sp ec ht el n
ACTIO
As a cultural festival i of transformale was to form c within the country, to promote t themes in a broader public sphere. Th interventions should grow from the conn projects. The main emphasis in 2015 was to and reflection. The video project “spechteln” w the open space, and found its appropriate place o of the shown movies had an impressive focus on th Land ahoy.” It was within our highest ambitions to suf to allow production that wouldn’t have been possible Unfortunately, and to our disappointment, there will be financial situation of the province of Carinthia, this form
SPECH
There was an open call for projects for the transformale 20 Sicht/Land ahoy.” The transformale festival takes place in Ca the theme made me even more curious as it needed to tran cinema. After pondering for a long time on the theme I was sense and in the meaning of displaying images by devices. are not discovered any more by adventurous explorers o the means of spying, beeping. It was also when the NS before the refugee crisis in Europe started. So I was co world to make video works on the topic of “spechteln” like: „spying, peeping, observing someone/somethin As it is Austrian dialect Germans don´t know and German regions by astronomers when they are requirement was that the video works need that should remind the viewer of a keyho of perspectives. Art is something tha
curator and o
ON!
in Carinthia, the goal culturally relevant synergies the discussion of crucial social he transforming power of the artistic nections and correlations of the varying use open space as a place of compression was within its format, specifically developed for of presentation in the city of Villach. The content he thematic core of transformale 15: “Land in Sicht/ fficiently finance the various initiatives participating, within the frame of usual sponsoring circumstances. e no more transformale festival. Due to the precarious m of expanding borders/spaces will cease to continue. Ulli Sturm & Tomas Hoke curators of transformale 2013-2015
HTELN
015. The projects should evolve around the theme: “Land in arinthia, Austria, thus a land without access to the sea. Hence nsform perspectives, which is done very well with film and especially thinking a lot on projection - both in a Freudian . Finally I came up with the idea that nowadays new lands on ships but in times that everything is “world wide” by SA spying scandal still hold grasp of us and only little ommissioning four artists from diverse corners of the ”. The word is Austrian dialect and means something ng from hidden in a somewhat voyeuristic manner. d use the word, strangely enough it is used in all observing stars (!). Besides the theme another ded to be done in vertical format – a format ole and that should underline the change at cannot be grasped, so is the world!
Fritz Hock organizer of “spechteln”
4 VIDEO WORKS ON THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATNESS, ON OBSERVING AND BEING OBESERVED. Foreigner’s out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a film!) Ebadur Rahman, 15’39’’ YOLO Ben Russell, 6’30’’ seizure - rewriting counter-histories Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, 25’ Notizen aus Griechenland // notes from Greece Cornelius Onitsch, 6’ Curator, Organization: Fritz Hock Co-Curator: Piera Nodari Design: Agentur KOMMERZkunst Original photo of the eye: “Eye I” by Thomas Tolkien, Creative Commons DVD-Mastering: Andreas Kohlweg DVD pressing: Digital Media Solutions Thanks to: Ulli Sturm, Tomas Hoke, Ulrike Mlekusch and the city of Villach for the great help with the projection, Syed Hadiuzzaman and Gulmohor Carnival Association for the cooperation with the artist in residency of Ebadur Rahman, Rosalia Kopeinig and CIC, Gerhard Fillei, Rathauscafé Villach, sub.sound and to my family. “SPECHTELN” WAS A PROJECT OF TRANFORMALE FESTIVAL SUPPORTED BY K3 FILM FESTIVAL internationales Filmfestival Villach
Foreigner’s out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a film!) Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!) Ebadur Rahman 15 min. 39 sec., colour, sound, 2015 Written, Directed and Produced: Ebadur Rahman Film Editor: Rafiqul Shuvo, Manuela Wilpernig Music, Sound Design and Mixing: Ebadur Rahman, Manuela Wilpernig Soundtrack: Syed Hadiuzzaman Arvo Prat Camera: Tapash Paul, Syed Hadiuzzaman, Le Ebad (name withheld at request) Film Extracts The Great Dictator BBC news France24.com Euronews Public Domain footages Cast (alphabetically) Amuthavalli Tuma Le Ebad Majid Khosravian The film would have been impossible to make without the support of the following persons: K3 Film Festival, Syed Hadiuzzaman and Gulmoher Carnival Association This film is dedicated to the memory of my sweet teachers Allen Ginsberg and, Edward Said
Synopsis Foreigner’s out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a film!) is a micro-history of “now”, wrenched from the lives of refugees and people disenfranchised from land, labor and language. Foreigner’s out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) connects Rohingas from Myanmar to Afghani, Syrian, Iranian or Tamil immigrants staying or passing through Villach and the vicinity. With multiple points of view and narratives, an exploration of issues that link violence to the war-on-terror policy in South Asia, Foreigner’s out (Come on, momma, we are shooting a Film!) adduces an euroeccentric cinematic space of potential, outside historical-time and historicity, superstructured as a performative architecture of and living cultural organisms, still throbbing with traces of violence and the memory of loss. Director´s note Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!), combines two stream of ideas and monikers, culled from Christoph Schlingensief’s oeuvre, but channelled through Jonas Mekas’ sensibility, and hyperreal post-occupy, postjasmine revolution aesthetics. No need to invoke a slanted reading of Deleuze to unhinge the relation between time and image or the complex articulation of becoming and the outside; Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!), composed of three narratives/videos, traversed by the double inverse movement of two heterogenous directions, one of which is launched towards the future (art) that never arrives and, one which inaugurates a past (art) that never was.
The performing architecture of Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!) affords the spectators an impossible theorem: they cannot perceive it without having come to the end of the understanding of the art-culture-history-rightsethnography-anthropocentric body of knowledge upbraided and, mishmashed with; but, the end of understanding would not come until the end of the film, hence inside the Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!) becoming is outside, inside is inverse, end is the beginning, beginning is the end, definitions are doldrums, demarcations are in tantrum and, deaths are in instalments. Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!) could only be viewed in the present by reviewing it already in the past when the past is being constantly thwarted and put into an anti-reality by the violent present. What Maurice Blanchot called, the vertigo of spacing impacts the comprehension and the visibility of the films/ videos because the limit and the legitimacy of the image submits to the memory of itself where it has to be blackout. At the centre of Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!), is “Atrocity Exhibition”, a post 9/11 war-on-terror snuff film. State endorsed vigilante executions and extra judiciary killings – specially those drawing on the post 9/11 waron-terror global panic conditions – have an unparalleled ability to pinpoint social nerves. “Atrocity Exhibition” opens with the mob killings of a few Rohingya refugees, from Myanmar, for their alleged connection with Islamist elements in Bangladesh.
Unblinkingly, the phallic gaze of the camera sneaks up on another execution of a minority man, in front of the police and the media, where government goons are hacking him to death. Working with un-staged, real life footage, sans verbal commentary or description, “Atrocity Exhibition” unravels a culture of impunity –in a failed state– that overwhelms the fundamental human, legal and political principles in place since the 17th century. Using “Atrocity Exhibition” and the policies and changed politics of the post 9/11 world as a filter, Ausländer raus (Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film!) looks at the contemporary refugee crisis, which is Europe’s 9/11 in instalments, and unravels stories of two recent immigrants in Villach as well. _Ebadur Rahman
Ebadur Rahman is a Paris-and-US based theoretician/filmmaker, curator, critic and artist. He is the founder and artistic director of the People’s Museum of Bangladesh, as well as the minister of propaganda of Gulmoher Republic; also, he runs a publishing co-operative: BE Collective. Ebad was introduced to avant-garde filmmaker and folklore expert Harry Smith and Jonas Mekas by Allen Ginsberg; Ebad curated Harry Smith’s rarely seen 11 films at the Anthology Film Archives, in NYC. Ebad wrote the scripts of two award winning full length feature films: Meherjaan and Guerrilla, which had special screenings at the Fribourg Film Festival, in 2012. Ebad received the highest National Film Award of Bangladesh, for Guerrilla, which also got the Netpac award for the best Asian Film. The first instalment of Ebad’s transmedia film, Torture Talkies, “Atrocity Exhibition” premiered at Festival de Cannes. Torture Talkies has recently been showed at the Contemporary Art Museum (Buenos Aires), DOX (Prague), Pompidou Centre (Paris) etc., in museums and in many art academies and venues.
“ YOLO ” Ben Russell 6 min. 30 sec. S16mm on video, color, sound, 2015 MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH EAT MY DUST COLLECTIVE: CHARL + DEON + JACK + JULIAN + PHILLIP + RONALD + SIFISO + TARYN + TAYLOR SPECIAL THANKS TO DELPHINE DE BLIC + FRITZ HOCK FILMED IN SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA SUPPORTED IN PART BY TRANSFORMALE 15
SHORT SUMMARY Filmed in the remains of Soweto’s historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a structuralist mash-up made in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound – this is cause-and-effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone. O humanity, You Only Live Once! DEVELOPMENT / BACKGROUND YOLO is a film whose image was recorded on S16mm film in more-or-less one take, with a few small manipulations in the edit. It is the direct result of a oneday sync-sound 16mm workshop that I gave in June of 2014 to a somewhat distracted youth film collective called Eat My Dust, based in the Kliptown district of Soweto in South Africa. The film was meant to be sync-sound and had been arranged to run in reverse, but nothing quite worked out or, said differently, everything did. You Only Live Once. The teenage sound recordist pressed stop when he was supposed to press start; the sync clap went unseen; the adolescent non-actors missed their cues; a soccer ball flew through the air towards the camera; all of the breaks and ruptures took a different form altogether. All that was recorded in Kliptown remained simply as material, as archive, until a year later when the theme of „spechteln“ was presented to me by Fritz Hock, the director of the K3 Film Festival.
By looking through the keyhole of „spechteln“ – of observing and being observed, of being in public and being private, of stargazing (even in the daytime, when the stars are present but invisible) – I found my way back to this material. In YOLO, sight is confused and reflected in all directions, catching audience in a series of glances that turns everyone into a subject. In YOLO, site is even more significant - after all, this is a makeshift structuralist film shot in the ruins of Soweto’s earliest cinema; it is a reverse-linear narrative featuring a collective of young “underprivileged” filmmakers from the impoverished townships surrounding Johannesburg; it is a kino-mash-up that asks kids to play cinema like football, to claim the medium as their own material. Due to the fortuitous un-recording of the sync-sound single take, the soundscape of YOLO is constructed from a mix of pre-roll audio recordings, an unexpected document of these young men and women briefly catching themselves as solid-state data. As a sine wave steadily rises to the piercingly resonant frequency of a crystal goblet, Soweto voices holler out raps, guffaws and goof-offs. And so: for the full six minutes and thirty seconds, these Kliptown South African youth will briefly occupy the vertical projection space of Villach (and later, your television screen) – they will be present, they will be there in the sky and on all the walls, peering back through this temporary keyhole called cinema. Ben Russell
Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is a media artist and curator whose films, installations and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film/video/performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.� Ben currently lives in Los Angeles, USA.
seizure – rewriting counter-histories Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid 25 min, colour, sound, 2015 Concept and realisation: Marina Gržinić Camera: Sandro Đukić, Urša Bonelli Potokar, Muzaffer Hasaltay Editing: Valérie Wolf Gang and Marina Gržinić Music: The Fucked Up Beat (from free music channel) Used film segments: The Sniper by Adela Jušić produced by Adela Jušić, 2007 The 727 Days Without Karamo by Anja Salomonowitz produced by AMOUR FOU Vienna, 2013 Leila and the Wolves by Heiny Srour produced by British Film Institute and others, 1984 Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights by Nevline Nnaji produced by Nevline Nnaji, 2013 Acknowledgment usage of materials: Adela Jušić, Anja Salomonowitz, Heiny Srour, Nevline Nnaji, Mesto žensk, Ljubljana Kinoteka, Ljubljana Filmske mutacije, Zagreb London Feminist Film Festival, Faculty of Media and Communications (Singidunum University) Belgrade, Serbia Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights (http://reflectionsunheardfilm.com), whatzuptv Commissioned by Transformale 15 + K3 Film Festival 2015 Produced by The non-profit Fund for Art Video, Ljubljana 2015
seizure – rewriting counter-histories Seizure is about rewriting counter-histories in the film and video productions. Four film and video positions in the order of appearance in this very dry and minimalized video work are: Adela Jušić, Anja Salomonowitz, Heiny Srour and Nevline Nnaji. I was curating three film programs in Ljubljana, 2014 and 2015, in Zagreb in 2014, and as well in Vienna 2015, where I presented these positions. The topic of peeping is here exposed as drawing boundaries, how to live without innocence in different regimes or art, technology, databases. It means not glancing from behind onto film productions but being face to face with the selected film directors and their work. It is not simply about oppositions, but about suspicious, implicated agencies and film instruments. Director´s note Adela Jušić’s video, The Sniper (2007, produced by Adela Jušić), is about Jušić’s father, who began serving in the Bosnian Army in 1992, and whose job was to hunt down the Serbian snipers who were shooting at civilians. Jušić´s videofilm challenges the machine of war which regulated gaze, affects and life from the 1990s on in the Balkans and it is a premonitory work that announces a topic (the sniper) of mainstream Hollywood films and counter positions in the art world (Rabih Mroué in his works from 2012). The 2013 film The 727 Days without Karamo by Anja Salomonowitz (produced by AMOUR FOU Vienna) is a documentary concerning the current debate on asylum and migration laws and especially how these laws incapacitate those in Austria who embark into relations and marriages and form binational couples. Destinies caught in violent measures of administration, family members pushed into heavy misery, children separated from one of the parents and abandoned by State
support measures – these are the consequences of intimate relations with those seen as racially different in Austria and the EU. Leila and the Wolves by Heiny Srour (produced by the British Film Institute and others), made in 1984, it is the only (in a manner of speaking) “historical” film, if we consider the date of its completion (1984) and that it took Srour seven years to finish it. Leila and the Wolves examines the often-hidden role of Arab women in contemporary Palestine and Lebanon, told with a structure similar to “Arabian Nights.” Srour (member of a Jewish minority in Lebanon, today living in France) stated: “Those of us from the Third World have to reject the ideas of film narration based on the 19th century bourgeois novel with its commitment to harmony. Our societies have been too lacerated and fractured by colonial powers to fit into those neat scenarios.” Nevline Nnaji Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights from 2013 ( produced by Nevline Nnaji ) in her overview of the Black women’s movement in the US, shows the processes of black women’s double discrimination status: they are subjugated not only to the 1970s patriarchal US capitalist system but also to a racialized gender division of labour. It shows that the black population in the U.S., and especially black women, were double-discriminated against and disposed; their access to the labour market was not only gender-biased, but they were also subjugated by processes of racialization. This means that every form of labour, agency and political activism in the U.S. and within the capitalist regime of whiteness is connected with racialization.
Approach and thoughts to the theme I decided to engage in serious inquiry about democracy, knowledge, state politics and about film. I can think of counter-histories that attack the hegemonic, discriminatory and racialized power regime of whiteness and the naturalization of nation-state citizenship. Mapping knowledge, practice and power is, maybe, the final outcome. In that very precarious conditions of minoritized context of presentation, the Zagreb film festival “Filmske mutacije – Film mutations” in 2014 was so bizarre, with no interest, no public, rather all coming near to money laundering by the organizers of the film event than an interest in film, I asked friends, artists, professionals to film questions and thoughts. In short, seizure is about stratified, but publicly invisibly constituted relationships that constantly reconfigure our art and theoretical practices, and our knowledge about what and who are the constitutive elements in contemporary art today. My principal question is what kind of processes we can detect today in these paradigms, and how they serve or conflict with current artistic and cultural processes. My question is also if it is possible to subvert, to turn around and to re-think some old and new relations in film and political activism. Marina Gržinić
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid are involved in video since 1982. They have collaborated in more than forty video art projects, they made a short feature 16mm film and numerous video and media installations; independently they directed several video documentaries and television productions. They have exhibited their video works and video installations in more than 100 video festivals in the world and have received several major awards for their video productions. In 2003 a retrospective of their works (1985-2003) was held at the Oberhausen international short film festival, in Germany. In 2009 a book about their work was published in English language, with the title “New-Media Technology, Science, and Politics The Video Art of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid”. Edited by Marina Gržinić and Tanja Velagić. Published by Löcker Verlag, Vienna. Marina Gržinić (1958) is Doctor of Philosophy. Aina Šmid (1957) is Professor of Art History and has been for long working as editor of a design magazine in Ljubljana. At the present she is a freelance writer. http://grzinic-smid.si/
Notizen aus Griechenland // notes from Greece Cornelius Onitsch, 6 min., colour, sound, 2015 field recording of Miralogia: James McNeish, 1961 support and advice: Xristina Mitropoulou Short summary: The short video examines Greece in three tableaus (and one prologue). The journey starts with an ethnological view, passes through intimate and private moments to finally arrive at the filmmaker’s personal opinion on the country’s actual political situation Director´s note: Loving, laughing, crying: it is the same wherever you are. And a film that is not spying, is out of focus.
Biography: born 1977 in Villach, lives in Berlin studied directing at the Film University Babelsberg