information capitalism through the example of free zones or tax-free zones and, specifically, Barcelona's free zone, along with the deterioration in workers' conditions in recent decades in the Spanish State (and, by extension, in the new global division of labour.)
HDV | B&W | Stereo
By appropriating and stripping down fragments of the films Nathalie Granger (1972) by Marguerite Duras and En rachâchant by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, scripted by Duras, the author draws a fragile self-portrait of the supposed paradise of childhood, full of conflicts and contradictions, in which the rejection of the structural violence of the family and its roles, as well as the rejection of the imposed hierarchies of traditional knowledge, begin to be seen.
Digital8 | Color - B&W | Stereo
Internal Memory is an exercise in reflection, through a first-person account, on the "forgotten" Galician immigration to Europe in the 1960s and 70s and its consequences, as well as the on way memory is constructed and on the mechanisms that produce history. Through a subjective narrative, this video underlines the possibility of a plural history generated by personal experiences, in contrast to the idea of History and official memory, restricted to the institutional sphere and articulated around the deactivation of political subjects.
That Which Cannot Be Seen Must Be Shown
HDV | Color - B&W | Stereo
That Which Cannot Be Seen Must Be Shown is a visual essay on the memory of the Transition, constructed from some productions of militant film that contradict the official images that have formed our memories of the end of Francoist Spain and the beginnings of democracy. 'From the duty of memory', in the words of Primo Levi, María Ruido tackles the construction of historic memory of the Spanish State, but her approach is not based on recorded testimonies, but on the revelation of the lack of images of certain events or issues. The militant films with which this film essay is constructed show what has been left out of the official representation of the agreed memory of the Spanish Transition.
Duty-Free Zone
HDV | Color - B&W
The Duty-Free Zone, a symbol of the trade area of traditional industry, and the so-called Distrito [email protected], the new space of logistic and technological capitalism, are the two polar opposites of the tourist-commercial Barcelona of the new millennium, and above all, the large real estate business protected by the umbrella of the post-industrial renovation of the Catalan capital. These two forms of capital fuse together in the new uses of the old port areas, now dedicated to big business call centres and customer service: let's get ready to leave the loading wharf and enter the call centre to continue working for the big business of gentrification, for the 'Barcelona brand'.
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires | 120'
Dor Guez's work generates overlapping geographical, temporal, and epistemological journeys. Employing an array of video and photographic practices, the artist leads us into distinct sites in contemporary Israel and the Mediterranean area. Through his art, Guez reverses the process of depersonalization and distancing that Shapira describes. He insists on reintroducing individual experiences and personal testimonies from Israel/Palestine into our range of vision, exposing the tragic human dimension that had been repressed and hidden from view.
The videos that were chosen for this project focus on three generations of a Christian Arab family from Lod—the Monayers'. As we sit face to face with them in their living rooms (and even gain access to a kitchen and bedroom), we learn about their lives, experiences, and subtle family dynamics. The camera's mostly static stance, eye-level height, and physical proximity to the protagonists create an intimate, empathetic ambience. The fact that we occupy the artist's position transfers the Monayers' trust in him to us.
In Watermelons under the Bed, Samih describes his father's situation after 1948 and his decisions as a Christian Arab in the newly established State of Israel: "He grew with it, and if he wanted to survive, he had to adjust to the new situation, dance between the drops and survive in the new environment." The camera cuts back and forth between Samih, sitting on his parents' couch, and Jacob, his dad, who is shown only in fragments, at home: lying in bed, examining watermelons, and sitting in the kitchen cutting sabra cacti. These plants symbolize attachment to the land for both Palestinians and Israelis.
The video 40 Days also offers a deeply personal story, which relates to a larger narrative. In this case, it is the death of Jacob, the artist's grandfather.
The video also relates to a larger and more complex narrative: the story of the place where he is buried, the Christian Palestinian cemetery in Lod, which has been vandalized by other religious groups.
The schism between self-identification and the way one is identified by outsiders is also addressed in (Sa)Mira, an extended monologue by Guez's nineteen-year-old cousin, who describes her painful experiences with racism and asserts that she feels "both Israeli and Arab." At a certain point, after breaking down in tears, Samira restarts her narrative from the beginning, and through recounting her story, she analyzes her place within Israeli society with increasing self-awareness. Guez's occasional statements and questions -his voice and person add subtle texture to each video, an intentional blurring of his documentary style- result in Samira's asking, pointedly: "What does it mean to feel Israeli? And what does it mean to feel Arab?"
(Sa)Mira
Samira is a first-year psychology student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her colloquial Hebrew, sartorial choices and mannerisms render her indistinguishable from her Jewish Israeli contemporaries. Guez asks her to recount a recent experience: in the restaurant where she works as a waitress, her Arabic first name evoked racist responses, causing her boss to ask her to change her name to the more Jewish-sounding Sima; they finally settle on Mira. As she recalls the incident and repeats it at Guez's prodding, she begins to articulate the complexity of her identity and how racism impacts her life.
Watermelons Under the Bed
Guez's camera dwells on Jacob Monayer in intimate settings with watermelons and sabra cacti. Intermingled with these quotidian moments, Jacob's son, Samih, recalls his parents process of adjusting to life in Israel after 1948 and the choices they made for their children. The watermelon and the sabra cactus carry symbolic significance linking identity and place within both Palestinian and Israeli cultures.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is believed that the souls of the deceased wander the Earth for 40 days when ascension of the soul then occurs; special prayers at the gravesite and in the church are then held in memorial of the departed. The installation offers a deeply personal, familial story: the death of Ya qoub Monayer and his memorial service 40 days later. It also relates to a larger and more complex narrative: the story of the place where he is buried, the Christian Palestinian cemetery in Lod, which has been vandalized by other religious groups. The destruction of the cemetery reflects the position of the Christian Palestinians living in Israel as a minority within the wider Palestinian minority.
The Sick Man of Europe: The Painter
Entitled The Painter, this video is the first of five from a new body of work, The Sick Man of Europe. Guez's project reflects on the military history and current political climate of the Middle East through the creative practices of individual soldiers from the region.
The video presents the story of a painter-turned-soldier, a Jewish Tunisian who immigrated to Israel. The "painter" was conscripted to the Yom Kippur War as a reservist soldier in 1973 and, in recent years, has undergone psychiatric treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, part of which consists of repeatedly recording his memories of the war. These recordings are central to Guez's new work, and relate directly to his artistic strategy of repetition and storytelling in re-evaluating accounts of the past.
Imagine walking through a surreal location covered in mist and approaching eccentric, uncanny and whimsical projections. You have just entered Maarit Suomi-Väänänen's universe. Suomi-Väänänen's latest work, Crazy May, brings together Up And About Again (2009), In a Musty, Misty Thicket (2012) and Log Head (2015). The common thread in this trilogy is the psychological tensions, absurdity and atavistic behaviour portrayed in each piece. Up And About Again and In a Musty, Misty Thicket have been shown and won awards in over 150 various venues over 30 countries. The trilogy is co-produced with the YLE Finnish Broadcasting Company, AVEK the Promotion Centre of Audiovisual Culture and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Crazy May was born out of Suomi-Väänänen's participation in artist residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada, EMARE Media Artists Residency in France, Kinokino Art and Film Centre in Norway and Saari Residence in Finland.
In Crazy May, abandoned landscapes play central roles, where speech is absent and inner worlds are exposed. A heightened awareness of one's solitude is experienced as we journey through the metaphors of childhood, puberty and adulthood. The trilogy points towards the ultimate exploration of human's inner state of being by combining black humour and cinematic special effects. A truly perfect celebration of madness.
Up and About Again
Super 16 mm | Color | Stereo
Up And About Again is laid back in the outback. A snow-covered Datsun 100A is driving through a summer landscape. Something inexplicable has turned an otherwise ordinary day upside down. Pain is hidden.
In a Musty, Misty Thicket
Finland / France
Pik Mama and Missy are spending a boondocks day in a musty, misty thicket sitting with a boiling pot by a smoky campfire, deep in a forest, on a deserted island where weird and bizarre things are happening. Two badly-behaving women in the middle of the forest on a deserted island.
Log Head
Canada / Finland / Norway
Log Head is an experimental comedy about a birch log that has a soul and a pair of skis. When Log Head is threatened with the final chop, it takes to its skis. Will Log Head's escape be blocked?
MUNTREF Centro de Arte Contemporáneo - Sede Hotel de Inmigrantes | 60'
A multimedia performance (with film, video, slides & sound) exploring the supposedly intrinsic concepts of a nationhood through deviations into the Finnish national epic Kalevala, abstruse found footage imagery and optical sounds.
HD - Slides | Color - B&W | Stereo
Cine Cosmos | -4260'
Spanning several decades of Asia's post-Cold War transformations, the four works in this program share a common impetus. Each of them addresses the return of the storm of progress in the afterlife of colonization. Using different forms—found footage (Hernando, Guieb and Albano), essay films (Nguyen, Ermitaño), and audio-visual assemblage (Badhwar)—the artists in the program cast a close look at the fracturing of the land and the violence wrought on bodies and psyche by capital and post-colonial states.
With humor and with care, and always with precise intelligence, they chart their open-ended, at times wayward journeys in the wake of destruction. These works, from the Philippines, Vietnam and India, capture fleeting moments of human connection and portray the fragility of collective solidarity with absurdist panache and affective intensity. Unsentimentally glancing back at the promises of struggles past, they record, rearrange, repeat and transmit images and sounds. They are, in other words, moving image works as time machine, undoing the hollow promise of the forward march of progress and preserving recalcitrant messages from the time before for the hope of future recognition. Curated for Experimenta Cinema in Asia Network (ECAN) by Shai Heredia, May Adadol Ingawanij and Yuki Aditya.
Jimbo Albano
One of the most prominent and well-crafted films that emerged from the Christoph Janetzko experimental film workshops in Southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, Kalawang is a satirical piece that uses found footage of war, sex, and pop culture to unpick the cultural and libidinal complex of colonization. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.
Letters from Panduranga
Trinh Thi
The initial idea for the film is the Vietnamese government's plan to build nuclear power plants in an ancient land once known as Panduranga. Yet the longer the artist spends time in the land that bears traces of its old matriarchal culture the more she feels her intended subject matter slipping from her grasp. A poetic essay film whose intimate portrayal of faces and landscape, and whose incisive self-questioning, subtly undermine the figure of the heroic artist while asking how art can continue to be socially engaged.
The Retrochronological Transfer of Information
Tad Ermitaño
Less a documentary than a marvel, as an irreverent parody of science fiction films. A humorous meditation on time, politics, and point of view in cinema. Hoping to send a message back in time by equipping the camera to shoot through Rizal's portrait on Philippine money, Ermitaño plays with the boundaries of different points of view: Rizal's, that of Philippine politics, the camera's, the filmmaker's, and ours as well as with the temporal relations between them. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.
Blood Earth
Kush Badhwar
Kucheipadar village in Odisha is a bauxite-rich block that since India's economic liberalization has been the subject of violent conflict between Adivasis and a mining venture. The singing of songs has come to articulate creative forms and political structures that steered the Kashipur resistance movement from subalternity, through solidarity and into dissolution. Blood Earth interweaves the efforts to record song, farming, village life and a political meeting to improvise a junction between voice, music, silence, sound and noise.
The Imperative Eye is a visual essay on Spanish colonialism (and neo-colonialism) in North Africa, and a reflection on the role that the visual system plays in the colonial process and in current coloniality. The film was shot in Morocco, Ceuta and Barcelona between June 2014 and July 2015, and produced by the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona).
The film puts forward a transversal reflection on the role that the regime of visuality acquires within colonial and neo-colonial processes, these being understood not exclusively as forms of politico-economic exploitation, but as 'abyssal thinking' which, as Boaventura de Sousa would say, unceasingly dominates the system-world.
Super 8 mm - 16 mm - 35 mm - HD | Color - B&W | Stereo
This film, constructed with 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film, as well as rewritten texts by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and María Ruido, presents Morocco as a case study, but sets out to reflect on the possibilities of a cognitive justice outside of the hegemonic system of knowledge and representation (in all senses the system of representation) and, by extension, ask to what extent true visual sovereignties are possible and what political potentialities they have.
It is precisely this way of looking at the world that Jean-Gabriel Périot sets himself against in his films. He takes hackneyed images, brings them to a stop, dismantles them, puts them back together again, makes them move faster, slower or backwards, tears them out of context, adds a new one, questions, and constructs meanings. Here, at the end of all certainty and convention, revolutionary vigilance is called for. Périot shamelessly exploits the glut of images that surrounds us: archive material, television recordings, advertising, paintings, photos (his own and those of others). He demonstrates how the Internet can be turned into an instrument of liberation rather than enslavement.
This is about the liberation of the imagination once postulated by critical theory. In this sense, Jean-Gabriel Périot's films, quite apart from their content matter and the openly propagandistic titles, are deeply political at the core. The dominant language—in this case the visual language of mainstream media—is deconstructed as such, the image recoded in a different way. The viewer is meant to learn to see "real" images not as more or less natural and therefore true, but as products, always manufactured with a specific (political) intention. Périot sees images as "documents"—material used to run poetic and metaphoric circles around reality. Though he never studied film, this connects him to filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, whom he reveres, Guy Debord and Santiago Álvarez. The theoretical foundation of his method, however, is the "iconology of the interval" proposed by the German cultural theorist Aby Warburg, who in his visual atlas Mnemosyne, was the first to assemble the most diverse images into a cultural historical document and who located "history" precisely in the "intervals" between two images. Périot: "Those dark and unexpected spaces were purposed to the viewers as spaces of liberty, the liberty for them to think and to fill the missing links by their own thinking. There, in a time where media try obviously to make the audience not to think, is the place for some radical and political art."
But it's not only in his archive films that Périot plays the cheerful mainstream shredder: he also deliberately uses moments of insecurity and blanks in his own documentary images. In this - the best - sense, his works are animated documentaries. A term which (to our mind, too) is not defined by a Jew animated manikins running through the frame because no documentary material was available to the filmmaker. To animate something means to make it come alive, which is exactly what Périot does with the documents. Now that's what's real freedom.
(Grit Lemke, DokLiepzig 2014).
Our Days, Absolutely, Have to Be Enlightened
May 28th, 2011, Orle´ans. Inmates gave a concert inside the prison. The sound was broadcasted outside for the audience.
We Are Become Death
Found footage | Color | Stereo
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed.
A few people cried.
Most people were silent."
"You don't know what we are."
The Barbarians
If politics were to come back, it could only be from its savage and disreputable fringe. Then, a muffled rumor shall arise whence that roar is heard: "We are scum! We are barbarian!"
(Alain Brossat).
Under Twilight
Found footage | Color - B&W | Stereo
Beauty and/or destruction.
Even if She Had Been a Criminal?
France, summer 1944. The public punishment of women accused of having affairs with Germans during the war?
Today's been sad.
Tomorrow won't get any better.
Let's un-do it all over again.
That I am the cause of your journey.
Don't leave me on that way
We Are Winning Don't Forget
We are many, we are uniforms, we smile in the pictures, but we are NOT happy.
This selection of 35 mm analogue films represent my fairly rigorous attempts to explore analogue cinema as a possibility for artistic expression—using home movies, found footage and obscure home-grown technologies. The making of these films was governed by coincidences, the unforgiving nature of the analogue film medium as well as ideas of recycling culture and technology. All of these four films are sort of regenerative processes or re-examinations made in the last moments when cinemas still used analogue film as the medium of presentation.
35 mm | Color - B&W | Stereo
Fokus is a stirring viewing experience. It is based on an extremely minimal visual form: contrasts, textures and glowing colors. Its visual language consists of highly magnified and slowed images. Surface of the film material, the film grain and other anomalies function as integral parts of the whole. Van Ingen's rigorous structuralist methods have produced beautiful, emotionally touching and many-layered results. Fokus is as close to the art of painting as cinema can possibly strive to be.
(Mika Taanila).
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.
The Sequent of Hanna Ave
The Sequence of Hanna Ave is the result of my reworkings of some experimental film practices and my enquiries into the phenomena of the movement-illusionism in the film form. By combining found footage, hand processing and hi-end digital technology, I attempt to elevate a few mundane gestures into a new perceptible wholeness, and give some little fingers and an audio cassette all the attention, grace and drama they deserve.
Exactly is some re-arranged found footage with its original sound track re-united. By omitting just the name of the protagonist I have turned this recycled strip of film (cut for recycling purposes from a 35 mm screening print into a 16 mm leader by an unanimous lab years ago—thus the undulation of images) into three meditations on the international market economy.
Without doubt Peter Tscherkassky can be named amongst the outstanding figures of world experimental cinema and next to Michael Haneke he is probably one of Austria's best known film artists these days. Tscherkassky's films premiere at Cannes, Toronto and Venice and are invited to numerous festivals all over the globe.
But it is not only this success which makes him a central figure within the history of Austrian avant-garde cinema. As a theorist, teacher, writer and editor of books he became very influential also for upcoming generations of visual artists and not only in Austria.
Peter Tscherkassky always saw himself within a certain tradition of an Austrian experimental cinema which had it's beginnings in the late 1950s when Peter Kubelka and Kurt Kren made their first films which became pioneer works and part of a strong global movement of structural films since the 1960s.
The so called second generation of Austrian experimental filmmaking was partly even more radical in questioning the institution of cinema with provocative expanded cinema performances and actions.
Tscherkassky started making films in the 1980s. Like most of his fellow film artists at that time his primal material was Super 8 and in the beginning their access to filmmaking seemed less orientated on structural mechanisms of cinema than on the poetic potential of the images themselves. That means the "work" on the images became of a new importance but at the same level brought along a reflection on questions of representation, feminism and ethnography. And it was the time when working with found footage became a prominent art practice to deconstruct conveniences of watching movies and establish new artistic interpretations of the material. This was artistic practice that Peter Tscherkassky brought to its mastership.
The two programmes follow several lines: The central idea was to embed the films of Peter Tscherkassky, who is dedicated a broader focus during BIM 2016, within the traditions of Austrian avant-garde cinema. The second main goal was to carve out the broad range of aesthetics and artistic approaches which have developed over the decades.
Last not least the dialogue between historic and recent movies show quite plainly the awareness of traditions and roots, the continuities and references existing within the long history of experimental cinema in Austria.
It's this awareness of its tradition next to the public perception due to festivals like the Diagonale, the Viennale and others, distribution organisations like sixpackfilm, and a specialized funding system in Austria that guaranteed that avant-garde cinema has become and will continue to stay one of Austria's cultural highlights.
The first programme, titled Within the Light and Sound Machine, refers to Tscherkassky's interest in the mechanisms of cinema, its potential of being more than "just a vehicle for story-telling" but rather an art form by itself, structured by optical and mechanical principles.
That includes of course some of the best know structural films by pioneers like Kurt Kren (3/60 Trees in Autumn (1960) or 37/78 Tree Again (1978)) and Peter Kubelka (Adebar (1957) and Schwechater (1958)) but also by op-art painter and filmmaker Marc Adrian (Black Movie II (1959)). Within this context we can also read Hans Scheugl´s semi-documentary Hernals (1967), possibly one of the most beautiful films about the use of time in film.
That structural film is still extremely vivid, playful and exiting is shown in more recent productions by Siegfried Fruhauf (Exterior Extended), Christoph Weihrich (Red Nitro) or Björn Kämmerer (Navigator), partly being students of Peter Tscherkassky in the beginning of their artists careers.
The decision to use found footage to express their art is beginning to be seen in the work of this younger generation presented in this programme, such as Michaela Grill and Martin Siewert with Cityscapes, Elke Groen and Christian Neubacher with Optical Sound or Johann Lurf with his ludicrous Twelve Tales Told.
The second programme titled Scratching Surfaces collects on one hand some of those artists of the so called third generation of Austrian avant-garde cinema which Tscherkassky himself belongs to. This concerns mainly artists like Lisl Ponger, Dietmar Brehm, Mara Mattuschka, Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl who all started more or less during the 1980s with their filmmaking.
The programme title does not primarily refer to a certain artistic practice but rather to scrutinize general social, national or visual conventions which come into question in a variety of artistic approaches.
Semiotic Ghosts is a chain of well composed travel images in an associative composition. Lisl Ponger focuses on terms of representation. Her use of the "noise" of an orchestra of blind girls tuning their instruments on the soundtrack evokes irritations which bounce back to what we see on screen. Both the artist duo Hiebler/Ertl as well as Dietmar Brehm use found footage for their work. While Brehm developed his "Pumping Screen" by intercutting scientific and porn movie material to create his menacing and uncanny universe, Hiebler/Ertl transfer excerpts from Alpine musicals in such way that the surface of an idyllic self-image of a nation is scratched.
Kurt Kren as well as Ernst Schmidt Jr. became known also for their collaborations with the Viennese Actionists in the 1960s when they filmed some of the material performances to then re-edit them, deconstructing the original dramaturgy to celebrate the "filmic material" itself. Body and performance play major roles in the films by Moucle Blackout and Mara Mattuschka. While the former is driven by feminism in the context of the sexual liberation of the 1970s using pop songs and metaphoric mirror images, Mara Mattuschka performs herself manipulating her own body which she then reanimates in combination with different animation techniques. To deal with conventions of cinema is a main topic of Kubelka's Dichtung und Wahrheit, a "gathered footage" film of cinema-commercials test reels. Peter Tscherkassky later will use parts of the same materials when making his Coming Attractions.
All of which in the end brings us back to the key idea of these programmes which was to link Peter Tscherkassky with the traditions of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema.
3/60 Trees in Autumn
Kurt Kren
16 mm | B&W | Mono
The first embodiment of a concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren'´s Trees In Autumn, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience (Malcolm Le Grice).
37/78 Tree Again
For his film Tree again (1978), Kren used a highly sensitive infra-red color film, a type which usually has to be developed within a very short period of time. However, Kren who always worked on a very small budget, only had a roll of film which was already five years past its expiry date and, as Kren says, "there was little likelihood of anything turning out on the film." But he still decided to take shots of a large and splendid tree surrounded by bushes and a stretch of pastureland over a period of several weeks, from summer to autumn– a series of individual pictures taken from the same camera position. Kren's illogical hope and his unshakeable confidence in his material were rewarded. Tree Again became one of Kren ´s most beautiful works
31/75 Asyl
The camera with a sun shade is mounted on a heavy tripod in front of a window. Over 21 consecutive days the view outside is filmed from this perspective. The same three rolls of film (totalling 90 metres) are used one after the other each day while the mask in front of the camera lens is changed every day. Each of the 21 masks made of black cardboard has four or five small rectangular openings: all these openings together would give the full view. For each take (one day) not only the mask is used, but sometimes the diaphragm is closed completely. This change differs from take to take. The picture is changing constantly. Sometimes only a portion of the emulsion is exposed, and the other area remains unexposed.
Black Movie II
Marc Adrian
Black Movie II is a film without a camera, consisting solely of coloured frames; the number of frames for each colour had been drafted in advance on graph paper according to a predetermined scheme. At this time, by the end of the 1950s, Adrian developed not only a pioneering concrete and neo-constructive, kinetic and optical vocabulary as a painter, but also extended his innovative concepts to embrace film starting his Filmblock series.
In Adebar, only certain shot lengths are used and the image material in the film is combined according to certain rules. For instance, there is a consistent alternation between positive and negative. The film's images are extremely high contrast black and white shots of dancing figures; the images are stripped down to their black and white essentials so that they can be used in an almost terrifyingly precise construct of image, motion, and repeated sound.
(Fred Camper).
35 mm | Color - B&W | Mono
Kubelka's achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as the basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema. The fact that a projected film consists of 24 still images per second serves as the basis of his art.
Björn Kämmerer
In NAVIGATOR, Björn Kämmerer films a set of vertical mirrors with bevelled edges in monumental close-up, and vigorously edits them in a back-and-forward motion that offers a dizzying array of Cubist perspectives.
Optical Sound
Christian Neubacher
35 mm | Color | Optical sound
Optical Sound is a homage to optical sound. The directors step to the background, the composer, at the start of the film. The hierarchy is broken, music is paramount. The composer receives raw material, abstract sounds from which he creates a rhythm made up of sounds, scratches, and voices--fragments of head and tail leaders.
Only now does the original image fit with the present composition. Parts in which the picture ´s dominance represses the sound are excluded. The rhythm of the composition has written itself into the image.
Hans Scheug
16 mm | Color | Mono
In front of the camera: Valie Export, Peter Weibel. In Hernals, documentary and pseudo-documentary procedures were filmed simultaneously by two cameras from different viewpoints. The material was then divided into phases of movement. In the montage each phase was doubled. The techniques used in this process vary. Also the sound was doubled, again using different techniques. Two realities, differently perceived according to the conditions of this film, were edited into one synthetic reality, where everything is repeated. This doubling up destroys the postulate: identity of copy and image. Loss of identity, loss of reality (e.g. schizophrenia).
Martin Siewert
35 mm | ByN | Optical sound
The perception of the city in the modern era is characterized by its fleeting and momentary nature. Social and architectural constructions are fragmented and dashing past. Cityscapes attempts to make archived recordings from the Austrian Film Museum legible along these lines. Single images are isolated from the cinematographic flow in order to scrutinise their inscribed cognitive potential. For Walter Benjamin, history disintegrates into images and not stories. Cityscapes is a search along the tracks of these images.
Red Nitro
Christoph Weihrich
A "color sound film made without a camera or musical instruments" is how Amos Vogel described Loops by Norman McLaren, who painted sound and images onto a strip of 35mm film in 1948. In a similar way Christoph Weihrich'´s Red Nitro does without this technical equipment. Frames were colored red by hand, and a white "observation slit" in widescreen format was made with the aid of stencil. The titles and frames from a found Super 8 film were pasted inside it, and the sound was stamped onto the soundtrack in a way similar to the found footage.
Exterior Extended
Siegfried Fruhauf
35 mm | B&W | Optical sound
Interior and exterior space blur in a frenzied staccato layering of digital imagery, creating the film's distinctive sphere of subjective experience. The spectator penetrates the medium's imaginary interior drawn in by the undertow of glimmering pictures. A subtle game of perception assembled from 36 individual frames.
Twelve Tales Told
Johann Lurf
After a sojourn in a more contemplative series of films observing the looming ominousness of large scale architecture, Johann Lurf returns to the frenetic structural analysis of found footage with Twelve Tales Told. A dozen logos for Hollywood production companies play before you as they would precede a normal Hollywood production; appropriately in 3D if watching digitally, in 2D on 35 mm—and self-aggrandizing in any format.
Only, each logo sequence, some animated with glossy grandeur (Disney, Paramount), some more restrained (Regency, Warner Bros.), is stutteringly interwoven image by image into the others, beginning with the longest and ending with the shortest.
A film shot in the public space often shows a sense of actuality. I am interested in shooting a film in the public space, documenting objects or people in an uncontrolled environment, to express an idea with recorded sound and visual through a chosen medium and equipment. I am also interested in cinema apparatus and visual perception and trying to find a formal connection between a subject and other elements, including techniques that I use to manipulate the visual. The films in this program show various ideas through documented images that would discuss not only possible uniqueness at each place but also viewing experience at the screening, in contrast to the actual time and space at the shooting location.
Clear Blue Sky
Mini-DV | Color | Stereo
It is a study of movements, colors, and shapes. The visual effects were created through, not a lens, but an adjustable slit, which was attached in front of the image sensor of a DV camcorder, while shooting at Washington Square, San Francisco. I was changing the length of the slit and rotating the angle to change the visual effect, while listening to the sound at the location.
Sketch Film #1
Super 8 mm | B&W | Silent
As a painter carries a sketchbook, I carried a Super 8 camera and did single framing as an everyday exercise, shooting shapes and lines found in the public space to make an animation. The entire film was edited in camera and hand-processed.
The second film in the series, showing my study especially in apparent shapes—a shape that cannot be found in a single frame but only through a series of consecutive frames.
The third film in the series, showing a series of paired images, a blurred image with diagonal camera movement followed by the same image with static shot, later showing an experiment to produce the apparent depth by rotating an apparent shape.
The fourth film in the series, focusing on colors and shapes. It was shot on Kodachrome and processed at Dwayne's Photo.
The last film in the series, which I shot at the site of Marin Headlands in California. The footage shows the nature in the area, as well as the historic buildings originally built for the US Army, including batteries and the Nike Missile Site.
Manhattan One Two Three Four
A study in visual rhythm with images of architecture in Manhattan, New York, using the technique I used to shoot the first sequence for Sketch Film #3. All edited in-camera and hand-processed afterwards. This film is commissioned by Echo Park Film Center.
Into the Mass
The visual was originally captured through two Super 8 cameras, each attached on the pedal of the bicycle, while riding from Marin County to San Francisco, then optically printed onto 16 mm film. The double projection shows a new landscape of the photogenic city. The ride ended after joining Critical Mass, an event occurs every last Friday of a month in San Francisco.
Lumphini 2552
It was shot through a still camera, Nikon F3, at Lumphini Park in Bangkok, Thailand. The hand-processed visual shows the organic patterns found in the monumental park, constructing the systematic yet emotional rhythms and paces on the screen, accompanied by the sound from the visual information on the optical soundtrack area. Lumphini is named for Lumbini, a Sanskrit word of the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal, and 2552 is the Buddhist year (Buddha Era) of 2009.
3 5mm | Color | Silent
It was shot through a still camera with 16 lenses, which would take a series of 16 images consecutively within a few seconds in two rows on the area of two regular 35 mm frames for still photography, similar to a movie camera or a device that Eadweard Muybridge created to photograph a horse galloping. The film shows Tokyo Racecourse, when it was holding the biggest race of the year, Japanese Derby (Tokyo Yushun) in 2008. The excitement of each race lasts about 2 minutes and 30 seconds in this racecourse.
Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars
I buried a 100-foot (about 30 meters) 35 mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for about six hours, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil. This film was exposed to the possible remains of the radioactive materials.
16 mm | B&W | Silent
All images were filmed on Market Street, one of the main streets in San Francisco. I used Sketch Film #1 and Sketch Film #2 as reference to make the structure of the film. The visual was carefully composed frame by frame, while shooting on the street. This project was commissioned by Exploratorium and San Francisco Arts Commission for the outdoor screening event A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005: An Outdoor Centennial Celebration.
45 7 Broadway
This is about Times Square, the noises and movements at this most well-known intersection. I used a color separation technique, it was originally shot on black and white films through color filters, red, green, and blue, then optically printed onto color films through these filters. The layered images of shots by handheld camera would agitate the scenes, and the advertisements on the digital billboards try to pull ahead of others.
Tokyo - Ebisu
JR (Japan Railway Company) Yamanote Line is one of the Japan's busiest lines, consisting of 29 stations and running as a loop. The film shows the views from the platforms of 10 stations in Yamanote Line, from Tokyo Station to Ebisu Station clockwise. The in-camera visual effects and the layered soundtracks may exaggerate the sense of the actual locations, while suggesting the equipment that was used for capturing the audio and visual.
Shibuya - Tokyo
As a sequel to Tokyo-Ebisu, this film shows the views around the exits of twenty stations in JR Yamanote Line, from Shibuya Station to Tokyo Station clockwise.
Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon
It displays bridges on the Yahagi River, which runs near where I grew up in Japan. I shot each bridge twice, first in the morning and second in the evening. One sixth of the frame was exposed at a time and the result shows the sense of the sun rising or setting.
Greg Pope will present a range of films and videos dating from 1997 to 2016. Although mainly involved in live cinema and sound/projection events, Pope continues to produce single screen work. Here he will show material stretched over 20 years that starts in the poetic documentary tradition, but soon moves into more fractured and conceptual territory. Sequences break down to single frame films and then into atomized film and pure text film, before returning to an extreme examination of the fabric of the pixel image.
Maas Observation
In Maas Observation Karel Doing and Greg Pope demonstrate their fascination in the bizarre landscape of the port of Rotterdam, a stretch of "neo-nature" with little place for humans, where huge machines seem to move around according to a logic of their own. The film begins with images of windmills on the edge of the Maas plain in a montage sequence based on the steady rhythm of the rotating sails. The focus gradually shifts towards activities on the river further upstream. The montage tempo slows down as the mechanical motion gives way to the play of reflections in the water.
Whirlwind is collaboration between Bea Haut, Ben Hayman, Karel Doing and Greg Pope. The origins of this film came from documents shot during the preparation and the execution of several collective performances carried out by the British group Loophole and the Dutch artist Karel Doing. Using frame by frame, long exposures and optical effects, these performances were manipulated and intensified. The essence of cinema, writing with light, is portrayed as a hallucination.
Crashing through the Arctic ice and snow—a journey to Joes' grave, 1934—wrapped up in the chaotic beauty of the church bells of England—white light vision.
Incidence Room
Single frame bursts of material divided into four themes: city, window, mountains and people. A visual punctuation of time coordinated with a soundscape recording.
Moonwalk
Mini DV | Color | Stereo
A digital haiku, a meditation on the moon, sky, sea and snow.
Shadow Trap
Shards of emulsion layered and structured onto clear 35 mm.
Prole Art Threat
Stenciled film using lyrics from the classic The Fall'ss track.
Shot Film
Film blasted with a shotgun.
Clothes Horse
Extreme close up and slowed image from north Iceland.
As a camera-based artist I work in the tradition of street photographers and documentary filmmakers. I believe in visual storytelling and the power of images to inform. I stand by the observed film to believe in the viewer's ability to understand and be a partner in creating meaning. With the arrival of high definition video in 2008 I felt that my single channel work could be reinvigorated.
Suddenly the video image made by a small, consumer camera, could be projected on a cinema theater size screen, and this opened new possibilities. These works have a single author and a single vision- to take the viewer into an experience. Whether cityscape, landscape, or the space of air travel, they share a belief in the power of observation.
Venice Underwater
Looks at the Italian city struggling with rising sea level and the inundation of more and more tourists.
Greetings from Amarillo
Landscape portrait of Amarillo, Texas that begins and ends at Cadillac Ranch. Amarillo is a crossroads for transportation and travelers and Route 66 passes through. Music by Hayden Pedigo gives the work a structure of eight songs. Scenes include Amarillo Ramp by Robert Smithson, a Truck stop named Love, a coal train, and Cadillac Ranch by Ant Farm (1974) which has become a roadside attraction.
Premiere screening in Buenos Aires and additional screenings at Basement films, Albuquerque and the VideoFest, Dallas, Texas. Produced and Directed by Chip Lord. Cinematography by Christopher Beaver. Sound mix by Jim Mckee.
The terms "densifying the content of the image", "multiple overlappings of different angles" and "annulling of the classic perspective" are also completely valid for the film that opens Programme 2, Freeze Frame, one of my first films in Super 8. Freeze Frame is presented as a savage collage of images in violent movement, recorded entirely in Berlin, my second place of residence between 1979 and 1984, and whose density can be read as my first nod to the Californian cinematographer Patient O'Neill. I have always acknowledged his work (along with Peter Kubelka's) as the most important influence on my work.
This programme includes the film Parallel Space: Inter-View from my intermediate, pre-darkroom period, made entirely with a normal 135 format analogue camera, as well as two films made with pure found footage: Happy-End and Shot-Countershot, which could well be considered comedies.
Such a qualification is definitely not applicable to Parallel Space: Inter-View, a dark film about the insurmountable separation between the thinking, perceiving individual and the world around him; about the being-separated, the having-to-remain-alone as inescapable human condition.
Although it isn't quite a comedy, Coming Attractions, the first of two films in this programme made in a darkroom, is full of knowing nods. It is composed from test shots for advertisements, in which directors who are not exactly masters of their profession give instructions to models who don't know how to act to repeat gestures and given movements over and over again. Coming Attractions is a documenting of involuntary failure.
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is also a found footage film, based to a large extent on images from Sergio Leone's masterpiece The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. My intention was to distil from this existentialist Western a kind of farewell to all the language of symbols of analogue film, including leader strips, synchronization marks, cut marks and many other signs that exist purely at the service of work in the laboratory and the projection booth, which are never shown in the cinema itself and which nonetheless form the basis of analogue cinema, since their absence would cause widespread chaos in production and projection. It is to these endangered marks, increasingly emptied of content, that Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is dedicated. One might say that all my film oeuvre is dedicated to analogue film, to its specific beauty, which could never be replaced by another medium of moving image. A beauty that we may be about to lose forever.
*Translated from the Spanish translation of the original German text written by Peter Tscherkassky
16mm | Color - B&W | Mono
Freeze Frame is the best example of a filmic significator from which the transparency and invisibility has been removed. Material which has been repeatedly re-filmed (a construction site, a rubbish incinerating plant, industrial graveyards, an antenna and line-drawing like frame that continually falls over) are exposed on top of each other. The result is that an unambiguous reading of the picture, to say nothing of their positioning in a fictive room, cannot even be attempted. This type of calculated picture removal is carried to the point where the film strip is stopped in the projector (and hence the title) and burns.
(Michael Palm)
Parallel Space: Inter-View
Photographic processes—the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing, and in the case of film, projecting—function as metaphors for psychological processes. What Tscherkassky does is to take various tropes of 1960s structural filmmaking (derived from Landow, Kubelka, Frampton, Gehr and Sharits) and run them through a Lacanian psychoanalytic sieve. In both form and psychological content, Parallel Space is deeply reflexive.
(Amy Taubin, "Flash Floods: Parallel Space: Inter-View")
Happy-End
Happy-End is a found footage film: the reworking of someone else's home movies from the 1960s and 70s. The sequences selected are taken from many hours of the staged private life of "Rudolf" and "Elfriede", pivoting on demonstrative celebrations, alcohol and cake consumption together.
Shot-Countershot
Not a stage direction, but rather something very concrete is hidden behind the technical term. Something which betrays a little of the yearning for intelligent and playful dealings with the medium of short film....
(Marli Feldvoss)
35 mm | B&W | Stereo
Tscherkassky's recent, most beautiful film Coming Attractions creates a complex mosaic of cross-references—both formal, between shots, and historical, between periods and genres. This film demonstrates the extreme textual density found footage can achieve, interweaving early cinema, the avant-garde and commercial advertising. ... It explores the solicitation of the viewer's attention and desire implied by the term "attraction," through the coy glance and the revealing display. In the Kuleshov tradition, Tscherkassky absolutely creates a new film from his found footage, but still he delivers to us discoveries drawn from the original footage, revelations about the nature of film and our fascination with it.
(Tom Gunning)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine
The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself.
Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shades. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shade.
Semiotic Ghosts
Lisl Ponger
Lisl Pongers peaceful, hovering travel and daily life pictures, assembled associatively instead of narratively, develop here into a reflexion on photography itself, to an examination of unknown alphabets: Geometric forms develop out of the world's chaos. (Alexander Horwath).
Definitely Sanctus
Gerhard Ertl
Definitely Sanctus deals with Alpine customs and traditions and is composed of scenes from Austrian films from the fifties belonging to the genre of ''Heimatfilme", sentimental narratives based in idealized rural settings.(Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl)
In 9/64 O Christmas Tree Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl "action". The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials. (Stephen Dwoskin)
Birth of Venus
Moucle Blackout
The basic material consisted of about thirty photos showing some close friends, and a dead pig we had found on a road. The pictures of the pig are used as a symmetrical motion montage. I took proper and left/right-inverted photos which are moved back and forth symmetrically over the central axis. The introduction scene shows Botticelli's Birth of Venus, cross-fading the figures at both sides and following the title, also Venus with a symmetrical pig montage. A detail of Boticelli's picture appears at the end of the film on a wrapper of a deodorant (sniff). Three Beatles songs emphasize the performance with their text. The pig is used as a symbol for the woman as a victim. It also stands for any associations to pig as proverbial: poor swine, greedy pig.
NabelFabel
Mara Mattuschka
16mm | B&W | Mono
In NavelFable Mara Mattuschka subjects herself to a second birth through endless pairs of tights. Her body struggles so hard and in such a deformed manner from out of the layers of nylon that the sheer struggle for survival becomes visible.
(Peter Tscherkassky)
Poetry and Truth
Releasing Poetry and Truth, said Peter Kubelka, required some courage. A great many people who think highly of his previous film oeuvre could have been disappointed. The filmmaker himself claimed to have undergone a radical change in position, from the role of perfectionist artist to that of hunter and gatherer. For this reason the footage for three commercial spots which makes up Poetry and Truth must be considered intentionally gathered rather than found footage.
Ernst Schmidt
At the beginning of 1965 Kren showed his action films in Berlin. Otto Muehl, who was becoming more and more interested in the controlled documentation of his actions, meets Ernst Schmidt Jr. who fitted in better with his ideas. In May, Ernst Schmidt Jr. filmed the actions Rumpsti Pumsti and Bodybuilding. In this period Muehl conceived his actionist works almost exclusively for photographic and filmic documentation. The necessity for a spontaneous confrontation with the public, which played a major role in Muehl 's later actions, does not yet apply to these works (Hubert Klocker).
Dietmar Brehm
A superlatively crafted film which uses the psychology of sight deprivation to keep the viewer in suspense: you are allowed only the merest glimpses of what is really going on. The cumulative effect as a mental picture starts to grow is at once titillating and disturbing. Director Dietmar Brehm knows exactly how to tempt our darker desires.
Conference (Notes on Film 05)
Norbert Pfaffenbichler
In this grotesque found footage film close-ups of 65 actors playing Adolf Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today are combined in shot/countershot-manner. The soundtrack was produced by the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang. No other historical figure of the 20th century was portrayed more often in movies and by so many different actors than Adolf Hitler. (Only Jesus Christ has more appearances in cinema history—but with a headstart of more than 50 years.) In this grotesque and uncanny identity parade Adolf Hitler is presented as an undead who is impersonated by an alarming number of revenants.
Conference is part five of my notes on film series, which deals with theoretical and historical subjects in film.
This eclectic program of short films from CFMDC's contemporary catalogue takes us on a timely journey, in celebration of our 50th anniversary (Canada's 150th) in 2017. Referencing this epochal moment in time, we begin with one of Canada's most celebrated artists, Michael Snow, whose humor-inspired nod to the 21st century malaise of attention deficit in the digital world, WVLNT - Wavelength for Those Who Don't Time, reduces his 45 minute classic film to a 15 minute video redux.
From there we go to a modern rendering of archival film footage from the World Expo 1967 hosted by Canada in Montreal. The full program of shorts moves through a world that collapses time and focuses on the seen and unseen at once. With musings to ancient Mycelium, or the static wave of an old analogue radio tower, to the skeletal dance of life, to the frantic freeway experience. Through built spaces and deconstructions, the micro and the macro, this program highlights artists interventions with the frame and the material. These artists are representative of a country that celebrates the diaspora of our society, from First Nations artist Lyndsey McIntyre, to artists whose families have emigrated to Canada. From the old guard to the new guard, diverse in cultural and sexual identity, this program highlights the many women breaking through the historically male-dominated domain of experimental film, crafting spectacular frames filled with light refractions of the physical and metaphysical movements on screen. With subject matter ranging from the abstract to identity and sexuality in subtle and overt forms. From this dazzling dance of light, all that is crystal will be clear.
WVLNT (Wavelength for Those Who Don't Have the Time)
16 mm to digital | Stereo
Wavelength for Those Who Don't Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, now 15! Michael Snow's film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003, Snow created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.
By the Time We Got to Expo
Philip Hoffman
16 mm - HD | Color | Stereo
A meditative journey through Expo 67, revisiting a significant moment in Canadian history using manipulated imagery taken from educational and documentary films. Footage has been reworked using tints, toners and photochemical techniques to create a vibrant collision of colors, textures and forms.
Overpass
Kami Chisolm
Beginning with an afternoon drive down a Los Angeles highway, Overpass weaves together intimate stories of histories of racial and domestic violence against the backdrop of the infamous OJ Simpson car chase in 1994. In this lyrical, experimental short, filmmaker Kami Chisholm draws from television news reports, archival footage, and her own family history to explore the gaps between celebrity spectacle and the mundane realities of interpersonal violence endemic to US society.
Sunday Solitude
Madi Piller
Super 8 mm - 16 mm - HD | Color | Stereo
Filmmaker's insightful contemplation of life, present and past. Shot in Vienna. 16 mm and Super8. Hand processed.
Queer ecologies
Atom Cianfarani
Queer Ecologies is a diary style, video text piece, made up of one or two sentence installments. Instead of addressing "Dear Diary," or God, the writer directs her internal musings to a Mushroom, or the larger organism that a mushroom springs from, a Mycelium. While the writer expresses her personal struggles and misgivings about the human condition, she compares her experiences to the supernatural life of the mushroom species. The language is both scientific and poetic.
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine
Geoffrey Pugen
The video Methylenedioxymethamphetamine documents through macro-cinematography the landscape of the drug MDMA. The combination of reflective abstractions with techno music creates an in-depth and eery meditation on rave culture.
Aturquesada
SoJin Chun
Super 8 mm - Digital 8 | Color | Stereo
Aturquesada is a performance-based project playing with the color tealquoise, a word coined by the artist to describe a greenish color that exists in between turquoise and teal. This performance takes place in a snowy landscape that is typical during Canadian winters. The violence inflicted upon the main character and her demise is absurd and humorous. This performative project is inspired by the artist's connection to the winter Canadian landscape as an immigrant, as well as the emotionally violent nature of a brutal cold winter. This symbolic death by tealquoise is also part of a larger body of work that includes objects painted in the same color and various performance-based videos in which the artist sells tealquoise objects on the streets where informal economic activities occur.
Castles on the Ground
Ananya Ohri
Digital | Color | Silent
Buildings rise from the rubble, defying gravity to re-imagine their fate and the possibility of affordable housing for all.
HIFI Normal
Amanda Dawn
Digital 8 | Color | Stereo
"Toward the insignificant" was the Oblique Strategy card that inspired this VHS collaboration. With representational images of a local landmark, the image gradually decays until it is replaced completely with abstraction. Two VHS decks were joined together and plugged into one side of a handmade DIY video mixer, while the other input of the mixer was connected to a VHS camera running a feedback loop. The starting image running on the loop was a static image of a telecommunications tower in the centre of Moncton which, in recent years, has become almost useless. Using the homemade video switcher, we switched between the inputs of the looping image and the raw feedback until the tower disappeared entirely into the abstract non representational imagery of the feedback.
Skeleton Dance
Emily Pelstring
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA's DVA Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the Experimental TV Center (an archive of early video systems), December 2010.
All-around junior male
Lindsay McIntyre
A single-subject portrait of a young Nunamiut athlete through the practice of his sport, which focuses on the materiality of film and its surface textures.
Film Resistance
Digital HD | Color | Stereo
Biomorphic shapes at play in this film reiterate and expose the persistence of vision, frame flickering and illusions. The random cycling images question who is the projector and who is the projectionist, while light forms the sound frequencies. The images have been collected over the last 10 years, constructed from mushroom spore prints, directly printed onto 35 mm film, then optically printed in black and white. The result was scanned in order to be composed onto the final short video. The sound was made during a film performance with the deconstructed film elements shown through an overhead projector in Vienna on March 2016. A remix of the live sound recorded from a 16 mm projector during the performance was kept and now constitutes the audio for the composite image.
Super 16 mm - Digital 8 | Color | Stereo
A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one's internal image of desire.
In the 1990s, a new language, the language of video, charmed artists in Russia and central and eastern Europe. Since then, we can consider the burgeoning development of video art as a new and highly striking process of juxtaposition, experiment and synthesis in the sphere of art. By gaining access to video, many artists were united by a desire to rediscover reality, without changing their own language. The advent of the video camera was associated with the arrival of freedom. It simultaneously brought reality nearer and pushed it away, and by compressing the visible and blurring the desired it created a multi-layered video archive and coded time. The modern visual experience is a vast category and it becomes more difficult to determine what is cinema or video art, and what is media art (film critic Marko Müller). An interesting phenomenon exists on the fine line between cinema and contemporary art: the problem of "another" vision. Writers suggest that the line between the real and the virtual is erased and that artists work with the tactility of their art to influence all sensory perceptions. The program includes works by video artists who investigate this new video language. Time is interwoven into the video narration, and the technology chosen by the artists becomes the medium that transforms space and narrative to create a mental map—a landscape, memory, consciousness, and our inner world. The compilation Anthology of Russian Video Art is the first in Russia with professional research on the development of Russian domestic video art. Films presented in the program as well as in the anthology reflect the following themes: video and text; video and performance; video and television; video and cinema; video and media; and video and sound.
Trouble TV
Maxim Zonov
VHS - Mini DV | Color | Stereo
The narrative problem is about the main achievement of human communication—TV set. Art activity serves as a means for realization of social sexual-food complexes.
Brain Parasites
Vadim Koshkin
Betacam | ByN / B&W | Stereo
Vadim Koshkin, a pupil of Vladimir Kobrin, has in inherited in many ways the "handwriting" of his teacher, which is evident in his artistic style and his interest in problems in the life of the person in his modern technological information space. A new peculiar focus of the subject Vanitas (Vanity of Vanities), popular with painters of the 17th century, is now converted to new realities and implemented by means of new technologies. Koshkin's video was created with the help of computer mounting. His subject is not represented as a stiff and mournful speculation about the caducity of existence and the vanity of efforts, but rather as an exposure of precipitance of a vital flow to a person where everything is now transformed into information units, thus overflowing consciousness with the infinite flowing.
Rising, Submarine, Penguins, Plane
Timur Novikov
VHS | Color - B&W | Stereo
Shutov and Novikov's work is deliberately infantile and naïve, which contradicts the huge panels of hardly distinguishable images with a peculiar irony, that is characteristic of post-modernist art. It demonstrates the combination of local opinion of "low culture" with naïve symbolism to create a heraldic language. Video animation becomes an already peculiar emancipation of plots of Timur Novikov, where figures of characters turn into aloof entities.
System of Own TV
Studio of
Hi8 | Color | Stereo
The movie System of Own TV introduces the video project "Person, Word, TV," which was produced by Studio of Egocentric Features. The artists' concept of Studio is close to a series of art projects of Gehry Shim of the beginning of the 1970s, "Landart" and "TV-gallery" which are carried out in TV-space, new to the artist, and emphasizing unity of the artist and work of art. The idea uniting artists from different countries and generations was reduced to only one concept: "On the television the artist can reduce the work to expression of a position, the simple gesture corresponding to his concept. The trinity of the unity of the concept, the visual embodiment and the artist who has generated this idea becomes a work of art" (Gehry Shim).
Dance & Video
Alexey Isaev
These video is conceived as video documentation of the Russia's First International Festival of Experimental Video, Computer Animation and Projective Synthesis. The festival took place in a squat in Petrovsky Boulevard in March, 1994. Movies Videostsenary, Dance&Video—part of Russia's first video catalog—are documentation of that festival. Dirigie, desde 2000, los programas "Media of the Forum" del Moscow International Film Festival.
What a Surprise - Such silence
Sergey Shutov
VHS | Color | Stereo
The video piece by Sergei Shutov from the 1990s in which Soviet films are edited with the help of modern computer technology in order to create an "other vision" from a science-fiction film with a strange situation in which a stranger is sitting in front of a television. Sergei Shutov's video, in the aesthetics of MTV, was made well before the introduction of the TV giant MTV. The experiments of Shutov with image and sound in this work are merged together in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the influence which the TV mediator has on the viewer.
Dmitry Gutov
The events of Radekovets are supposed to interfere with a natural social landscape, in order to change of its sense. On transitions there is an accumulation of the people waiting for green light. There are con only five people with banners which would go ahead of the crowd to turn the street crossing to a demonstration. A demonstration is already a social event of other sense, a plot for news, "snack for mass media." The basis of Radekovets is a provocation against modern reality which is possible through the "cinematic". It is possible to compare what was made by artists with Kuleshov's installation (i.e. the mood and value of ordinary action changes depending on the context in which it is located).
Elena Kovylina
The performance was made in Berlin in Volker und Freude gallery in connection with the exhibition devoted to Robert Rauschenberg. A scene of action is a spacious hall with eclectic architectural details, with a stone floor and mirrors which doors leave in a garden. There is a table close to an entrance on which there are about 39 glasses of vodka and which also displays Soviet military awards. "Trophy" music is playing. The artist, dressed in a black knee-length gown (a neutral dress), invites someone from the audience to dance with her. After several detours on the hall with the partner, she drinks vodka, breaks a glass against a floor and pins one of the awards to herself. Partners change, the artist gets drunk while the floor is covered with broken glass.
Homourbanas
Platon Infante-Arana
Mini DV | B&W | Stereo
Despite the small clip that is Homourbanas, it is still a full film. All arsenal of graphic means of cinema and video (parallel mounting, effects of animation) is involved in it. The artistic image is a result of mixing several clear visual quotes. Although performance is rather important, it still is only one of the tools to create a kinoform. The concept of the clip describes this video work in the best way. Using the mix method, the artist designs the artificial world which is similar to those created for music videos or advertisements. Such a world assumes an irrational and sensual method of perception and its form is a result of the development of an aesthetics of modernism. The genre of such a video can be determined as a screen.
Who Wants to Live Forever?
AES+F
The criticism of global media system is the main concept divided by AES. A photo series and video, Who Wants to Live Forever draws attention not only to mass media sources, which exploit sexual scandals and deaths of celebrities, but also the exhibitionist behavior of the famous. As Woody Allen once said, "the highest achievement in the career of a star when one doesn't create anything, except the image of his/her own face on the screen, is his/her death".
Dmitriy Bulnygin
35 mm - Mini DV | Color | Stereo
The work Lola is a performance for the camera. The style of the film (the fixed camera, absence of a montage, an original sound) emphasizes authenticity of action. Lola can be classified as an intimate art diary which, for example, can be seen in the frank action of the artist in front of the camera. A very widespread genre of video, which in English is called "acting out," used, for example, by Vito Acconci, Roman Signer, and from an artist from the 1990s, Pyerik Soren. The genre is provocative because of the frankness of its action, and at the same time, on a deeper subconscious level, it researches different psychological, cultural, and social realities.
Series of Performances
Blue Noses
Men in protective pea jackets and gray soldier's caps with earflaps, and blue plastic caps from large mineral water bottles covering their noses. Is it a construction battalion? Is it a demobee on a guardroom whether they are "temporarily delayed" in a pre-trial detention center? In the background there are two-storey plank beds, wooden benches, a wooden desktop, and a wooden door with a window for distribution of food. There is nothing to do. They absolutely don't care. Therefore with enviable commitment these men dramatize "video performances". The distributing window has turned into a screen of a puppet theater. Absurd sketches from army and prison life serve as a catalyst for a discourse of modern art. In absence of the audience, the actors become the audience.
"Vot" (So)
Viktor Alimpiev
In short film Vot, five actors perform a composition formed by speech. Synchronization—a moment of harmony in this performance—occurs when the Russian word vot is pronounced and a length of singing is similar in musical and compositional logic to vot.
Rehlen (Avar Language Flock)
Rehlen is shot in between mountain villages Tsada and Ahalchi, Republic of Dagestan, it has a simple narrative: a young man is wearing a traditional sheepskin coat timug, usually worn by shepherds, and he attempts to scramble as close as possible to the flock of sheep. A literal interpretation of this work concerned with local nature or traditional cultural symbols, has a supportive function towards the content of the work—a question, "What is the goal behind performers' actions?" Rehlen deals with problem of social relations that demand consent with certain rules and regulations for social and cultural integration. This work is about what we are ready to do in order to become a part of community.
The six pieces featured in this section confront the history of the twentieth century with notions of place and non-place. Each in its own way, through its structure, its development or its form, questions the fractures of a history stricken by war, ideological violence and the arbitrariness of power. Something unresolved, or not resolved, remains, and cannot be reduced to discourse, decisions and the slow sedimentation of history: the marks of the unthinkable, or rather, the signs and dregs of that unthinkable thing, whether it is the representation of power, the expression of the arbitrary or its consequences. Placid fragments, dispersed in reality, that the moving image questions, examines, and brings together.
Dig Shiwei's animation appears as a disenchanted confirmation of the failure of the utopias, a surreal transposition of the nihilism of the twentieth century and of the violence exerted in the name of grand principles. The incarnations of arbitrariness come one after the other in history. Hayoun Kwon takes us to a propaganda village in North Korea, with the appearance of a city, that functions as a mechanism of fiction. The video multiplies the written registers to go to some extent against the current of ideological fiction and make access to reality possible once again. The artist goes so far as to exhibit the very device that produced the images, an analogue process at the critical distance necessary to take apart or understand a representation. Micael Espinha uses archive material of photos taken during Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal. The work is developed as an exploration of a material frozen in time. The moving images update the empty spaces and the deserted architectures, which are then presented as so many other sets and scenes of past events, supports indifferent to a reminiscence of history.
In Jasmina Cibic's film, the question of history is put forward through architecture. The dialogue between the four characters in the film, made up of fragments of real speeches by politicians, architects, dictators and theoreticians, underlines the ambiguity of all discourse on the replacement of buildings and the representation of power.
The two last films have a position apart in the section. They show an attempt to find in a real present sufficient elements to think the unthinkable. Bettina Nürnberg and Dirk Peuker film the area around Ebensee in Austria where, immediately after the end of the Second World War, a housing estate was built on the same site as a Nazi concentration camp. The film examines the ambiguity of its proximity to the commemorative site, and questions the discourse on the history connected to the place. Lastly, Anthony Haughey returns to the scene of the Srebrenica massacre, where in 1995 over eight thousand men and boys were murdered.
Goodbye Utopia
Ding Shiwei
Ding Shiwei questions the remains of ancient utopias, reviving the order "thou shalt not kill" and its incarnations in history. Man creates himself and destroys himself. In the Old Testament, God on Mount Sinai hands down to Moses the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, Nietzsche tells us that God is already dead.
Model Village
A village loosely inspired by a North Korean propaganda village, Kijong-dong. Hayoun Kwon reveals a setting and invites us into a fiction carrying out the journey by proxy. This film testifies to this ghost town in its true state as a mechanism of fiction. The reality of a border confronted with its staging. This village can only be reached within our imagination.
Micael Espinha
A visual and soundscaped short ambience voyage through a utopian, ghost-like city-state. In this mid-twentieth century imaginary Lisbon, the power plants continue to produce energy, brand new subway network locomotive engines hum in standby, city lights and neon signs come alive each night and radio receivers spread Salazar's [Portuguese dictator] speeches—yet, nowhere is to be found the slightest human presence: there isn't anyone to see and hear this newcomer modernity's heartbeat. Only statues and facades inhabit the metropolis. Cinza is a short film made entirely from photographs that depict Lisbon during the dictatorial regime installed in Portugal from 1926 until 1974.
Tear Down and Rebuild
Jasmina Cibic
Composed of various quotes—belonging to political speeches, debates and proclamations—that extract and emphasize the iconoclasm of architecture, art and monuments, the film creates an original conversation between four characters. A Nation Builder, a Pragmatist, a Conservationist and an Artist/Architect become a reflection of ideological deliberation facing a practical scruple. Including words drawn from Regan's speech on the Berlin Wall, Prince Charles's 1984 address at Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Isis bloggers' proclamation on the demolishment of temples, the film's storyline uses language that endorses demolition and redesign, which were to aid the creation of new displays for ensuing nation-states or ideological positions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Bettina Nürnberg
The Nazis set up a concentration camp in Ebensee. Nürnberg and Peuker wonder what conclusions they can draw from the topography about dealing with the past. The takes remain static; a woman's voice dryly contributing information from off screen is all that clarifies the context within contemporary history. A site that looks like a dirt road turns out to be the Löwengang (Lion's Walk), which the camp's prisoners were driven down like animals to reach a tunnel that had to be dug. As soon as the film moves to the residential area that was founded on the site of the concentration camp shortly after the end of the war, surprise at the lack of sensitivity in dealing with the past mixes into the off-screen commentary. What Zement aims to get at is the ambiguity of this proximity of commemorative site and settlement.
Anthony Haughey
UNresolved reflects on the 20th anniversary of genocide in Srebrenica, where in 1995 more than 8000 men and boys were systematically murdered by the Bosnian Serb army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The title relates to the UN Security Resolution 819, passed on the 16th April 1993, declaring Srebrenica as a "safe" area for refugees—the prelude to what was the largest act of genocide in Europe since the Holocaust. Following Haughey's earlier work in Bosnia, between 1998 and 2002, he gained exclusive access to buildings and atrocity sites in Serb controlled territory, areas that have hitherto been off limits. Since completing the film, in early 2015, the building where the Dutch UN was based has been renovated. As a result UNresolved it is also an important historical document which captures the building in its original state.
With his subtle poetics, fragile and full of plasticity, Cao Guimarães makes the radical proposal of exposing us to the 'time of life', as he defines it. Life is duration, and in times when delay is synonymous with tedium, Cao Guimarães's universe of images is here to tell us that tedium is only a question of speed, which is the impossibility of entering and letting yourself get carried away by other speeds. Journeys which, just like that, provoke and make our perceptions venture and feel the drama of some ants or of a simple leaf.
Deforming the perspective so that it is minimal, deforming the expression so that it is subtle, ceasing to be the cause to become the quasi-cause of the expression, so that the world flows freely in its immanence. Being a minimum of mediation, so that the microexpression of the world returns us its reverberating potency and which perhaps absorbs everything it touches. In this movement, the artist reduces his writing to paradoxically strengthen it and allow to continue the vibration of the world .
(Hunger. Experimental Cinema Space)
A city designed and planned only becomes a city when its diverse elements take on autonomy; when they learn to speak for themselves, inventing a grammar with its own rules.
A city becomes a city when a leaf falls from the tree and recognizes the land it lands on, or when the sleepy city sighs quietly with the pain and pleasure of existence.
Super 8 mm | Color | Stereo
The air that comes from the chest in multiform voices, in street trading, is not the same air that shakes the multicolour awnings that protect the owners of those same voices from sun and rain. Two different weights configure the delicate balance of life on the streets in Mexico City.
Peiote
Super 8mm | Color | Stereo
A child possessed by a hybrid entity (Mexican wrestling and Japanese superheroes) offers the ancestral indigenous a hoedown.
From the Window of My Room
From the window of my room I saw a street of wet sand and, in the rain, two bodies of children who loved each other fighting and fought each other loving.
The film describes the journey of a soap bubble that examines the empty rooms of a house under refurbishment.
Nanofania
Soap bubbles bursting. Flies jumping. The beat of microphenomena to the rhythm of a toy pianola.
Concert for Chlorophyll
The conjunction of light and shadow, shapes, colours and textures that reveal the necessary interrelationship of all that is alive and kicking.
After Carnival, with the melancholy sunset of Ash Wednesday, the ants begin their profane, multicolour fiesta, to the rhythm of the samba in a matchbox.
Between - Inventory of little deaths
Between is the place and the moment of passing. What separates what is inside from what is outside, what passes from what remains, what goes through what is left.
Her Glacial Speed (2001) is one of her most enigmatic works, woven from threads of found footage, distilled into a 4-minute, lyrically surreal, floral thriller. A series of visual states of suspense unfold as intangibly as in a dream. Heller's most recent film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2013: Creme 21 circles around the idea of time, yet short-circuits cosmology, research and pure fantasy, science and fiction. Right from the start heavenly bodies break into dance, yet the black and white rumble in outer space remains silent. The central images of this two and a half minute prologue were derived from an educational film about the phenomenon of light. Heller inserts images of retro-futuristic space travel, a man stomps backwards through mud, and unsettling things start to happen. A shadow flits across a wall, somebody stumbles into a vat of sludge, a soiling takes place. Creme 21 involves a voyage through film history. Early cinema plays out in these first scenes, a kind of silent film slapstick that cannot quite deny its proximity to sadism.
Suddenly the film switches to sound and color, undertaking a leap in time: we hear fragments of music, words and meaning while viewing deep purple vistas. Creme 21 values being in color. The sky is its limit, where stars sparkle and clouds pass. Space and time are intangible. Spoken texts and animated illustrations imagine travelling into the past and voyaging to the distant future. Creme 21 is about nanoseconds and spiral patterns—nothing less than the universe. Heller refutes the indivisibility of time, employing the cinematic apparatus to chop images and sounds into bits, rendering the soft clicks of near one thousand film splices audible, inserting the sounds of a music box, freely associating popular science, nature studies and inexplicable experimental procedures; a host of scientific diagrams and instruments serve only to stress the capriciousness of chance. A toy robot stomps across the screen and animated models of the universe illustrate planetary orbits. A return to silence and the deprivation of color concludes a work that seemingly dissociates the visual from the acoustic—and this is exactly how the film demonstrates the poetic potential of cinematic art.
Analog motion pictures constitute Heller's sphere of activity. She focuses on the materiality of photochemical film, including emulsive punctures, scratches, and random flashes of light – the beautiful mistakes and idiosyncrasies of her chosen medium. While Last Lost (1996) demonstrates a hypnotic reshuffling of 1940s home entertainment cinema, Astor Place (1997) captures people passing a mirrored storefront, methodically slowed to demonstrate the self-choreography of Manhattan street-life. Elsewhere the filmmaker shifts to a dramatic increase in velocity: Ruby Skin (2005) was made out of sentence shreds and visual tatters excised from a magenta-shifted educational film about creative writing. It resembles a post- Burroughsian cut-up etude, an aleatory poem in poisonous green and ruby red. Creme 21 is related to Ruby Skin, in the consummate grace of its Hellerian sound/image staccato whereby tension and serenity embark on entirely surprising alliances.
Last Lost
16 mm - HD | B&N | Stereo
A hypnotic parable about coming of age in a shifty world of slipping terms, "found" in the optically mesmerized fragments of a home market movie about a chimpanzee's high adventures at Coney Island. A new story is rendered from the filmic vocabulary of the lighthearted original by moving in on background details, slowing down fleeting actions and shifting the psychology of the frame. Last Lost is a silent film in spirit, trying to speak without words, like some dreams.
(E.H.)
16 mm - HD | B&W | Silent
Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities. This film is informed by the work of the Lumière brothers, with an eye to permeating an authority of the static camera and establishing a question as to who is watching whom (E.H.)
This Goffmanesque study of how people perform their identities is an enactment of the urban ballet city theorists have described. (Janine Marchessault)
Her Glacial Speed
Unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding at a place outside of worldly time. This premise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. An unexpected interior unfolds, made palpable by a trauma that remains abstract. The world as seen in a teardrop of milk.
Behind This Soft Eclipse
I was imagining a collaboration of parallel worlds or a kind of doubled consciousness, a sense of the corporeal and the riddle of absence. The body of the film depends on a spine of interlocking contrasts in the form of negative and positive space, day and night shots, under and above water elements. These are cut on motion and qualities of light that are sometimes gentle and sometimes jarring, to convey the tender labor of hosting a balance. A crossing of paths behind the seen in the wake of one who no longer walks the curve of the world.
Ruby Skin
A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up, while taking filmic advantage of the 26-frame displacement between sound and image inherent to the optical soundtrack system of 16 mm film. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational film on "Reaching Your Reader" reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape ripped a "ruby skin" of the emulsion away from the base of the film, leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material homage to the disappearing medium and some of its idiosyncrasies. (E.H.)
A jarring rhythmic hiccup is introduced into the original films, impeding our cognitive ability to see through to the image, throwing us back to the filmstrip itself. (Mike Kiscinski)
8 mm - 35 mm - blow-up | Color | Silent
The first film I ever made consists of the first roll of film I ever shot, entitled One. I made it for the first film class Keith Sanborn taught, in 1978 at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Buffalo, when he was a graduate student working with Hollis Frampton. I was 17. The assignment was to make a film using one roll of Super 8 film, without moving the camera. The result is a kind of poetic/cinematic one-liner. It is in tune with the structuralist spirit of the day—to my surprise.
A slow motion blow-up to 35 mm foregrounds the kinetic serendipity of a handhold portrait shot in 1980 and entirely edited in-camera. At the time I explored the groundbreaking portability and technical features of Super 8 to capture the wild intensity of my dog Juice as we played in a down and out neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. In 2009 I treated the film as an objet trouvé—without bettering its formal quirks and lags—documenting the so-called "amateur" nature of the medium and an unselfconscious phase of filmmaking practice.
Self-Examination Remote Control
8mm - 35 mm - blow-up | Color - B&W | Stereo
A fragile Super 8 self-portrait rediscovered on 35 mm, made by a struggling nineteen year old discontented with the pseudo-Brakhagean spectacle presented by her fellow students at the end of the 1970's. I shot with remote control and intercut magnetic striped passages of black to record my quandary. The paradoxical predicament of being both subject and object in myself resulted in a film that represents a perhaps obligatory phase of cinematic narcissism in the early work of an aspiring avant-garde filmmaker.
16 mm - HD CAM | Color - B&W | Stereo
The stars are going haywire. A vision of heavenly bodies in wild disarray recurs in Eve Heller's Creme 21. Assembled out of found moving images procured from old features and educational movies, Heller's film begins and ends with a tunnel vision of outer space. From the suspended state of an astronaut we return to earth, fleeting shadows animate rooms, a slime-covered man is raised to his feet. Two eyes open hesitantly; we see how they begin to see. After the silent black and white prologue, sound and color are tuned in. Brief fragments of music and spoken commentary are strung together in the form of a cut-up, accompanied by the soft audio clicks of close to a thousand tape-spliced edit points—a symphony of shattered sentences and synthetic/exotic sound collages.
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires | 90'
Eu não vou juntar tudo isso is a live audiovisual performance presented by the artist. The project consists of a remix of video works carried out by Bambozzi over the years 1990 and 2000. The proposal is to suggest an understanding of the videos as a single piece, in crossed narratives merging themes like love and the perception of time. Originally designed for Besides the Screen 2015 (in dialogue with the festival's theme, associated with the role of curators), the presentation suggests the prospect of "self-healing" or "self-curating" as a process of assessing and revising two decades dedicated by the artist to the production of images.
CONFUSION / DIFFUSION is an artistic, audiovisual project emanating from the economic and social confusion that first emerged in recent years between Germany and Greece and now is spreading throughout Europe and the world.
The two countries are here as examples, representative of the differences and conflicts that are exacerbated by a crisis: north/south, rich/poor, developed/underdeveloped, hot/cold, discipline/chaos, abstract/concrete, improvisation/composition, etc. Prejudices and misunderstandings between nations will be addressed, which are provoked and disseminated by populist media.
We want to use contrasts, humor, provocative but also poetic images and sounds to put the stereotypes in question and to open up spaces for reflection.
DIFFUSION: An Audiovisual Essay with Live Performance
Live performance - Live music - Live screening
The performance consists of live improvised music, videos, audio tapes and prepared electronic tapes and texts.
Invisible image produced by the action of light on silver halide crystals suspended in the emulsion of a photographic material. History of Korean artist's cinema is exactly the same as latent image, writing our history is much the same as archiving unexposed film prints. Experimental film and artist moving image made over five decades in Korea are extremely difficult conceptualize due to lack of historical contingency. Although our consciousness is suspended by the presence of archive itself, this program focuses on the ways in which artists in South Korea have addressed the intrinsic conditions of cinema and the changing social and political context that have defined the ways artists have been able to work. This screenings will attempt to map the continuities across various generations and the crucial role of artists' organizations. (This program title is borrowed from Cho Seoungho's video work.)
Alfabeto coreano
In-tae Kim
While at National Film Board of Canada (NFBC), In-tae Kim produced Korean Alphabet, an educational film designed to teach the Korean alphabet with a soundtrack created by Norman McLaren. Through this work (which received the Golden Prize for Educational Films at the Tehran International Film Festival in 1968), we can get an impression of the scope of cinema in Korea during the 1960s, and glimpse how new technologies and experimental techniques were used to explore cinematic concepts, in this case within a pedagogical setting.
The Meaning of 1/24 Second
Kim Ku-lim
Taking the basic structure of film, that consists of 24 frames per second, The Meaning of 1/24 Second expresses the harsh reality faced by modern humanity and the sense of alienation that comes from uncontrollable speed. Duration was a key concept in Kim's artistic journey and the cinematic shape of this film was based on editing every second image. Unable to make a finished film print at that time due to technological limitations, Kim was so worried about the fragile nature of the print, given its many splices, that he prepared many additional elements for the premiere, including dancers and multiple slide projectors. These elements turned the film premiere into a multi-projection performance. The event was held at the Academy Music Hall in Seoul on 16 July 1969. This artistic gesture is considered to be one of the first non-normative cinematic interventions in Korean moving image history.
Event-Logical
Lee Kun-yong
Super 8 mm | Color | Silent
From 1975 to 1979, Lee presented about 50 "events" in different locations and exhibitions, although documentation of Lee's performances is extremely rare. Identical Extent and Indoor Measurement were originally presented as part of Today's Method group exhibition at the Identical Extent and Indoor Measurement White Deer Gallery in April 1975, while Rope and Two Peoples (originally titled as Meeting) were first presented as part of An Event by Four Artists at the Seoul Gallery in April 1976.
Allow me to begin with a short historical summary. In Austria, the avant-garde film movement began in the late 1950s. Contemporary film history separates the period from then until the 1990s into three generations of avant-garde in Austria. A first generation, with Peter Kubelka as central figure, preferred the 35mm format. A second generation was established from the mid-1960s, filming with 16mm. Lastly, a third generation came through in the mid-1970s, distinguished by their hand-held Super 8 cameras. My films are part of this generation. (Works from the three generations can be found in the programme Circling Tscherkassky).
When I was producing my first film, between late 1979 and early 1980, video came out on the market as an amateur format and the demise of Super 8 was immediately predicted. I didn't share such radical pessimism, but as a consequence of sometimes quite vehement arguments I carried with me from the start a great sensitivity to the specific qualities of the analogue film image compared to the electronically generated moving image. Even back then my choice of Super 8 was one made explicitly against video.
The two programmes presented at the BIM include works from this early Super 8 period. In all of them one can appreciate how my attention is focused on the filmic corpus, and I portray it artistically, that is, I focus on the specific physical and haptic qualities of the film strip and its images, in contrast with the electronically recorded moving image. In the works of Programme 1, the human body is taken as central theme, so as to successively carry the observer's perspective from those bodies to the body of the film: my intention was to make this filmic corpus visible, since it normally remains "invisible" behind its images.
After working in Super 8 for ten years, I made the leap to 35mm format. Manufaktur is my first film made wholly within the dark room, with my manual copying technique. It is also the first film of mine to be produced entirely with found footage.
After a prolonged absence from the dark room, I returned to it in 1997, and continue to use it to this day. The first works that came out at that time make up the CinemaScope Trilogy, which is part of this programme.
All these films show the fascination I feel for the possibility of densifying the image content, for the multiple and simultaneous overlapping of different angles as a way of annulling the habitual classic perspective. This is also valid for my more recent work. Exquisite Corpus, which to some extent can be considered a return to the Super 8 films of this programme: a perspective on the erotic potential of the film strip, transmitted through the perspective on eroticism of the naked human body.
*Translated from the Spanish translation of the original German text written by Peter Tscherkassky.
Digi-Beta | Color - B&W | Mono
One can determine a line in Tscherkassky's oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognizability—with the only-just and the not-any-more. Just to see desire. An example of this is Erotique. One sees swirling pictures, parts of a woman's face, red lips, eyes in cyclical fragments of movement. Often it is difficult to tell which part of the body one actually sees (whoever wants to can see/imagine/think sexual organs and sexual acts). The gaze gets hung up on partial objects, no integral, whole body to think about. No body, whose representation was always one of the problems in cinema. (Michael Palm)
Urlaubsfilm
Urlaubsfilm juggles with closeness, distance and the successive removal of the object on show. A woman on a meadow, strolling around, narcissistically involved, wandering. Now and again one can see her breasts through her half-opened shirt. The camera films with a powerful telephoto lens. This idyll is radically destroyed when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. There is an immediate cut (the voyeur has been discovered) and the whole sequence of events begins from the beginning again, but each time re-filmed from the last till, finally, only a completely abstract, flickering picture remains. The erotic view becomes increasingly memory.
The target of tabula rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze. (Gabrielle Jutz)
A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.
L'Arrivée is Tscherkassky's second homage to the Lumière brothers. First you see the arrival of the film itself, which shows the arrival of a train at a station. But that train collides with a second train, causing a violent crash, which leads us to an unexpected third arrival, the arrival of a beautiful woman—the happy end. Reduced to two minutes L'Arrivée gives a brief, but exact summary of what cinematography (after its arrival with the Lumières' train) has made into an enduring presence of our visual environment: violence, emotions. Or, as an anonymous American housewife (cited by T.W. Adorno) used to describe Hollywood's version of life: "Getting into trouble and out of it again."
A woman, terrorized by an invisible and aggressive force, is also exposed to the audience's gaze, a prisoner in two senses. Outer Space agitates this construction, which is prototypical for gender hierarchies and classic cinema's viewing regime, and allows the protagonist to turn them upside down. … Flickering images, everything crashes, explodes; perforations and the soundtrack are engaged in a violent struggle. … The story ends in the woman's resistant gaze.
(Isabella Reichert)
A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. Dream Work is—after L'Arrivée and Outer Space—the third section of my CinemaScope Trilogy. The formal element binding the trilogy is the specific technique of contact printing, by which found film footage is copied by hand and frame by frame onto unexposed film stock. Through this, I am able, in a literal sense, to realize the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the "dream work," as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement and condensation. The new interpretation of the text of the original source material takes place through its "displacement" from its original context and its concurrent "condensation" by means of multiple exposure.
The Exquisite Corpus
The Exquisite Corpus commences with a search along a seashore. Eventually, the object of the search is discovered: a sleeping beauty lies on the beach, before our very eyes. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, we are drawn into her dream. It's a highly ambiguous dream—sensuous, humorous, gruesome, erotic, and ecstatic—a broadly defined seduction lusting for a tangible, perceptible, exquisite physicality—including the body of the film.
In 133, Eugenia Balcells and Eugeni Bonet take apart an album of sound effects. In encyclopaedic fashion, they match together fragments of found celluloid (fiction, advertising, Argentine cinema, documentaries, etc.) with the sounds in the same order that they appear on the record. In this way, the spectator creates different narratives from the fragments based on their proximity and matches (or inaccuracies), advancing Lev Kuleshov's investigations. 133 is an apparently uncritical, regulated, fun and fascinating reassembly of the use of the audiovisual to classify life through its sounds. A work that is by necessity created at random, in which the audiovisual topics are used to show how montage is a trick that can be manipulated ideologically. The revelations of modern poetry incorporated into the audiovisual structure show that when two objects are considered together some relationship is always established by contagion in a new unity of pre-existing elements. In this way, we can observe the DIY technique as a disassembly attitude and practice, bringing together and relating fragmented content like words in a sentence. In experimenting with this work method, Balcells and Boney have managed to construct a pseudo encyclopaedia of moving images from the criterion of the order of sound effects on a record. The sounds of planes, animals, ships, home interiors, factories, cars, fairs and shows, gunshots, rockets, parades, human sounds, trains, bells, the weather, through to trumpets, drums and organs, to close with machinery (typewriters, sewing machines, motors), etc., have been matched with fragments of found celluloid. But instead of following their self-imposed rule to the letter, they make breaks between the signified in relation to the signifiers, playing with the coincidences and dissonnances between audio and images. One of the first artistic practices from Spain of appropriationism, disassembly and film recycling. Observed in the present, 133 implies a great effort of audiovisual archaeology. It could be treated as a document of the everyday, as a portrait of society and ideology, or as an element for anthropological studies of the visual; one might even, at first sight, intuit the distinctions of class and power of the moment. This encyclopaedic catalogue, aside from its validity as a work of art that plays with the audiovisual tautology, surprises us with its knowing winks which, as the relations develop in a precise way, at certain times logic is skipped, hooking the spectator. (Carlos T. Mori)
Eugènia Balcells
found footage 16 mm | Color | Stereo | Screening format: 16 mm
A phonographic album of sound effects (133 Authentic Sound Effects, Elektra Records) provides the basis and the structure of the film: the order and thematic groupings of the sounds are respected as found in the album. The images were obtained from film waste from different backgrounds: commercial films of different genres, amateur movies, home movies, advertising, industrial, tourism, etc.
Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface
Lee Jang-wook
16 mm | Color - B&W | Silent
This film is based upon the form of an individual's diary. I created new images using several chemical treatments on the film surface, multi-printing, etc., utilizing footage of daily life recorded on film. This serial works were begun from trials that I had communicated seeking to re-construct my own memories, memories deeply connected with memory on film and with the film itself. The film is a conversation with personal documentary and everyday practice at darkroom.
The Dark Room
Min-yong Jang
The Dark Room is homage to a 16th-century apparatus, camera obscura. I tried to create a uniquely cinematic sensory experience. The views of Pacific Ocean could provide the powerful sense of moving water as mass and volume.
Latent Sorrow
Shon Kim
SD | Color | Stereo
Moving painting #7: to reach coexistent points where abstraction and concreteness are equally fused.
Sung Si (Jeju Symptom and Sign)
IM Heung-soon
This video is inspired by the phrase "Two omens: bamboo blossom and the morning star" (4.3 Speaks, vol. 4, pp. 341–342). Rather than deliver the mere historical factuality of Jeju uprising on April 3, 1948, my intention is to generate, with a minimum of information through images and sounds, a situation of sympathy with human existence and its emotions, as it helplessly faces historical tragedy, In Sung Si, I wanted to depict situations at that time where happiness and safety were suddenly removed and anxiety and fear took control, and the desperation of survivors, whose lives could only to be lived through "praying hearts" and forbidden mourning. Sung Si means disaster and omen in Jeju dialect.
Kim Kyung-Man
The images of this film are taken from propaganda films produced by the Korean government over the past 60 or so years, and most of the sounds in the film are taken from these films and the audio-visual teaching aid The Anti-communist Case of the Anti-communist Child Lee Seung-bok, which was produced separately by the Ministry of Education and Culture. This audiovisual aid consists of a slide film and a cassette tape, and the high-pitched sound of the cassette tape is synced over the film.
Youjin Moon
Europa is an experimental video that depicts poetic encounters between the seen and unseen, between delicate details and expansive spaces. Enveloped in pure colors, elusive existence and frigid weather events, an imaginary landscape resonates with the constant state of perceptual ambiguity. Through the accumulation of time, the imagery creates a threshold between reality and imagination.
Latency Contemplation 1
Seoungho Cho
In this video, Cho transforms the sea shore into a visual poem. His inner landscapes and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation about space and place, light, time and traveling. The video consists of heavily distorted electronic images which result in mainly horizontal lines and color bars which are reminiscent of the horizontal lines of VHS video.
The old and new generations of artists. Both old and new generations of artists have found themselves in a very complicated historical context, when changes around them make them repeatedly turn to the search of an identity and to try to define their own place in the new frame of reference. It would, however, be a mistake to prescribe this condition to one specific geographic location, as the feelings of being lost, the degradation of meaning, and disorientation are specific sentiments of the younger generation. The young always feel everything keenly. This is an inherent condition for youth—inner conflicts, a search for identity, a desire to change the surrounding reality radically. But the characters in these works do not leave their attempts to transcend boundaries, even if it is just by crossing the heavy current on a mere air mattress or sewing up the black holes with simple thread. The Fathers and Sons program does not aim to define the future since each artist has his own aspirations, fears and a way to contemplate the world. Their dreams of a future, an eclectic mix of fantasy and reality, are just an attempt to expand the borders of the familiar world of visual art that obeys the common rules. It is hard to guess what awaits us in the future, but it is those who have just started to construct their reality through art that have the power to influence the potential world order, and we have great expectations of them.
Fragments from the novel of the same name by Vladimir Sorokin about the shortages of food and goods in the middle of the 1980 are on loop. This "Tibetan Book of Death" about people trapped in an endless cycle of consumption. The stream of options within the collective mind of the doomed artist is like a march with elements of tango. Here, it is not actually desirable, but real and unstable. Queue by Sasha Pirogova is a loop without the possibility of a meaningful exit and break. This work uses real items from the 1980s which were purchased in our time. We are free to watch in Queue the critique of the society of consumption and the metaphor of the collective martyrdom where regular items become symbols of desire.
Blue Soup
The convention of conditional audibility and an intelligible image is called into question by features of its structure: although the audience watches the video, it is hard to come to a single unifying conclusion. Videos of the Blue Soup show us both the accident and the loop in a pure form to represent it as a realization of scenario unit outside of a narrative. Instead of physical restrictions of plane and matter, as well as defying conventions of modernism, Blue Soup works with time, exempting it from the dictatorship of the narrator. Illusion stops being an illusion (Valentin Dyakonov).
PROVMYZA
35mm - HD | Color | Stereo
The metaphysical story, which has happened at a concert, forms an outline of the film. The young people who have come to the early music concert, instead of taking pleasure from instrument fine sounding, have to struggle with a wind forced by the organ into the music hall. The air streams subjected to musical impulses, run into a listener in spite of his will. Voices are not audible, but they sometimes break through noise of the wind and music. Force of an air influence gives compound psychophysical experiences. Something tries to establish a certain transcendental dialogue, which sets in for a moment, but then disappears. At one time the wind, accompanied by low monotonous organ noise, brings motionless sitting people to certain unconsciousness, to mad activity: fight is started at the concert.
Socialism in a Dream
Antonina Baever
This film consists of a monologue delivered by the heroine from her personal experiences, which depicts her confronting the condemnation of Russia's socialist past and musing on the socialism that is yet to come. Thanks to the techniques of surrealism, the minimalist interior of the photographic laboratory, and the abrupt montage, the viewer sees everything in a dream sequence. A clearly structured narrative fails to hold its own against the positive pressure of the social utopia and crumbles into petty domestic anecdotes, deepening the general unease at the current state of affairs, as wishful thinking gives birth to that which never was (Vera Trakhtenberg, Andrey Parshikov).
Courbet's Funeral
Evgeny Granilshchikov
The video is made of footage recorded from February to April 2014 and explores recent political events: the earliest protests against the war in Ukraine, the Bolotnaya Square case trials, and the time preceding the economic crisis. The work reflects moments of anxiety and uncertainty about the near future, with semi-documentary footage of everyday life reminiscent of hopes that have been indefinitely suspended. Courbet's Funeral is a collage, blending video poetry with documentation, fiction, reality and politics while creating complex associations rooted in personal and national histories. The film has preserved the tension and the confusion of this era which gets dissolved in the pink lighting of the final party scene to a soundtrack by Motherfathers.
Roman Mokrov
Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and swamps in ooze in Moscow area—not only the organic environment where the artist lives and has grown, but also a metaphor of the wild reserve of modern Russia which inhabitants have lost faith in wonderful things long ago. Roman Mokrov in Paradise, To Set Off and Homewards, on the contrary, builds on the basis of everyday pictures the fantastic worlds that cross collective unconscious, national household culture, national habits and media images. In works from "the Pastoral" series, the artist resorts to industrial film special effects or creates heroes who supplement silent natural landscapes and recover empty spaces where the look of the observer doesn't find anything surprising.
To Set Off
Homewards
Tatiana Akhmetgalieva
A blow, a feeling of pain, exposed nerves, fear, seething and straining inside. Unlimited anxiety is stored up and in time it will burst out, crushing everything in its way. You lose your footing. The traumatic experience stays forever in your memory. Raw scars remain upon the cloth of your life.
Visionary Film
Presentation BIM Memory 2014
The Church of Expanded Telepathy (TCoET) - Queering Expanded Telepathy: Un-doing Coded Language, Body Gestures and its Conceptualisation* *Activity presented jointly with Asterisco LGBTIQ International Film Festival
The radicality of the image. Overflowing Latin American latitudes. On some forms of experimental cinema
The eye that thinks and the mind that feels: ecological thought in the video work of Juan Downey
Centro Cultural MATTA Embajada de Chile en Argentina
The Lost and Found Voice of Moana: The Multifaceted Story of a Re-appearance and Restoration of Robert Flaherty's Silent Era Documentary Classic and its 1982 "Authentic" Soundtrack
My Half-Century of Film Criticism
For an Art of Vision. Introduction to the cinema of Stan Brakhage
Pablo Marín
Archive images: channel-hopping, scans and iconography
Gabriel Boschi
Thinking the system-world from/with images. Memory, history, decoloniality and globalization from the visual essay
Presentation of Collective Projects: Arkhé/Hambre
Mutant multiform screens
DECADES: From Portapak to Vimeo
Southern Collectives and Networks
Some Words about History and Perspectives of Development of Media Art in Russia
Genealogy of Art and Technology in Colombia: 1976-2016
Out of Sight: About a Film in Progress
The Handmade Cinema of Peter Tscherkassky
A dialogue with Olga Shishko
Theatrics of Landscape: A Dialogue with Valérie Jouve
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF |
In August 1965 I turned 21 in Buenos Aires. I was the guest of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, where I was showing a month-long series of American avant-garde films. At that time there was no book length study of that phenomenon. Because I had travelled with many of the same films, arranging exhibitions in Europe the previous year, I was more familiar with them than anyone else. There were no video tapes at that time; the only way to see a film was in a theatrical presentation. No one had seen these films as often as I had. So, it was in Buenos Aires that I conceived the idea of writing a book about avant-garde cinema. At first I thought to write it in collaboration with my friend and colleague Ken Kelman, a frequent contributor to the journal Film Culture. Soon it became apparent that such a collaboration would not be feasible.
Before I could start on the book, I had to return to Yale University to complete my undergraduate degree in Greek and Sanskrit. No sooner had I done that than I was asked to direct a second exhibition of American avant-garde films in Europe. That tour (1967–1968) provided me with the opportunity of seeing more avant-garde films over and over. In Norway I took up the idea of the book again, deciding that it would be devoted exclusively to American avant-garde films starting with Maya Deren. But it wasn't until 1970 that I began to write in earnest the stepchild of the book I conceived in Buenos Aires five years earlier.
After drafting the first three chapters in 1970, I had to put the book aside for nearly a year as I worked assiduously to create Anthology Film Archives, a theater, library, and film archive in New York City, devoted primarily but not exclusively to avant-garde cinema. On the island of Ikaria in Greece, in 1971, I wrote the next three chapters. Then, returning to America, I concentrated my energies on completing the second half of the book. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde was published in 1974 by Oxford University Press.
It sold out in two years. Rather than reprint it, I determined to write a new chapter bringing it up to date. Furthermore, I had agreed to remove the chapter devoted to Gregory Markopoulos who had left the United States and abjured association with American filmmakers. The second edition, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978, appeared in 1979. By then it had become the standard book on the subject and was used as a textbook in university courses devoted to avant-garde cinema. It continued to remain so until the end of the 20th century, when I agreed to issue a third edition, restoring the chapter on Markopoulos, who had died in 1992, and writing a new one on some important films made between 1978 and 2000. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 came out in 2002. It is that edition that will now be translated into Spanish for the first time. (It has appeared in French, Korean, and Chinese.)
*The book was translated to spanish by Montserrat Callao Escalada amd Pablo Marín.
The BIM is a meeting place for creators, researchers, students, cultural producers and for all lovers of audiovisual art in its more diverse forms. In this unique social climate, we weave a rich web of conversations, opinions, experiences, confessions, agreements and disagreements that add up to a body of thought that goes beyond the lists of activities and characters that a catalogue might cover. These memory is the result of an attempt to save some of that special enthusiasm experienced during the days when the BIM takes place.
Arkhé is an audiovisual arts research and production collective made up of Ivana Castagnetti, Gonzalo Egurza, Fabiana Gallegos and Ariel Nahón. It was formed in 2012 with the goal of constructing spaces of reflection for emerging productions, displaced from conventional circuits, as well as devising strategies of thinking about the tradition of experimental video and cinema, focusing its study on the output of Argentine and Latin American artists. Since 2013, it has been running the programming of the Invertir el ojo ('Invert the Eye') cycle and the Más allá del cine (''Beyond Cinema') workshop at the Club Cultural Matienzo. The collective's members are graduates of the Universidad del Cine, teachers, filmmakers and cultural managers.
The workshop attempts to question rigid binary oppositions of lecture versus performance, science versus theology and current modes of sexual invention in virtual space. By using a more abstract coding of body language, posthuman philosophy, time-sense conceptualisation, k-pop dance and moves, Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga will explain some of the main ideas behind the Church of Expanded Telepathy (TCoET). < br /> http://tcoetelepathy.tumblr.com
The writing compiled here seeks to make heard and continue via other media the affirmative overflowing that the radicality of the image as a constitutive formula of a unique cinema composes not only but especially in Amerindian latitudes. Thus, Overflowing Latin American Latitudes is the fragile way in which we carry out this publishing exercise, where we insist on the unique without replacing the identitary. When the strength of the audiovisual overflows, becoming always the remains of remains, it is only left to us to invent tangential forms, winding and delicate to approach the ever evanescent matter-film. This matter, like the force of the river, opens up new volumes, where whoever is open to talk nonsense can make a pororoca of perception. That is, an encounter of waters, an encounter of forces. Pororoca, from the tupi-guarani language—pororó-ká—means "great roar", what we hear when tens of kilometres of the river Amazon meet the Atlantic Ocean. The twinkling of those little big roars is what we want to bring together in this first publication of Hambre.
We always talk about a better cinema. Only by being less and defending a perpetual state of infancy inherent to the matter-film can we enter into movements of radicalization and experimentation.
Hambre is an observatory and a laboratory dedicated to research, dialogue and production of critical and sensitive thought by contagion and connection to experimental cinema(s). We have a strong emphasis on Latin American expression. Without hierarchies and with an open state of mind, disregarding any kind of completeness, the cinema that impels us is fertile and precarious, like the crabs that inhabit the mangrove swamp. We feel that our originality is our hunger. A hunger that destabilizes structures and forms, undermines the commonplace and banishes univocal points of view because its manifestation is violence. A hunger, an overwhelming force that excludes itself from industry norms, fighting market restrictions and lies, against the exploitation of the "exoticism" in supposedly "underdeveloped" geographies. An irrefutable condition of this cinema is to give an ethical and political place to what it faces. A hunger that has to be experienced, that calls itself experimental cinema.
Date: 10/31/2016 13:00 AR (GMT-3)
Centro Cultural MATTA Embajada de Chile en Argentina | 150'
This seminar will be based on the conflict between ecology and politics that can be seen in the video works of the Chilean artist, Juan Downey (Santiago, 1940 – New York, 1993). Downey believed that communication technologies could be thought of as an ecological network capable of connecting bodies, places and knowledges. Downey saw in this system of electronic and energy relationships potential for social and individual transformation, which was articulated via different media, particularly single channel videos made for television, installations and performances. The seminar will explore central concepts that influenced video in the 1970s, including Downey's work, such as the expansion of the notion of feedback and guerilla television, examining works of the artist that show this ecological thinking. We will analyze a number of elements, from electronic sculptures that Downey produced in the 1960s to video installations in the 1990s, taking as a central element the videos from the series Video Trans Américas (and the installation of the same title that can be seen in the Matta Cultural Centre) and the series The Thinking Eye.
Downey was an artist who created a far-reaching oeuvre in video art to explore a number of concerns about displacement, communication between cultures, different histories of coloniality and power structures, the intertwining of body and technology, and our mediated environment. Making use of video, Downey embarked on an exploration over different continents, forms of knowledge and representation systems, relating together in his works autobiography and ethnography, the documentary format and its parodic reflex, semiotic and historical analysis, and art as a social practice with politics running through it. His work presents a utopian vision of technology that, with his criticism, proposes new forms of association and connection.
This talk introduces the several histories of Flaherty's seminal 1926 feature film Moana—the first ever film to be called a documentary film. Despite its critical acclaim and firm place in film history, Moana disappeared from distribution early on and became nearly obsolete until the 1970s, when Flaherty's youngest daughter Monica set out to create an "authentic" synchronous soundtrack for her parent's film, together with cinema vérité filmmaker Ricky Leacock. Monica travelled to Samoa in 1975 to record actual sounds at the same locations where the silent film was shot and post-synchronized the dialogue, that was re-created together with members of the original cast and other locals enlisted to lip-synch for the new sound version.
After its release in 1981, Monica Flaherty's Moana with Sound achieved a critical success, but alas, just like the original 1926 silent version, it soon disappeared from distribution, until in 2014 Bruce Posner together with Sami van Ingen restored Moana with Sound to its former glory.
The multifaceted 90-year history of Moana is riddled with questions of attempts for authenticity, of cultural ownerships and problematics of intentions—the same questions that still occupy the discussions around contemporary documentary film practices. * Screening of the restored and remastered film on digital copy
In 1965 P. Adams Sitney presented a month of American avant-garde films at the Instituto Di Tella. Subsequently he wrote Visionary Film, discussing many of those films in the light of Romantic poetry. The reception of the book led to his invitation to teach several colleges and universities: Yale, Bard College, New York University, Cooper Union, School of Visual Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, and Princeton University (from which he recently retired after thirty-six years on the faculty). In this lecture he will outline how first, the principles he learned as a student of Greek and Sanskrit philology, and later his studies of iconography, history, and philosophy, guided his analysis of cinema in his next four books: Modernist Montage, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, Eyes Upside Down, and The Cinema of Poetry. < br /> Central to his understanding of film as a high art is the recognition of iconography and of the syntactical and rhetorical nature of the organization of cinematic shots. Traditional iconography underlies its imagery. The most basic unit of film syntax would be shot/countershot or reverse angle cutting. The greatest filmmakers (such as Dreyer, Brakhage, Vertov, Buñuel, Hitchcock, Deren, Bergman, Akerman, et al.) have either used this and other fundamental building blocks of cinema consciously and distinctively or dramatically rejected them. Similarly, the masters of the silent cinema, especially within the avant-garde cinema, made similar use of intertitles (or refused them). < br /> National cinemas and genres cohere through shared iconography. What the philosopher Stanley Cavell calls "types" are actually iconographic signs. Thus set designers and location scouts are iconographers without realizing it. Yet recognition of cinematographic iconography fades away quickly. One burden of film analysis is to recover and record these topical iconographic elements. < br /> Furthermore, syntactical and rhetorical innovation frequently reveal the meaning of so-called "difficult", films, such as Dovzhenko's Zvenigora, Bergman's Persona, and Deren's At Land. In these, and other instances, cinema becomes an instrument of discovery rather than a means of communication. As such its affinities are closer to modernist painting and poetry than to drama or fictional narrative. Pier Paolo Pasolini recognized this in his essay "The Cinema of Poetry." Gilles Deleuze was unique among the major theoreticians of cinema in acknowledging and developing Pasolini's insight. < br /> This lecture will trace the influence of classical philology, Leo Spitzer, Parker Tyler and Pasolini on Sitney's growth as an interpreter of modernist cinema. He will discuss the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to cinema as well. In opposition to the major bias of film theory, he will speak on behalf of the advantage of pragmatic, "empirical" psychoanalytic studies (eg. the work of Arlow and Edelsteit) rather than broad Lacanian speculation. If, on the one hand, cinema resorts again and again to iconography to connect images to history, traditions, and dimensions beyond what can be made visible, psychoanalysis illuminates the unconscious forces selecting and employing that iconography. < br /> P. Adams Sitney (born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1944) founded at 16 years old the journal Filmwise, devoting issues to avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas and Marie Menken. He soon joined Jonas Mekas as an editor of Film Culture, where he edited Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision (1963). The following year he interrupted his studies in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at Yale University to take the first International Exposition of the New American Cinema to Europe. He presented similar series at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1965), and in Europe (1967–1968). After directing of the newly created Anthology Film Archives in New York and moving to the position of director of the library and publications (1969), he taught at several universities and retired, after thirty-six years, from Princeton in 2016. He is the author of Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1972, 1979, 2002) and four other books and the editor of six volumes.
One of the most important and influential filmmakers of all time, the American Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) completed over 350 films—from psychodrama in the early 1950s to autobiographical lyricism, mythological epic, the "document" and the metaphorical cinematographic poem—until his death in the early twenty-first century. For many of his films he used his own handheld camera and fast cutting techniques, multiple exposures, collages, photographic abstraction and elaborate paintings directly on the celluloid of the film.
A filmmaker's filmmaker, Brakhage was at the same time a tireless and passionate thinker who dedicated, more than any other artist of his time, a large part of his work to writing. Far from attempting a general approach to all aspects of Brakhage, this seminar proposes to study what is perhaps the central pillar of his work—the amateur and the epic brought together by the transformative power of the vision—using key films and writing that show the possibilities of cinema as a personal creative act.
Pablo Marin is a filmmaker, professor and translator. As an independent curator, he has compiled the DVD Dialectics On Hold: Argentine Experimental Film and Video (Annennae Collection, 2011), held Argentine experimental cinema programmes in the USA, Canada and Spain, and was part of the research group on Latin American experimental cinema as part of the Getty Foundation project Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. He has compiled and translated texts by Stan Brakhage, J. Hoberman, John Waters and P. Adams Sitney, among others. He is currently working on a book about Argentine experimental cinema. In 2013, he was guest artist of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2014, artist in residence at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Canada. His film Resistfilm won first prize in the Avant-Garde Competition at the Filmadrid Festival (Spain) and was voted one of the five best experimental films of 2014 by the journal Desistfilm.
Moderator: Gabriel Boschi
Audiovisual archives are born, potentially, one second after the first cinema screening. The factory gate opens to let workers out onto a Lyon street and the Lumière brothers' factory is transformed into a warehouse of images (and later sounds). In 1898, an operator travelling around Russia used factual images of the Lumières to tell a story (the Dreyfus affair) for which he had no pictures. The polysemous character of factual images and the possibility of going beyond their literal content are questions that the programmatic foundation of documentary discourse, up until the late 1920s, would seek to neutralize. In as much as the State is the institution that underwrites said discourse, the identity is forced between documentary and document under the mark of unquestionable evidence. The whole arsenal aims at a single target: to fix meaning. From a symbolic perspective, one may even think of the function of the fixative in photochemical developing processes: it is a chemical compound used to eliminate the undeveloped silver salts that are still sensitive to the light. This "sensitivity reserve" is something that the documentary, in the authority it possesses over history, must annihilate.
Television is also a factory of audiovisual archives. The lability of the electronic image allows us to do without fixatives, but one must not forget that the possibility of recording on an electromagnetic support only became a possibility in 1956. The television archives prior to that date are produced with photochemical means, which introduces one of the most interesting expressive variables in the appropriation implied in working with archives: the transitions and crossovers between different technological types of images. In 1956, video recording was exclusive to television networks; in the 1970s, when the television viewer could record television broadcasts, channel-hopping came into being, a practice related to the possibility of coordinating new relationships among the images.
The contemporary audiovisual panorama has been oriented towards a new paradigm of the archive, in which the action of fixing has been replaced by that of destabilizing. The archive has become active and dynamic, which allows Antonio Weinrichter to nominate it as a performative archive. The semantic deployment of new appropriation proposals evidently goes for what is open, in which the context of origin and the new context form an area of passages of transformed meanings.
In this territory of archive practices, certain strategies that, because of their particularities, drive semantic circulation, can become sensitive. If channel-hopping goes beyond the limits in terms of massaging the retina, it can assume the form of a new type of poetry that goes beyond collage and introduces a critical distance to carry forward analytical operations. For the case of reappropriation of photographic images, the scan becomes a digital rewriting tool that orients expressively the indices of photographic materiality to bring to the surface of history the narrations that were sealed off: the JPEG is the format of the rebirth of muted identities. Lastly, we can find in the destabilizing montage of the archive Aby Warburg's actioning of the iconography notion, especially applied to the interval between the images; if there is no document without a gaze, and if it is only possible to embody that gaze through metaphor or poetry, the place that ensures more degrees of liberty is the inter-images space, a place through which, precisely, History would pass.
Gabriel Boschi is a graduate in Film Direction. He has made shorts in 16 and 35mm. He has taught classes in Graphic Design (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Combined Artistic Languages (Universidad Nacional de las Artes), and at the Universidad del Cine. He has written articles for the publications of the Euro-American Film, Video and Digital Art Fair and for the journal Kilómetro 111. Essays on Film. His graduate thesis, Robert Kramer: from fiction to documentary, from film to video, will be published soon.
Under the current circumstances of geopolitical complexity, and with some media that appear to construct our precarious (if not already defunct) idea of constructing history, what can cinema do to think about the world? What can we filmmakers do to operate in a system-world where the cinematographic apparatus and media imaginaries appear to be, more than ever, at the service of the elites, despite the multiple gaps through which visual works filter that contradict the hegemonic visual logics?
Is the documentary and its 'reality effect' still effective as a political and cinematographic tool, or has the fine line between fiction and non-fiction undermined our faith (if we ever had any) in images as an index of what is real? Has the process of denaturalization of the perspective, for which the critical tools provided by feminisms, decoloniality and historical counter-narratives have been so useful to us, put an end to the possibilities of new cinema to "think about the world"? Can we, from the production and remixing of images, help to generate a strong thinking that is opposed to the closed and blind account of history written by the media? What materialization can divergent memories have in a system where the distribution of images is more opaque than ever, despite the ease that the network can provide? Is it possible to lose the political potency of our counter-imaginaries through over-exposure rather than through invisibilizing censorship?
These and other questions are what I ask myself in my film work, and also and to a no lesser degree in my teaching work. Traditionally, we have understood cinema and, in general, audiovisual production as narrative structures, as forms for telling a story, not as forms for thinking. Traditionally, and following our logocentric education, we "think" about the world, we reflect with words, and we narrate and transmit emotions with images.
"An image is worth more than a thousand words", says the tradition, but it does not bring the capacity to generate thought, since that seems to be a capacity reserved for words. However, for decades now the different forms of audiovisual production have lit up a notion full of potential, that of the cinematographic essay, an antidote to subjecting the documentary to the idea of representing reality instead of putting itself forward as what it really is, a discourse on reality. The visual essay may be not only a new variant in documentary practice, but also a basic tool to find in cinema not just a tool for storytelling, but a fundamental tool for thinking about our complex reality, a reality in which images are a fundamental political territory.
MUNTREF Centro de Arte Contemporáneo - Sede Hotel de Inmigrantes | 240'
The writing compiled here seeks to make heard and continue via other media the affirmative overflowing that the radicality of the image as a constitutive formula of a unique cinema composes not only but especially in Amerindian latitudes. Thus, Overflowing Latin American Latitudes is the fragile way in which we carry out this publishing exercise, where we insist on the unique without replacing the identitary. When the strength of the audiovisual overflows, becoming always the remains of remains, it is only left to us to invent tangential forms, winding and delicate to approach the ever evanescent matter-film. This matter, like the force of the river, opens up new volumes, where whoever is open to talk nonsense can make a pororoca of perception. That is, an encounter of waters, an encounter of forces. Pororoca, from the tupi-guarani language—pororó-ká —means "great roar", what we hear when tens of kilometres of the river Amazon meet the Atlantic Ocean. The twinkling of those little big roars is what we want to bring together in this first publication of Hambre. We always talk about a better cinema. Only by being less and defending a perpetual state of infancy inherent to the matter-film can we enter into movements of radicalization and experimentation.
Mutant multiform screens (totem vs. locket screens). This workshop explores the different cinematic forms that have challenged the notion of the screen as a flat rectangular plane and which have generated experiences that move in areas that are known today as expended cinema. We will look (among other things) at audiovisual and spatial narratives, visual musical, projections on three-dimensional objects (mapping or video-objects), tracking and visualization of movement, and of the poetics present in this type of project. We will also work around totemic screens (cinema, billboards, mega-projections) and cameo screens (installations, micro-projections, mobiles.)
The workshop is made up of three theory and practical sessions that focus on planning and creating an exercise that reconfigures the traditional notion of the screen, exploring the integration of analogue and digital tools. We will review methods and ways of manipulating images in real time (mapping and tracking software), analogue projection forms, etc.
Carmen Gil Vrolijk. Artist, teacher, theorist. BFA and MA in Literature. Works as director of the Department of Art of the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. She has participated as an artist, curator and lecturer at events on new technologies and art in different cities in Colombia, the Americas, Asia and Europe. She combines her teaching with the creation of interactive multimedia projects and her main focus is on real-time video and large-format projections onto three-dimensional objects. In 2004, she founded the audiovisual project retroVISOR, and in 2012 La Quinta del Lobo, a multimedia scenic collective. Both projects work with music, the audiovisual and the scenic arts and have received various awards. Her most recent work, The Mangrove Tales won a MidAtlantic Arts Foundation award and the Large Format Multidisciplinary Scholarship of the Teatro Municipal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 2016.
Chip Lord will describe how he moved from architecture to video with the group Ant Farm and then show and discuss his video installation work from three decades: 1980s; 1990s; and twenty-first century. Trained as an architect, Lord co-founded Ant Farm in 1968 as alternative practice. Their interest in media led them to purchase a Sony Portapak in 1971 and they explored video's relationship to television. Lord will describe the context of working between documentary and pure art world experiments, the distance between video and film in the 1970's, and the evolution of the artists' work in the 1980s, and video as sculptural installation in North America. He will be showing excerpts from the following works:
Media Burn Ant Farm
1975 | 23'
Media Burn by Ant Farm began as a didactic media performance against broadcast TV staged before a live audience. It was edited in a university broadcast programme and distributed as both a postcard and video art work.
In collaboration with Mickey McGowan
Easy Living depicts life in an American suburb enacted with toy cars and doll houses but videotaped in a hyper realistic style. It won the Work of Excellence award at the 8th Tokyo Video Festival.
video sculpture - three channels of video
Picture Windows is a video sculpture with three channels of video displayed in the windows of a large child's playhouse. Commissioned by SFMOMA for a 1990 exhibition, the video uses dolls and toys to animate a dark vision of the suburban life in America. An earlier collaboration by Lord and McGowan was Easy Living (1984).
Fashion Zone
Interactive video installation, uses footage shot in Tokyo, Japan and recreates the experience of a TV ad for Seibu Department Store by putting the viewer in the position of a Godzilla like model. Shown at The Rena Bransten Gallery, 1992 and The New Museum, 1993. The accompanying single channel work is The Aroma of Enchantment, a video essay.
Movie Map (San Francisco)
The Movie Map project contains photo diptychs of San Francisco movie theater and a nine minute video piece. The six diptychs each pair a photograph of a movie theatre with a digitally composited collage that brings the fictional space of the cinema into the public space of the street. (Chip Lord)
Awakening from the 20th Century
Presents San Francisco as a city where the virtual and the real co-exist and asks the question: Will the computer replace the automobile?
To & From LAX
Is a public video artwork commissioned by Los Angeles World Airports and the L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs. It displays 25 channels of video to make a portrait of the world-wide network of air terminals as a shared public space. Arriving international passengers can find a screen showing the airport city they have travelled from. The single channel work IN TRANSIT (2011) is also playing in BIM 2016.
As part of the BIM 2016, we are happy to share this series of programmes from South East Asia, taking into consideration the work of collectives in the audiovisual and rearticulating the idea of "the collective". The proposal includes an open round table to analyze together—with different groups from Argentina in dialogue with Asian artists and curators—new partnerships, conversations and possible projects within the South-South axis, an axis that has been timidly explored and encouraged. The North has devoted itself to establishing partnerships, spreading discourses and passing judgment on aesthetics. A political axis that on the one hand narrows our imagination of the world, and on the other hand generates an illusion of a standard governed by a questionable divide between West and East. If we move away from the orientalist notions of the exotic, we will find similarities in a post-colonial story that questions the crippling paradigm of development and highlights the vital pulse present in each culture. The invitation is to cross a bridge that we want to build. It is only necessary to cross it with the hope of broadening our territorial, aesthetic, cultural and political imaginaries. The moving image as insistence, resistance and open, porous dialogue in constant construction.
This roundtable session accompanies the screening programs of moving image art from Asia, Refracted Journeys and Us. Co-curators Shai Heredia, May Adadol Ingawanij and Yuki Aditya cordially invite you to take part in a conversation and networking event out of which we hope will grow possibilities of exchange and collaboration between grassroots moving image art and pedagogy groups in Latin America and Asia. To kick off the conversation Heredia and Aditya will give brief introductions to Experimenta India and Arkipel - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival. These initiatives to which they belong are sustained sites around which a new translocal network of moving image experimentation and pedagogy is forming. This improvisatory network consisting of artists, filmmakers, educators, curators and organizers whose practices take collective, autonomous, activist, independent or alter-institutional forms, and who are anchored in Asia and with diasporic links beyond.
Since the mid-2000s our network has been growing organically among people operating within local contexts characterized by fragmentary or non-existent infrastructures for archiving, distributing and sustaining moving image creation, experimentation, and intervention. We have been taking up a wide range of roles as informal mediators, informants, and archivists. In doing so we are forming bonds of dialogues and friendship as part of the process of facilitating the circulation of artistic and critical moving images, and of producing knowledge and discourses about artists and practices that deserve greater visibility and discursive attention. To explore ways of consolidating this emerging network, and to begin to articulate more explicitly its collective potential and purpose, in 2013 Heredia and Ingawanij organized the Comparing Experimental Cinemas symposium in Bangalore. The contributions we are bringing to BIM aim to grow our network in two senses. For the first time we are co-curating moving images under the rubric of the Experimenta Cinema in Asia Network (ECAN). Our "southern collectives" screening series for BIM present artistic explorations of the promises, tensions and conundrums of collectivity. We have chosen this theme in the hope of providing a stimulating context for conversation with practitioners at BIM.
Nicolás Grande is an audiovisual filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist and teacher based in Buenos Aires. He has taught audiovisual theory and practice at universities, schools and community venues in Argentina and India and co-founded different collectives, working at the crossroads of cinema, poetry, music and sculpture. He is currently coordinating transdisciplinary laboratories. His works include The Poetics of Fragility, De Sidere 7, Videopoetry Series and The Passion According to Ander.
Matías Barrientos is originally from the province of Misiones. He has worked on audiovisual projects, research projects for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (UNaM) and Social Anthropology research (FHyCS – UnaM). He was on the staff of the International Short Film Festival "Oberá in Short Films, for Diversity and Cultural Identity". He is a member of the Entre Fronteras forum, bringing together audiovisual filmmakers from the border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and is developing the Proyecto Parcerías, a documentary series on border issues.
LAC (Community Audiovisual Laboratory) is a collective of filmmakers, artists and teachers which since 2007 has promoted community audiovisual development, production and creation proposals throughout Argentina. We pool our experience in film and TV production and in the field of audiovisual teaching, both in formal and informal spaces, to produce innovative audiovisual practices as part of a collective cultural project.
La Paternal Space Project came about from the work of artist Francisco Paredes, who in 2007 started to work on "the participative and the collective in art and society" through the Aeroplane Project performance. The work-management arose from observing the need for new venues where the artist, regardless of the laws of the art market and the obligation of producing art oriented at galleries and fairs, and in contrast to this seeks to draw out sensitivity and creativity as one more element in the construction of the community social network.
Jorge Leiva is an audiovisual producer and filmmaker from La Rioja, Argentina. He is part of the Community Audiovisual Laboratory. He has made the documentaries Notebooks of Young Suicides (2011) and An Invisible Invasion (2012) and the TV film Ghost Habits (2016). He is part of the editorial staff of the journal Al Oído. Música y otras experiencias sonoras. He teaches the Technical Degree in Audiovisual Production and Filmmaking at the ISAC in La Rioja, and is a teacher trainer in contemporary art and cultures, audiovisual cinema and media and literature.
Christian Delgado (La Plata, 1972) is a photograph and video artist. His work has participated in the festivals Alucine (Toronto, 2009), Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2011), Instants Vidéo (Marseilles, 2013) and IDFA-International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2014), among others. In 2014, his video installation project Intemperie, made with Toia Bonino and Nicolás Testoni, was awarded a National Arts Fund creative grant and received a mention at the Biennial of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahía Blanca.
Milena Pafundi has been experimenting in the audiovisual arts since 2001, from analogue to digital programming. In early 2014 she became an artivist, and it is in artivism that she wants to express her work, whether for sharing, teaching or experimenting with younger generations or to represent a work in the public space or in a museum. She is a founding member of the Tekhnë collective, experimenting in all types of visual and sound art.
Any attempt to "draw," as critics say, an artistic circle, representing this or that stream in art has a sense in historical investigations either when temporal remoteness influences the quality of the analyses or gives a very superficial result.
To the historical geography of Moscow underground—Kabakov's studio, studios in Furmanny, Chistoprudny, Trekhprudny, Contemporary Art Centre—one can add one more point—Moscow Art New Media Laboratory (from 1998, Moscow MediaArtLab). Mostly an educational project, created by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), it unexpectedly led to the change of Moscow art situation. Mostly, that happened because the pupils and projects' authors chosen for that laboratory were not students but professional artists, who had a particular aesthetic experience and developed ideology. Nowadays we can tell that a new kind of art exists and it has new possibilities, its own aesthetics, ideology, fashion, style, and production time. Although that couldn't happen in an empty space and in a second.
The first project of the newly established Department of Film and Media Arts in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to the collision of the past and the present, the innovative processes which occurred in the 20th century and were related to the "liberation" of artistic tools and media. With the demonstration of not only Russian works, but also western artists, we will try to answer the following question: Tradition and Contemporary Media Art: Is Classical Art Still Relevant?
Media art, with its history and original non-commercial orientation, its wish to leave the ordinary space of conventional art and make an invasion into mass media and social practices, has not always been on the same plane with the history of the development of the contemporary art. The key feature of media art is its interdisciplinary character. The media artist, who sometimes becomes a pseudo-scientist, then a pseudo-politician, then pseudo-showman, is the first to become aware of how to allow this or that media to use the power of another one and liberate it. The criterion of quality in media art has always been its innovative character from the point of view of an artistic idea and technologies, applied in this context of art. What is important in the media art is not so much the existence of a product, but the very stories of regeneration, of synthesis of different creative aspects inside the media space, guessing about the future. Conceptual and attractive elements are combined in the media art. However, there is a danger: as soon as we start to perceive a work of media art on the attractive level, it turns into entertainment and often loses its inner meaning. What is important is the "virus" which media art received from contemporary art—the virus of reaction, utopia, poetry.
In the 1970s, experiments were made in video art that paved the way for the country to become established as one of the centres of experimentation in art and technology.
The object of this lecture is to bring the audience closed to a prolific artistic movement that has manifested itself in different fields: from the video art and analogue experimental cinema of the 1970s and 80s, to the first experiments in the electronic arts, net art and interactive multimedia in the 1990s, to become in the last two decades a leading scene in technology-supported artistic creation.
The lecture will include an overview of the artists, institutions and spaces that have promoted these relationships in the last forty years.
Out of Sight intends to be a cinematic song of remembrance and an elegy to fading histories. Its main chorus will consist of footage I started shooting in 2010 at the Währinger Cemetery in Vienna, opened to the Jewish community in 1784 and officially closed in 1879. The very last person was buried here in 1911.
I initially chose to work with a widescreen analog format to render an expansive vision of this remarkable burial ground, and to convey its atmosphere of timelessness despite the ravages of history it has weathered. While it's tombstones tell of individual lives and times, its state of profound neglect communicates the missing care of subsequent generations, people who were killed or fled to distant lands. To gain access, visitors are required to make an appointment and sign a waiver agreeing to enter at their own risk. A high wall of stone surrounds the cemetery, embedded with glass shards and topped by barbed wire, to prevent acts of vandalism from permanently damaging sandstone tombs. Seen from the outside, the site is hauntingly reminiscent of a prison camp, yet the mighty trees towering behind its walls speak to the long ages the graveyard has fulfilled its peaceful purpose.
The lives of people interred at the site and their offspring overlap with the rise of photochemical imaging, analog photography and early film history. Today we look at photographic remains from other eras to contemplate bygone times, much as we visit a grave or cemetery to contemplate a person or people no longer with us. The resonating chamber of my cinematic song will be collaged out of photochemical materials. Specifically, I will contact and optically print glass negatives from the 19th and early 20th century, x-rays, archival footage, and still images I shoot using my collection of cameras—including a pinhole camera modeled on the first photographic camera in history. This camera will be used to photograph individual tombstones at the cemetery, exploiting its longer shutter times to capture shifts in light and convey a unique atmosphere of mildly altered time. Out of Sight intends to reveal the Währinger Cemetery in its current state and to reflect on Vienna's past.
The impulse to thoughtfully imagine a past that informs who we are in the present and that influences how our future unfolds, speaks to the time-based character of human consciousness. Film is the perfect medium to host this endeavor. It is in part due to an ancient imperative that the Währinger Cemetery continues to exist. According to the Halakha or collective body of Jewish religious law, a grave belongs solely to the deceased. It is sacrosanct. The body of the dead must lay undisturbed from the time of burial in order to rise again on the Day of Judgment.
This religious edict intended in part to serve the spiritual progression of individual human beings has prevented the record of worldly lives, their communities and times from being forever lost. The Währinger Cemetery, like so many others, is a multi-faceted jewel of human history. It contains approximately 9,000 graves with tombs overgrown by untamed nature. It is estimated that 30,000 people have been buried within its walls since it was first established. I intend to create a cinematic song in honor of these individual histories, as well as others I discover in the process of making this film.
Analog cinema is generally being replaced today by digitally codified, electronically generated motion pictures. Seen in this light, my films distinguish and emphasize fundamental differences between digital versus analog cinema and demonstrate aesthetic possibilities that will be forever lost if the photochemical basis of classic cinematography is condemned to obsolescence.
I make films without using a camera, employing a manual technique foregrounding their photochemical origin. Working in a darkroom I place found footage directly on blank film, exposing each image individually, frame by frame, and often involving multiple exposures. That is, each frame is made up of up to seven different sources. After this laborious exposure work, each blank film strip is developed by hand.
Naturally, this manual production process leaves its mark on the image. During the projection, constant fluctuations can be observed on different parts, which continuously remind us of the manual production process. A great number of impurities, scratches and material traces are added to the collage images that blend into the film as a whole. Editing marks can also be seen, just as, in terms of sound, a constant oscillation can be heard between the sound worlds assembled again from the original soundtrack and from those manual interventions on the material, which are inevitably "dirty."
In short, it could be said that the production process itself is deeply etched in the images and sounds of my films; and it is a process that, in this form, is due entirely to manual work with and on the analogue image material, which in no way could be swapped for another base material. This affirmation will be substantiated during the masterclass, through the analysis of my film Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine.
The theme of "new sight" or "new vision" was one of the central concerns of the art of the avant-garde of the 20th century. It was associated not only with artistic discoveries but, perhaps above all, with the rapidly changing environment around an individual person. Art in the age of modernity, rejecting the rational, geometrically accurate perspective of Renaissance invention, attempted to return to the "natural" model of vision, discovering it again in archaic or naïve works of art, or experiments, such as those of Michael Matyushin, with their "extended looking."
Art helps us understand the "invasion" of electronic media in the most familiar, basic relationship between the body and the visible world—our notion of this world and the language used to describe it. Not surprisingly, this transformation of relationships requires a transformation of art spaces, the emergence of "hybrid media," to recall Lev Manovich's term.
Within the field of contemporary art, the electronic arts cover a vast spectrum which for a long time has been absent in the fields devoted to professionalization, research and production. The electronic arts place technology at the centre of the reflection, not as a mere creation tool, but as a language that deploys unique mechanisms from the aesthetic, cognitive and conceptual point of view with regard to the man-machine dialogue. In this sense, the electronic arts imply an approach that links together diverse areas of knowledge—fundamentally art, science, and technology—and propose a form of work that encourages the transdisciplinary dynamic.
The UNTREF's undergraduate degree in Electronic Arts works from the basis that there is a transversal dialogue crossing through art, science and technology that can only modify each of these fields. The programme is proposed as a space for exchanging and interconnecting knowledge, making it possible to coordinate perspectives and attitudes, reflections and questions with regard to the individual, the work and their surroundings.
Photographer and filmmaker Valérie Jouve tirelessly roams the city in search of its inhabitants. Observer of the urban landscape, she fabricates unique space-times, questioning our customs of perception. In a documentary-like vision, Valérie Jouve shows situations, landscapes, characters. In her works, the classic themes of the landscape and the portrait come together in an image that mixes the individual figure close to intimacy, to the collective of urbanism. In this space, moving, fluctuating, shared, that the artist highlights in her photography, apprehending at the same time the body of the city and of the human being that inhabits it. Closed frames, suspended bodies, the characters neither caricatured or anecdotal. From the relation between the figure and the frame a new emotion is born. While at the same time they are witnesses to a reality, these photographs show a plurality and establish doubt.
In the context of the talk, the following works will be projected:
Grand Littoral /Gran litoral
On the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape crisscrossed by motorways, railways and scrubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos pass by and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? This brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions (Jean-Pierre Rehm).
El trabajo gira en torno a Tania Carl, una cantante francesa de blues que decide escapar de Europa e irse a vivir a Guatemala. The work revolves around Tania Carl, a French blues singer who has decided to escape Europe and live in Guatemala.
Claudia Joskowicz (Bolivia, 1968) lives and works between New York and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. She received her Master's in Fine Arts from New York University in 2000. Joskowicz teaches in the Steinhardt Department of Art of the same university. Her video works focus on the narratives flaws that occur when texts or events are taken out of their original context, mediated through technology.
PROGRAMMING COORDINATOR
Clarisa Oliveri
SCREENING COORDINATOR
SCREENING AND INSTALLATION ASSISTANTS
Paula Guersenzvaig
Ignacio Tamarit
Martín Smilevitz
COLECTIVOS DEL SUR PRODUCTIONS
Francisco Galán Juan
Sebastián Faccio
CONTENT PRODUCTION
Julieta Gómez
PRODUCTION AUXILIARIES
Camila Albertocchi
Tamara Moura
Federico Vázquez
Denise Rodriguez
TECHNICAL AUXILIARIES
Martina Colmenero
Vladimir Favrot
Lucas Medina
David Munné
Marina Rainis
Tamara Ferechian
Cristina Torres
Valeria Torres