Magazine Master of Film – Researchers 2021 by Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten

MASTER OF FILM

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA

CAN EVERYONE TURN THEIR CAMERA ON

2021

ABHAY KUMAR

10.

HADAS NEUMAN

14.

JORIK AMIT GALAMA

18.

INSURANCE AGAINST METEORITES

20.

NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA

24.

MARLEINE VAN DER WERF

28.

MIRA ADOUMIER

32.

RAMI EL-NIHAWI

36.

SARAH FERNANDEZ

40.

VASILI VIKHLIAEV

44.

VICTORINE VAN ALPHEN

48.

VIKTOR ZAHTILA

52.

COLOFON

MASTER OF FILM 2021

2. INTRODUCTION / CAN EVERYONE TURN THEIR CAMERA ON

INTRODUCTION

CAN EVERYONE TURN THEIR CAMERA ON

It was in one of the online meetings that we had so many of, the past eighteen months. With the Artistic Research Week in sight, we discussed with the 11 researchers graduating this year what title would work as an umbrella term for all of their different research projects. Many relevant suggestions were made. Among them: ‘transitions’, ‘acts of transformation’, ‘methods of intimacy’, ‘turbulences’, ‘how to think the future’. And then someone suggested ‘Can Everyone Turn Their Camera On’… That was it, all agreed. A multi-layered phrase, playful, yet serious. Referring not just to Zoom meetings or our increasing reliance on technology more generally, but also, of course, to the different uses of the camera for researchers ‘in and through cinema’. What do we film, where and when do we film, how do we film, and most importantly: why do we film? Do we turn our cameras on to document and observe or to provoke, or perhaps to heal? What political, ethical and epistemological choices and questions are involved when we’re using our cameras – or more broadly our medium – as a research tool? True, ‘Can everyone turn their camera on’ is not a term that will withstand the test of time, but that ‘datedness’ is precisely what makes it interesting. It marks a moment in time, and one that has had enormous impact – on the researchers and on their research. It meant that some of the researchers, for financial and family reasons, had to move back to their home country, for others that it put their shooting plans on hold (almost permanently), while for all it meant a confrontation with the fundamental question of why to make art, and for whom. It’s no surprise that for several of the researchers the question of the sustainability of their artistic practice took centre stage during Covid times – even when, of course, it wasn’t a completely novel concern for them. For many the situation also reinforced the need to turn the camera towards themselves and more generally to intimate subjects, which called for finding and further developing their methods of work and research. Given the strong political and ethical commitment of this group of researchers to their research work, some have thus developed alternative methods for doing (documentary) interviews, while others propose to sidestep the traditional chain of film production altogether. The pandemic didn’t just force our researchers to ask fundamental questions. It also demanded that we, as educators and institution, rethink or legitimise anew why we do what we do. For me, the Corona crisis, combined and connected as it is to the climate crisis and the systemic inequalities in our societies, in fact shouts out the need for art and artistic research. Intrinsically valuable, art and research have a critical role to play in society, and as art institutions we need to create the conditions of possibility for that. The eleven graduates that present themselves in this publication, through their fundamental and critical research, deserve our fight.

The original research interest Indian filmmaker Abhay Kumar came to the programme with related to ‘exploring various types of disruption to expand the cinematic frame’. The background of this interest lay in his questioning of the dominance (if not neo-colonialism) of Western conceptions of Indian cinema - not just in the West, where these conceptions translate directly in criteria for funding and distribution of Indian films, but also in India itself, where Abhay’s fascination for techno and sci-fi found no support. Exploring that fascination for techno and sci-fi during the Master’s programme - in the context of discussions on subjectivity and race theory - led Abhay to propose a short film, called The Room, which poses the question ‘who gets access to hedonism and in what conditions?’ Underlying The Room is still Abhay’s original question – exploring types of disruptions – but centred now on the notion of ‘the grid’ for which his home town, the city of Chandigarh - Le Corbusier’s modernist adventure in India – provides the model. In Sector Quicksand, Abhay’s proposal for a hybrid feature film, he tackles ‘the grid’ and its pervasive systemic influence head on. Trained for and working in the film industry, Hadas Neuman (Israel), had over time felt a growing unease and displeasure with the traditional way of filmmaking: making very few films but endlessly writing funding applications. Where had the fun gone? Coming to the programme with an interest in movement – wanting to create a ‘dictionary of movements’ – Hadas found a more sustainable way of working, when, one day, she just picked up the camera and started to film the everyday world around her. Continuously experimenting with ways to catch, or rather: produce, the unpredictable, she developed her ‘camera in a bag’ method which allows her to snatch reality and its weird and wonderful irregularities while simply walking down the streets. Thus, Hadas’ cinematic wanderings led her to develop a project called 100 men. All of the work and research of writer, visual artist and filmmaker Jorik Amit Galama (the Netherlands) is embedded in an ‘ethics of care’. This ethics pervades not just their choice of subject matter – focusing often on the vulnerability of the body or the cycle of harm as a result of traumas and oppression – but also their way of working. Film, or art making, not just to observe or critique but also to transform, to heal, to be beneficial for all those involved. This meant rethinking and reworking the traditional documentary interview, by using different methods to create a form of safety that, as they describe it, ‘allows for a meaningful encounter and respectful exchange’. Working in different media and on different projects at the same time, two now take centre stage: The Second Lily – a documentary project about the socio-ecological tensions deriving from industrial lily farming in rural Drenthe, where they are from – and Insurance against Meteorites which is a multi-layered collaborative project undertaken with peer researcher Natalia Śliwowska.

Coming from photography and with a background in critical theory, filmmaker Natalia Sliwowska from Poland, is, and has always been, fascinated by the practice of staging and creating interventions as a means to uncover what is hidden, even from the people portrayed themselves. Using a research strategy described as ‘heuristics’, Natalia experimentally researches what insights the broader conceptual term of ‘performativity’ yields about human behaviour and through that about the social-economic systems we live in. Insurance against Meteorites, the joint hybrid documentary project she and Jorik embarked on already early in the programme, is a very intimate family story about the tragic death of her older brother, but extends it by including different story telling methods and by always also being about the medium of documentary filmmaking itself. Working on the Insurance against Meteorites project, caused Natalia to also look into the ‘funeral culture’ that’s so present in Poland. Among her many other projects, Walking on Eggshells stands out: an artist book dealing with complicated ethical questions that arose during an experiment on working with non-professional actors. Marleine van der Werf is a Dutch visual artist and filmmaker with a strong documentary practice, focusing on questions of perception. Gripped, early on, by the desire, or even the human or social need to understand how other people perceive reality, all of Marleine’s work and research tries to find ways of allowing spectators or participants to immersive themselves in these other perceptual realities. During her time at the Master’s programme, she further developed a method that she had previously used intuitively: understanding through experiencing. Interested in broadening her methodological scope she also researched the ways of working in other disciplines, and engaged in different collaborations, many of which ended up as (short) films. All of these experiences have enriched her main project, The Living Dead, which is an inter- or multidisciplinary project seeking to understand and experience what’s called the Cotard Syndrome, a rare condition in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they’re already dead, do not exist of have lost body parts.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

THE GRADUATES AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS

For filmmaker Mira Adoumier, who holds a Lebanese, French and American passport, the theme of exile was important not as a description of a situation but as a way of being in the world, experiencing and understanding it. Using the term ‘the exilic’, her research and work focused on how to use cinema to express that different perspective, also described as ‘peripheral’. Taking the idea of the peripheral one step further, by turning her camera around to film what’s around rather than what’s in the centre, she was drawn to the idea and importance of landscape. Hence the title of her research: Peripheral Landscapes, with the 1000-year-old cedar forest on the hills outside Beirut being one of those landscapes (Dreams of a Wandering Octopus) and the night another (The Night came about).

INTRODUCTION

Lebanese director and producer Rami El-Nihawi used his time at the Master to fundamentally rethink the ‘in and through’ of his cinematic practice. ‘Exile’ and ‘home’ being the subject matter of his practice, the ‘through cinema’; themes that represent the human experiences of longing and belonging and allow one to question the social and political aspects surround these experiences. This is exemplified in Rami’s proposed trilogy on the organized chaos in Lebanon (the fictional film Until further notice), the organized chaos in the Middle East (the documentary project Possible memories) and the same chaos in the world at large (an observational film about dreams and nightmare, Life is but a fantasy). A thorough analysis of his working method, in the context of the ideologically driven demands of the film industry, and a proposal for an alternative production, financing and distribution method in the form of collaborative platform (Dialogues of Exiled) is at the same time a clear and compelling research ‘in cinema’. French visual artist Sarah Fernandez, with a background in philosophy and social sciences, came to the programme to investigate the possibility of ‘epistemological anarchism as method in social science and image-making’. Having remained a driving force throughout her time at the Master’s, that aim is also very much present in her current research project, dealing with digital image technologies and resulting in a VR-installation about her native Camargue region in France. Sarah analyses and unmasks the promise of digital imaging and digital spaces as neutral, clear and clear reproductions of our normal world, as a mere scam, as a more or less conscious choice to sanitise reality and hide what’s at odds with it. So instead of working towards a believable simulation, Sarah explicitly shows the glitches, inaccuracies and inadequacies of the world she’s creating. In her speculative VR world of the Camargue also the common relations between humans and non-humans are questioned. Vasili Vikhliaev is a Russian born German filmmaker with Moldavian ancestry whose method of work is truly experimental. Going from one experiment to the next, combining different media (film, animation, music…) and taking the insights or outcomes of the first to the design of the second, Vasili has undertaken a brutally honest journey of self-reflection. Using the camera as a tool to confront himself with himself – as maker, as foreigner, as man, as (grand)son, as brother, as lover… - he unveils not just himself but also the patriarchal white culture that has helped shape him the way he is. However personal, Vasili’s artistic research is thus never merely private. As audio-visual artist, philosopher and curator Victorine van Alphen is interested in questioning and crossing borders, whether those of artistic disciplines or those that separate art from science or life from technology. For Victorine it’s all about ‘modes of being’ and how people – and maybe not just people – can move or be moved between them. One of those modes of being is that of a parent. Intrigued by the sense of presence of babies, Victorine wondered if it would be possible to create that sense of presence by means of technology. Her multi-layered installation VR project IVF-X suggests it is. For many of the visitors to the installation, the cyborg baby they ‘designed’ as ‘parent’ felt as a presence they could connect to.

Viktor Zahtila, a filmmaker, critic and gay activist from Croatia, originally set out to answer the question “whether the process of making a participatory film can have an emancipatory effect on its subjects and create a space of intimacy they can use as outlet for various types of sexual repression”. Filmmaking as therapy to overcome the traumas, pain and shame, so common among gay men. Over time however, Viktor understood that this fascination with trauma was little other than interiorized homophobia and that both privately and artistically he should move away from it and seek to explore sexuality from a different angle. Focused less on violence than of fragility and seeing the desire in, and of, uncertainty. Aesthetically this shift from trauma to pleasure led him to formulate a kind of inverse Dogma 95 for gay porn. Mieke Bernink Head of the Master’s department / Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Abhay Kumar

GRIDS AS CONTROL MECHANISMS ABHAY KUMAR

EXAMINING DEVIATIONS WITHIN THE GRID

Abhay Kumar is a double National Award-winning filmmaker from India. Abhay’s work often appears in response to power structures and systems which control access. His hybrid feature documentary Placebo (IDFA, Hotdocs) got a worldwide release on Netflix in 2016 and won the National Award for Best Investigative film 2017. Working with verité non-fiction, animation, found footage and fiction, Abhay's work tries to find a hybrid space in storytelling. Abhay's 2011 hybrid animation short just that sort of a day became the first Indian animation film to compete at the Tribeca Film Festival and won top awards at Busan, Regensburg and New York, and got him his first National Award for narration in short fiction in 2012. Abhay edited and produced About Love which won awards at Sheffield, DMZ Docs, Hainan and went on to secure distribution through POV, North America and a global release on Mubi in 2021. Abhay is also an alumni of the Berlinale Talents 2016 and attended Berlinale Talents 2021 under his artist name ‘Fugue’. storyteller.ink@gmail.com

SS* once said ‘A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing’. But I might have a thing or two to say about a thing. I was born inside a Grid. And then I forgot about it. You move left, you move right, you move straight - you move thinking you have free will. And you do, but only within the pathways allowed by The Grid. Straight lines - never curves. From inside The Grid, it’s impossible to know you are, inside the Grid. You internalise the Grid - from physical to conceptual, invisible. To truly notice The Grid, one needs a different vantage point - a slight elevation, a top down view, you need to get high-er. A Grid is an Apollonian concept - geared to orient, systemise, pragmatic, ordered, measured, controlled. However, no Grid is a perfect system, as subtle deviations ripple through its straight pathways. My research aims to create an exploration of Dionysian deviations - queer desires, off the grid desires, monsters, primordial impulses which constantly challenge the Grid.

Using cinema as a medium, this ongoing research expresses itself through two projects: A) Sector Quicksand: hybrid feature documentary in development Chandigarh stands as an anomaly amongst the chaotic Indian landscape. Designed by Le Corbusier in 1964 as a utopian vision of what modern independent India could be, his obsession with straight lines and ‘form follows function’ is evident in the grid urban design of the city.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Thus duality forms the bed on which this research builds through a theme of ‘transformation’ which connects the dual streams of inquiry.

A Natural landscape is ‘transformed’ as a grid is imposed upon it. A space transforms into a place as humans interact with it, guided by architecture and design, a thing becomes another thing - an altered state. A human wants to escape the Grid and ends up in a club a Dionysian ritual gathering. Space-Body-Sound-Light collide to create a trance-formative state within the architecture of pleasure. The Grid can only work if those occupying it submit to its plan. But what about those who exist outside the plan? Those who exist against the Grid? Exploring ‘horror’ from a spatial perspective, the idea of ‘monsters’ emerges as ‘beings that escape the taxonomy of the Grid’.

Chandigarh 3d model

ABHAY KUMAR

Le Corbusier

Chandigarh plan 1951

The city is divided into 60 grids. Each of these grids is a mini city called a Sector. The social housing in sectors are divided into 13 Types. Type 1 for the highest government official and type 13 for a peon. I was born in sector 7 in a type 10 house. When my father retired from the government service, we were in a Type 8 house. A filmmaker visits his parents in his hometown of Chandigarh trying to resolve an ongoing disagreement over his life choices. Over this time spent at home, where moments of gentle affection seem to be punctuated by a total communication breakdown, the filmmaker starts to suspect that the city might have a more insidious role to play in this unravelling situation. As he spends time within the grid of the house, the larger grid

structures around him start becoming apparent. Could it be possible that the design of this city suppresses individuality, which threatens its ideal of order and coherence? GD** says “If you are caught in the dream of the other, you are fucked”. The film examines how the physical grid of the city projects a conceptual grid over its inhabitants. The film plays out in a dystopian setting where the will of an individual is set against the collective will of the city itself - the city as a breathing organism, made of clean lines, geometric angles demanding submission to its will, and the individual trying to come to terms with the cost of going against it.

T he Room: science fiction/dance short film in production

‘The Room’ is a desire machine where ‘off grid impulses’ manifest. In a nondescript basement, a group of people are being interrogated about their background by an off-camera voice. The interrogation starts friendly enough, but soon acquires a threatening tone as the detainees are questioned about The Room. “Why did you go to The Room?”, is the oft repeated question that is drilled into their heads as the detainees start to unravel slowly. The film constructs its narrative through the tension created between the interrogation and visuals from The Room - a dark strobe lit bunker where people dance manically to pounding techno. What is the secret of The Room? What desire is it fulfilling?

MASTER OF FILM 2021

By revealing these answers, The Room aims to pose the question: ‘Who gets access to hedonism, and in what conditions?’

* **

SS- Susan Sontag GD - Gilles Deleuze

Hadas Neuman

THE PRODUCTION OF THE UNPREDICTABLE

HADAS NEUMAN

“A CAMERA IN A BAG" JOURNEY OF A FILMMAKER WALKING DOWN THE STREETS

Hadas’ latest experimental short documentary, Two people will come, with balloons, has won the Next! Award (WIP) at the DocAviv International Film Festival 2021. In her research, ‘The production of the unpredictable’, she explores different ways in which she can use unpredictability as a narrative tool to reclaim the spectacle of everyday life and incorporate it into hybrid works that blend documentary and autofiction (where autobiographical elements meet fictional storytelling). hadasneuman@gmail.com hadasneuman.com

Illustration by Liran Kapel

Hadas Neuman (Israel/Netherlands) is a BA graduate with an Honors scholarship majoring in script-writing and directing at Sapir College. In a more informal setting, she can also be introduced as a filmmaker walking down the streets (with a camera in her bag). Her short films (Prove it, Goosebumps, Fairy on a roof, and more) and feature documentary (The European grandma project, co-direction; 2018), have been screened at global festivals and won awards. Currently, her artistic practice is shifting towards the point at which fiction and documentary intersect. She is welcoming that very moment with a mix of excitement and anticipation (even suspense), visually expressed by the blank space below:

Once you print something on a page, it will forever stay there. However romantic that might sound in our transient world, in this context it means that the very page will not keep up with the artist. If you wish to stay up to date with the ever-evolving definitions and concepts driving the artistic process, please follow me in all acceptable ways.

I WILL START IMMEDIATELY: I found a way to make films that brings me joy as a creator. Enjoyment should be part of the basic production equipment list, right there next to 4x4 white Reflector canvas, gobo arm and sandbag. I call this way ‘A CAMERA IN A BAG METHOD’. *Yes, I know there are other bag carriers out there (Hey Ursula, Hey Agnes), they are nice as well. So, let’s say a filmmaker (me) is walking down the streets with a camera in her bag. Let's add that the camera can be pulled out at any time, ready to shoot. Let's also add that the process of walking needs to be prolonged – meaning hours, days, even weeks. Above all, it MUST be aimless, unsystematic, undirected. Reflection is allowed only in retrospect. MY BAG IS NOTHING TOO FANCY – A SIMPLE TOTE BAG WITH A LEOPARD PRINT, BUT LET ME EXPLAIN ITS MAGIC: The walking pace will cause the leopards’ heads to move and their legs to shuffle. What is most important, however, is that this time they are not hunters but gatherers.

PARKing (May 2020) WHAT IS CINEMATIC WANDERING? / WHO IS A CINEMATIC WANDERER? I’m a wanderer with a camera. Investigator of landscapes. Lens cap off, lens cap on. A collage maker of moments. I hang around. I am alerted but not chasing anything. I am after reality’s irregularities – things that don’t seem right but at the same time feel familiar. I pass by them, they pass by me. As I wander, I’m zooming in and out of things, people and behaviors. It amazes me how extraordinary, how weird, how funny, how strange those irregularities can be.

As you might have guessed, I am a gatherer myself. I collect stories – and this is how: I allow myself – the method allows me – TO BE freely attracted to places and people, to film fragments of the everyday, riddled with transient encounters – all of them dictated by chance. I follow the method described above almost religiously (in the most atheist way possible). Then comes the moment when I can look at the material and reflect (usually right after my hard drive is signalling)

MASTER OF FILM 2021

FILMING and EDITING are at the base of the practice I’m about to describe (NOT WRITING) Therefore I WILL FOLLOW A SIMPLE RULE HERE: I’M GOING TO USE ONLY 831 WORDS WHICH IS THE AVERAGE AMOUNT OF WORDS ONE CAN READ BEFORE GETTING BORED. (Based on Oxford Academic Journals fictional research "The tiring bulk of words", published in 2016 in the magazine Words and Fatigue. If I might add, more research is needed concerning the average amount of words that a filmmaker can write before losing her focus.)

WHAT DID I FILM: Exclusively trash, starting with a box of bourekas with a note "eat me" left on a bench. Ending up with a collection of various packaging styles spotted on the streets. Mostly dogs. Started with the real deal, and proceeded with illustrated ones, even (god forbid) pet shops. Abstract footage, close-ups of light reflections, or electric boxes losing their box-shaped structure due to extreme zooming in, resulting in an undefined image that can later be attached to a new meaning. An older version of Anne Frank (either visiting Amsterdam from another dimension or a very convincing lookalike) strolling around Anne Frank’s house.

"Placards Protest" (June 2020)

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling/training.” (I’m schooling myself, thank you, Walter Benjamin)

Black Lives Matter protest and exploration of the hidden identities of placards by filming them from behind. (see Image on the left) A man sitting by himself in the park for an hour without moving. * All of them resulted or will result in a film

“It is true that filming, especially a documentary, is gleaning. Because you pick what you find; you bend; you go around; you are curious; you try to find out where are things. However, you cannot push the analogy further, because we don’t just film the leftovers.” (Nicely put, Thank you, Agnes Varda)

Big lipped sofa" (April 2021)

WHAT IS VOICE OVER? No, I am not talking to myself on the streets, but it is a very important element in my work. While filming I entertain myself (in my head, not out loud) by making up sentences as the mundane moments are unfolding in front of me. While in my head, the words flow as a stream of consciousness but Later, I record and edit them, tame them into meaning: as playful observations and instructions. With the help of a V.o I take the everyday and find a narrative in it. The V.O also functions as a layer of comedy to a dramatic, serious situation.

"Everyday" (March 2021) WHAT IS THE ATTRACTION to capture the everyday? I am arriving from a country in which: At the age of 7, I would be packing my gas mask to school, daily. At the age of 12, I would be stepping out of the bus due to suicide bomber suspicions. At the age of 18, I would be holding guns in the army for 2 years. At the age of 24, I was hiding in shelters. I lived in a reality that I accepted as normal since it was the only one I knew. In a country where normal is, in reality, atrocious, I have developed an attraction to capture and find narratives where there supposedly aren’t any: in the everyday, the mundane, the ordinary. (and eventually show how politics seeps in even in stories that emerge more from the everyday)

AND THIS IS WHAT PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE LOOKS LIKE: One-month experiment practicing ‘a camera in a bag method’ in one neighborhood in the city of Givatayim (Israel) ↓ Archiving the material, I find: the vast majority of the people I filmed are elderly men ↓ I ASK MYSELF: WHY? (don’t worry, I ask myself other things as well, sometimes) ↓ It takes me a (very) little while and then it dawns on me: The neighborhood where I filmed all these elderly men, is where my father lives. A father I have no contact with (ever since I was born) and no access to. It became obvious: subconsciously I was drawn to a big, unresolved issue in my life. One that I was sure I had come to peace with already. Thus, the randomness in my filming experiment is not so random, it turns out. All this time, I was filming the absence. Aimless shooting reveals itself as an inner compass, which guided me to deal with this silently pressing issue. ↓ Flabbergasted by this discovery (and by the word “Flabbergasted”), I decide to film more men ↓ 100 of them: ↓

HADAS NEUMAN

WHY DID I FILM WHAT I FILMED (or: where does the filmmaker's sensitivity turn when it is unmediated and undirected): I try to extract from my subconscious reasons for my particular attractions. I weigh it against the idea of randomness. The random has become my storytellinginstigator, I'm using it as a narrative tool (or as a way to attract ideas) – which is to say that random and unpredicted are my (and my camera’s) city guides. However, when I’m done with all the shooting, I treat all those chance events with a solid dose of introspection, even psychoanalysis. To search my subconscious motives is, of course, to look for a pattern – ultimately it means to go against the randomness of the supposedly random. It is a playful-constructive process that reveals as much about the subject matter of my film experiments as it does about me (or whoever is filming). It touches my most inner, deep, personal place as a creator. It leads me to tell only authentic stories that are at the core of the self that chose to film that moment or at the core of the encountered people. I call it THE PRODUCTION OF THE UNPREDICTABLE. (Note: If you are one to appreciate the alliteration here you will realize that, at least, the name of the method is not random.)

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people" (Nicely put, Thank you, Agnes Varda)

The man who stares ambiguously

The flower man who every day chop the tip of the rose

The security man who is always sent to problematic places

The man who at all times holds in his right shirt pocket a picture of himself from when he was young (including its negative)

The man who owns an electric scooter he calls “Tarataike”

The bookstore labyrinth man who each day decides how old he is

The man who walks the exact same way as his dog

The man who says plants are like human

The man who dances to the song “We’re in the army now”

The log-line A 36-year-old filmmaker wanders the streets with her camera, filming small encounters with random older men. Why is she doing this? Because on one of these streets, lives her father, whom she doesn’t have contact with or access to. The brief meetings with the men reveal not only their stories but also her own. family secrets and history. The encounters function as part documentary, part performative dress rehearsal for the one meeting that she anticipates the most; the 100s man - her father. The thing you write for the funds The personal, intimate story becomes socially relevant as the encounters reveal a broader perspective of society. As a result of the multiplicity of participants, the form itself constitutes fieldwork, social research, and by definition, a kind of auto-ethnography, by revealing elements of the social structure. It achieves this merely by putting all the men together and having one agent (me) move between all these worlds as the narrative evolves. These interactions often expose gender dynamics observable between the filmmaker and the participants. Recurring motifs such as different

forms of masculinity, loneliness, family secrets, remorse, the question of the relevance of a person at a certain age, and power relations rise to the surface. The things I discuss with my therapist This film could make an excellent case study for psychologists, or more generally, for people interested in the workings of the mind. Not only because this happened to be my experience, I think that if one allows oneself to be completely free of associations and sufficiently unfocused one will stumble across something deeply important and personal for them on an existential level – and that simply by wandering the streets. It is a grand theory of mine, every filmmaker who'll dare to do that can discover what it is for him or her. The process is not only the discovery of what that thing is, but through the filming and making of the film, one can deal with or even resolve some dormant traumas. I could write about the therapeutic quality of filmmaking for hours, but I’m afraid that I would exceed my word count by doing so.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

100 MEN – A FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY

THE FIRST FILM in which I used this method, is a film I affectionately call “The hospital film”. Its creation was spontaneous: I picked up a camera, just like that and started filming people passing by. I would have never expected that it would turn into a film:

TWO PEOPLE WILL COME, WITH BALLOONS a short experimental documentary Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival NEXT! WIP Award 2021 While her mother is undergoing surgery, the director documents the act of waiting. When the time stretches as it does in a hospital, every passer-by, every gesture takes on a meaning. Desperately and whimsically she examines whether she could control reality through the act of filming, but soon reality shatters her efforts and leaves the terrible waiting time in her hands, as it is – infinite.

Jorik Amit Galama

JORIK AMIT GALAMA

INTIMATE SYSTEMS

Jorik Amit Galama moves between fine art, literature, and cinema. After studying philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and graduating from the Image and Language department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, they got selected for the Slow Writing Lab by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in 2018. Their fiction stories and texts on art have been published in Metropolis M, Tirade, De Revisor, ZINK, Kluger Hans, Tubelight, De Internet Gids, EYE Filmmuseum Exposed, and various artists' publications. Recurring themes in their work are embodiment, self-healing, and intimacy, viewed through the lens of queer ecology. jorikamitgalama.com jorikamit@gmail.com IG: jorikamitgalama

During the Master’s programme Jorik worked on several short and longterm film projects. One of the long-term projects is The Second Lily (working title), in which they focus on the socio-ecological tensions deriving from industrial lily farming in a rural community in Drenthe, the Netherlands, where they are from. By talking with locals who are affected and/or affecting, as well as following the many side stories relating to the lily supply chains and the history of the area and landscape, possibilities for transformation are mapped. In another long-term project Insurance Against Meteorites, a collaboration with fellow master researcher Natalia Śliwowska, they follow Natalia’s mother Wanda, who attempts to investigate police corruption and neglect surrounding the death of her son Bartek in a mysterious car accident. While gathering more and more information, and collaborating with a fortune-teller who predicted Bartek’s death, Natalia and Jorik portray different modes of mourning and remembering through the use of performative interventions.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

We spoke with Jorik about their ongoing research and the works they will present during the Artistic Research Week.

Photo left and right: Research material The Second Lily

At first glance, The Second Lily and Insurance Against Meteorites might seem like disparate projects. What do you see as common denominators in these works? A recurring theme in my works is the vulnerability of the body. I want to center the body’s flaws, transformations, sensuality, scars, carnal archives, and porosity to its environment. On a deeper level this often links to traumas and oppression. I wish to honour the actions people take to transform the cycles of (self)harm that stem from traumas and oppression. In The Second Lily this entails ecological destruction, mental and physical illnesses and discrimination. In Insurance Against Meteorites family trauma and injustice are the primary focus. Both films share the strategy of gathering a mosaic of perspectives to foreground the intricate effects that a damaging event can have. What moved you to making the uncovering of vulnerability the focal point of your research? To me vulnerability has a lot of layers. Obviously, there is

the current digital layer that makes us experience more and more of our intimate exchanges online, where a lot of our complexities are filtered away. Intentionally reclaiming time and space for being vulnerable with others can connect to some vital questions about the way we live. What positions of dominance do I inhabit? Who are the bodies around me? How do they influence me? Do I influence them, and if so: for better or for worse? I think we can only heal ourselves and others by looking into these questions and answering them openly and honestly. Indirectly this can also question a tendency that I often observe; how we tend to repeat the way we describe our identities or the things we have experienced – how they can become stabilized stories. During interviews I often search for an opening in those stabilized stories. These are the parts of our psychological landscape where things are more fluid and less organized, and can therefore offer the chance to openly think together instead of stating conclusions. Somatic exercises, improvisational drama games and elements of spiritual rituals can function

as ‘tools’ to enable playfulness and a form of safety that allows for a meaningful encounter and respectful exchange. To maintain the intimacy I often work firstly with just sound and search for a cinematic or literary translation later on.

JORIK AMIT GALAMA

How do you reach such a translation? Often during these interviews, I get hit by something. You could say it’s the punctum or ‘the meaningful detail’, as they sometimes call it in prose writing. It’s often something small that shows the peculiarities of an experience in a very condensed way. These can become the ingredients that start to boil in my head. When I reevaluate the interview together with participants or collaborators, I start to propose ways to capture them in film or in writing. Sometimes this leads to a performative retelling or reenactment, other times I use the aesthetic outcomes of the ‘tools’ used to set the conditions for the encounter. You spoke about wanting your filmmaking to become a form of slow activism. Could you elaborate on this? Firstly, I think there’s a risk of deflating the word activism, which to me primarily means direct action and selforganizing. I’m still navigating different strategies, like offering my filmmaking skills to NGOs and volunteering for a political party. Documentary filmmaking can feel like a very impractical way of spreading information. It also operates through rather elitist ways of production and distribution. At the same time, documentary filmmaking gives you the chance to register long-term processes. In this way, I hope to create some tiny insights on self-healing, building resilience, and networks of solidarity. This might be called slow activism. Maybe this can also be said about the process of filmmaking itself; the encounter you have with someone. I work from an ethics of care that puts the integrity of the process above an end product.

systems we inhabit and the many harmful effects that they generate. It thereby vigorously questions what is considered natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal, and shows how those binary oppositions are often embedded in eurocentric heterosexism. For me, the lens of queer ecology offers a framework to see more of these effects, just like other branches of critical environmental justice like Black feminist ecological thinking. It reminds us how marginalized identities generate vastly different experiences of our environments, and risk very different dangers in relation to climate change. It reminds us how marginalized identities and human diversity in general, generate vastly different experiences of our environments, and also; cause very different risks in relation to climate change. Besides, by bringing in the dazzling manifestations of complex genders and sexualities present in nature, queer ecology can function as an inspiration for the way we relate to our own bodies and those of others. On a personal level, it makes me look more closely at myself as a kind of ecosystem, with certain strengths, weaknesses, pollutants, and seeds. It has been fruitful for me to view myself and the world around me in this manner because it offers a way to analyse, and assess where I have response-abilities. Interview by Lianne Kersten

You view your work through the lens of queer ecology. What does this lens offer you as a filmmaker and writer? Queer ecology is one way to look at the socio-ecological Still Reproduction Sites

Research material The Second Lily

Stills A Glorious Defence

Stills Decompression Room

BOY MODE OFF Slightly wary, I walk past the groups sitting on benches along the walkways. In the sections where it is quieter, I feel my body returning from a divisible surface to a whole. I try to find the right inner attitude, to transform my gaze into a sharp point that pricks open the stream of observations to let a meaning pop out of them. The evening sun creeps up behind me. The park is a living picture held in its frames with might and main, and sometimes brutal force. The picnic meadows are watered, a gigantic vacuum cleaner sucks up cans, balloons are cut from the trees, leaves are scooped from the waterfall, the love temple where couples say “I do” is temporarily closed due to danger of collapse. Two policemen with a muzzled dog speak to a homeless man. I count the dog's saliva droplets on the asphalt, seventeen, before they leave. Every so often I pick up a pebble and put it in my bag. Before I went to Paris, my grandmother came to visit me in a dream. She was sitting in the back of one of those 1990s streetcars you hardly see anymore. She beckoned me to her, handed me a bag of coloured pebbles, and got off silently at the next stop. At home, I threw the pebbles on the ground. They clumped together into words that formed a message to my biological mother. Did my grandmother ever stroll through this park? Is this octogenarian by the fountain one of the children she once cared for as an au pair? In my head I fabricate images of her and the man she was married to for several years after WW2. A Jewish man who had survived the concentration camps, the love of her life, according to my aunt. Evening walks, a kiss against one of the plane trees, seemingly dissolving into nothingness.

Regularly in this park, as in the Vondelpark, I see women of colour pushing strollers with white children. It gives a feeling of nagging helplessness in which I find La noire de.... by Ousmane Sembène. Still a large proportion will give their youth for far too low a wage, and sometimes leaving behind their own offspring and dependents, for the reproduction of the elite of the Global North. “Hey dude, nice dress!” someone calls out behind me while I let a hairy caterpillar walk on my hand. Like something cold, the words creep up my neck. I don't dare look back and walk away as fast as I can with the caterpillar on one hand, my handycam in the other. At the statue of the god Pan, I let the caterpillar transfer to a bush.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Still Penis Flowers

With invisible wires my body and the handycam are connected. In the morning I decide what I want to get out of the day, what setting I need to film what I would like to film, and thus how I should present myself. Do I turn on boy mode, to compromise on myself and glide through society more or less frictionlessly, or do I turn on femme mode, where I get closer to myself, but become something that the eyes snag on. From the bushes a hedgehog crawls out, I run after him. “Why didn't she actually have a message for you?” my mother had asked. My grandmother's message had touched her, she said it was something she had felt but which my grandmother had never voiced. I pick up a pebble from under the bush. My bag is almost full, at home I will throw them on the ground.

Natalia Śliwowska and Jorik Amit Galama

INSURANCE AGAINST METEORITES NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA ANDJORIK AMIT GALAMA

AN EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY, A VIDEO INSTALLATION Eighteen years ago, a fortune teller predicted Bartek’s death in a car accident. Now his sister contacts the same fortune teller for advice on confronting the alleged perpetrator.

CHAPTER ONE OF INSURANCE AGAINST METEORITES, SEPTEMBER 2021 At the end of our first semester at the Master of Film, the two of us sat down in the canteen. Here Jorik shared the effects of a traumatic event in their extended family. Natalia in response told them about the death of her brother Bartek in a mysterious car accident near the family home in Psary, Wrocław. Jorik then, on the spot, proposed to Natalia that she would tell them the rest of the story while making a trip together to Poland. A proposal that directly resonated with Natalia’s desire to approach this event through the lens of a collaborative cinematic investigation. Our research is spurred by Natalia’s mother Wanda's previous attempts to investigate the corruption and negligence surrounding the death of her son. We open files and take up questions that kept haunting Wanda for the last 19 years. Her unrest and suspicions arose from situations such as: the forensic institutions making it impossible to see and/ or identify Bartek's body; an anatomical report describing a different body; witnesses pressured by the police to change their statements and the awareness that the driver of the other car is the son of an influential prosecutor. In trying to address these questions we started to interview family members and people involved. In doing so we create a constellation of characters ranging from people directly involved in the accident such as the woman who was in the car with Bartek during the accident. We also draw the circle bigger, reaching out to a firefighter and village elder, a journalist

Mother Wanda watches a 3D simulation of her version of the accident.

Father Henryk compares the length of human life to the duration of a falling stone.

who reported illegal organ trade in Lower Silesia, but also to the spirit world and an acquaintance frequently visited by Bartek's ghost, who requesting favors to help him rest in peace. While a mosaic of contradictory stories about the accident started to take shape, we requested assistance from different sources of knowledge. One part is ongoing training in investigative journalism and interview techniques to confront people that might hide information. Another part is an interdisciplinary collaboration between forensic experts in accident analysis and animators, who analyze police reports, and reconstruct the accident in a 3D animation that is based on the actual police physics calculations. In contrast with the analytical approach, an important role is being fulfilled by a wróżka (fortune teller) who predicted Bartek's death two months before the accident. This wróżka fills in the gaps in the investigation, reads the intentions of those

A statue of Holy Mary, on the crossroad near the accident site and the house.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Mother Wanda as Stańczyk

Bartek’s passenger Jadwiga presents her tiny scar from the accident.

involved, and advises on the way to fulfill Wanda's long-held wish: to meet and/or confront the alleged perpetrator of the accident - who in the meantime started to work for a Dutch company [sic]. All these different sources of knowledge are primarily used to serve the need for answers by the family. Instead of being about something, the film primarily sets out to do something. One of the things that the film is doing, is Natalia reclaiming her narration about traumatic memories. In one of the interviews, she narrates that she experienced the very evening of her brother's death as the spectator of a tragic and absurd play, which is formally addressed in the film. Throughout the non-fictional context of the film, insertions of staged scenes and performative interventions appear. Beyond symbolic control over the story that these performances mark, we also want them to highlight how a truthful representation of reality is inevitably subjected to the falsification inherent to our medium. At the same time, these staged scenes make the ungraspable truth about the deadly accident part of the fabric of the film. The most striking example so far is a scene of mother Wanda performing a PowerPoint presentation in her home office, enumerating instances of police corruption, neglect, and disturbing gossip. By this, we not only avoid lengthy interview material as a source of information but most importantly; capture the fierceness and determination of Wanda’s character, stemming from her motherly grief. Another example is a scene in which father Henryk throws a stone on the floor in the living room. This scene is a direct reenactment

In the ruins of greenhouses Zuza, the sister, and her child are watching the sky.

of a lesson he gave to Natalia, when she was eight years old, in which he compares the perceived length of a human life to the falling of a stone. In the film, it is translated into a reflection on the relativity of time perception. At the same time, it indirectly captures the essence of his mourning; the way in which he deflects an unimaginable loss. He thereby stands in opposition to Wanda’s investigative passion that pushes the film forward. We find these (subtle) performative interventions, as well as the constant dialogue between our insider and outsider’s perspectives, essential in turning personal memories and experiences into portraits of universal psychological processes. The progressive research on the one hand and contemplative portraits on the other draw (sometimes unexpected) relations between mourning, spirituality, the fallibility of memory, and institutional injustice. As a result, Insurance against Meteorites is a long-term research into the devastating effect which injustice has on mourning processes, as well as the way in which ‘a twilight of truth’ forms a breeding ground for spectral beings that draw attention to unresolved matters.

Natalia Śliwowska

NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA AKA NATASHA CHAOSU

aka Natasha Chaosu

“THE TRUE IS THE MOMENT OF THE FALSE”

Natalia Śliwowska (1994) is a Polish filmmaker and photographer who graduated in cultural studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Here she specialized in film studies and art analysis and criticism, researching artistic strategies derived from critical theory. Her photographs were featured in magazines such as Film Shooters Collective, LensCulture and Uncertain Mag. During her studies, she directed an independent documentary and co-founded and curated a cinema club ‘Kino Suka’, a place where transgressive cinema and social discourse got connected. She began her master's at the Netherlands Film Academy with research on adapting a theory of Pure Form to film. Research that led to her current interest in performative documentaries. Her works explore questions of representation and inability to know. Exploring these questions in the context of the traumatic past of her family, she is currently working on her first feature documentary Insurance Against Meteorites in collaboration with Jorik Amit Galama. www.sliwowska.com nataliasliwowskathings@gmail.com

Authenticity Guy Debord has famously stated, “The true is the moment of the false”, and there’s something in that quote that I keep wondering about. When he speaks of the society of spectacle, I associate it with the immeasurable amount of socially defined frames that we lay over our social interactions. As a result, art comes closer to advertising in the age of ‘mechanical reproduction’ of images, which are carriers of the market values. This grand diagnosis has only a little to do with my practice, but it helped to set me on my path. What I’m looking for in filmmaking are those moments where performance gets the better out of the performer. Let’s call them the “moments of truth” for the time being, these instances where people concoct their bullshit (even subconsciously) and it pushes them to perform. At that moment, there’s a slight opening for me to catch something - you might call it a true self - but I’d rather say it’s just another layer of the self that stayed hidden. What I find cocky in Debord’s statement is that you might assume there’s one ultimate truth to discover. I don’t believe that. When I speak of authenticity, what I have in mind is not some kind of true essence, but these parts of human behaviour that we are most likely to hide from others, the camera, but most importantly - ourselves. It doesn’t have to be something bad or evil that we conceal on purpose. It’s just those things that come out when you drop your guard, lower your defences. I think I managed to capture a few of those moments that contain authenticity understood as the moment where people get disarmed, where something that even they were not conscious of came to the fore through their attempts at performance. Performance The way we commonly apply the notion of performance in our everyday conversations is mostly negative. The performer is the one who is insincere. It comes from the fact that a good performance is indiscernible from reality, and it puts the perceiving subject in an uncomfortable position. When you suspect someone might be performing, you feel anxious as you can’t tell if you can trust it. Now, what is a source of discomfort in regular interactions can become an asset on camera, as the camera works like an accelerator. Whatever your subject is trying to do, it can single out, and render visible in the moment of its concoction. It doesn’t happen all that often, but you can cast your camera like a fishnet to raise your chances of retrieving those fleeting glimpses of performance. In that respect, I believe it to be related to what investigative journalists are looking for - the cracks and openings that will let them uncover the story that others want to (consciously or not) conceal. What is incredibly revealing in that process is often the moment where people involved are confronted with the footage of themselves. Very often, it is only after they became the spectators of their own performance when people realize they were steering away from something that had been buried deep inside them. Those moments, captured on camera, accelerate their process of self-recognition by offering them externalized evidence. Those rare flashes are the instances of authenticity that I’m after when encouraging a performance.

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS: a photographic novel / a research publication In this book Viola Zelazny and I invite the reader to come along and experience a journey of consequences which sprouted from one innocent film exercise in directing non-actors. For that, I invited a stranger to my apartment. In turn, I was left with disturbing confessions pointing towards a criminal offense related to the most extreme of social taboos. Written in 3 different voices this book externalises my process of denial, the inability to believe it, confusion as to where the fantasy and reality split. Consisting of the screenshots of mini DV footage, phone photographs, transcripts of interviews, dialogues and research presentations; monologues of an obsessed mind in search of synchronicities and diary accounts this book blurs the lines between reality and performativity.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

THOUGHTS ON

PILGRIMAGE: two channel video installation When I was a kid, each year there was this one morning when I would wake up to sounds of collective prayers rendered by a small megaphone. Each year a Catholic procession walking from Wrocław to Trzebnica would pass in front of my bedroom window. On the one hand, a reminder of a passing time, on the other, one of my first alienating reminders of Poland's strong cultural polarization. In Pilgrimage I set up a white backdrop on which I capture that very same procession. With one video presenting an establishing shot and the other a close up of passing pilgrims, I want to immortalise it and offer my childhood contemplation to the audience.

Intervention Spotting a bad performance in a fiction film, one that shines through and points to the fact that someone is acting, is a source of annoyance. It’s considered bad acting and bad

NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA AKA NATASHA CHAOSU

directing. In my practice, rendering the layer of performance visible is the key. Or to be even more precise, it is not about staging a bad, self-denouncing performance, but having the spectator witness the change of registers while the performance unravels on screen. I achieve that through a series of interventions - changing the tone, and making you question the status of what you’re watching. Instead of giving you comfort of recognition, a certainty that you’re either watching a documentary or a fiction film, I intervene and make you aware of my interventions. A majority of the material in Insurance Against the Meteorites (co-directed with Jorik Amit Galama), which is a very intimate story touching upon a real family trauma, feels like hands-on documentary footage, but we consciously inject it with those heavily staged scenes that frame my real-life protagonists as performers of their own stories. Those interventions bring different sets of behaviours and emotions to the fore - ones that are not necessarily more “real” but they certainly reveal something that our everyday composure might have repressed. However, those scenes can only work, if they are “sandwiched” inside the honest state-of-the-art documentary footage that establishes the layer of “reality”, and therefore a frame of comparison. Through interventions, both layers - the one that we consider “real” and the “performative” denounce themselves as constructs, conventional frames of representation. None of them is more true but assembled together they allow us to glimpse into the elements that they were respectively trying to conceal. Transformation That recognition, of something buried deep suddenly emerging, is not only reserved for the spectators. Protagonists themselves also realize that the performance unlocks something in them. I mix the observational approach with performative rehearsals where we work on staging what my protagonists have already shared with me. On one hand, from a purely dramaturgical perspective, it lets me condense their story, squeeze out its essence and add a narrative flair. On the other hand, a confrontation with their own narrative, combined with the question of how to “act” it, often proves to be a transformative experience to the ones acting. To make you become a spectator of your own performance I set up collective screenings of the footage, where protagonists and all people involved watch the rushes. It is that perspective that allows you to start questioning certain elements of your own narrative that you got accustomed to. In Insurance Against the Meteorites we asked my mother to prepare a PowerPoint and give a presentation summarizing her investigation into my brother’s death. Working on the subject for over a decade, she internalized certain assumptions, so deeply, that only seeing herself recounting the events, she was able to start questioning her own narrative. Transgression This brings us to another meaning of performativity formulated by the philosopher of language John L. Austin, who explained it as “the capacity of speech and communication to act”, meaning that when you say “I do” during your wedding ceremony, it not only causes ripples in the air but also transforms the reality. This is precisely how I understand the words of Dimira at the end of our journey described in the photographic novel Walking on eggshells (co-written with Viola Zelazny). When I insist on Dimira giving me some kind of summary, an explanation, she says: “I gave you a performance. I thought it was enough”. And she’s right, at this

stage it no longer matters what was initially true or false, this performance created a whole new set of circumstances that transgressed their initial conditions. It created a new “reality”. (The book will be on show during MACA Artistic Research Week, Oct. 2021) Director I actively assume the position of a director and do not try to conceal my presence. I would go even further and say that I perform the role of a director myself. Additionally, that directorial persona changes, and adjusts to what the material requires. In the shoot described in Walking on eggshells, I deliberately acted as this dreamy new-agey healer, who is not only holding the camera but actually performing a ritual. It was necessary to impose that frame, to disarm tension and justify the situation to one of the two participants, a stranger who walked into the situation unprepared. On the other hand, Insurance Against the Meteorites is potentially a minefield. What we uncover might have real consequences to the people involved - both emotional and legal. Thus, we needed to wrap the whole investigation in the unthreatening cloak of absurdity. We consciously assume those highly exaggerated docile roles of a slightly infantile, young Polish girl with ponytails, and a clueless outsider, a good-spirited and colourful Dutch artist. Playing with those assumptions, we subvert gender and cultural stereotypes using them to our advantage, catching people off guard. What we want people to see is a concerned sister who needs to understand what happened to her family when she was just a kid, in order to move on. It doesn't mean that the part of my personality that I channel here is made up, but rather that I accentuate one relatively non-threatening aspect of what I’m about and what I'm after. There is a scene in that film where I prepare to confront an ex-policeman who initially helped my mom with the investigation but currently denies any involvement. We sit in the car together with Jorik and we pump each other up - “You need to be non-threatening”, “You need to be cute”, “You need to make him feel guilty but also responsible”, “You need to be relentless, but sweet”. I need this pep talk to be able to withstand the pressure of that situation, to remember my lines and what I came there to learn. Heuristics Looking at the way in which I set up my experiments, I started seeing a pattern that this concept describes really well. Instead of focusing on systematic analysis, heuristic relies on quick associations and intuitive shortcuts. It is a

problem-solving method, applied where there’s no time or means to study the whole issue in its towering complexity. The answers it produces are not necessarily conclusive and optimal but sufficient for finding a satisfactory solution. Understood as such, heuristic is the mode of reasoning that describes well what I do and how I search for answers following the urges of my film-based practice (as in my ongoing research on the Funeral Culture). Most of the notions contained in this publication - including the performativity - were not something I set out to investigate. Instead, it was within the conditions that I kept setting for my experiments, that I saw performance emerging again and again as a tactic, a problem-solving method. The heuristic approach, coupled with some following reflection supplemented by grounded-theory research, let me constantly refine and question my understanding of my methods by abandoning a rigid frame of experiment in favour of what the situation dictates and requires. It is in the way I react to actual challenges, where my method lies. Thus, if I truly want to perform practice-based research on my methods, I can’t speculate on what I would do in optimal conditions, but reflect on how I actually respond to particular situations that unravel in front of me (for a more detailed case study of this approach, read my publication Walking on eggshells).

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Interview Each medium favours a different set of cognitive activities. A written text requires a very different form of engagement than a moving image. If you emphasise the spoken word in the film, the cognitive condition that you create for the viewer is closer to reading a text than watching a video. I consider that a wasted opportunity as there are so many more cognitive activities that the film can trigger. I do not seek to get rid of the talking heads, but I try to decenter the words themselves as the sole point of focus in my works. I wouldn’t use such grand concepts as active spectatorship, but I certainly want to enable a more interpretative mode of watching, by providing you with enough information to start questioning what is being said. I want you to look for the hints in the unspoken, and form your own interpretations. Staging My approach to staging stems from deadpan photography. Before I ventured into film, I was shooting stills and got fascinated by the dry, sharp wide shots of deadpan photographers who seemed to have been simply centering the cameras on their subjects and snapping their entirety. I offer you the whole person and its milieu for contemplation, making you partially responsible for the way you choose to see that person. Based on an interview conducted and edited by Stanisław Liguziński

FUNERAL CULTURE: an ongoing research in an early phase Following 2 years of research for Insurance Against Meteorites, I developed a sudden, strong and unsettling fear of death. For self-shock therapy, I went to Poland, where, unlike in the Netherlands, death is present on the streets. It mostly manifests itself in the form of coffin and urn advertisements. Gathering meditative footage of the commercialization of Polish funeral culture, I end up researching various working conditions (and alienation levels) of people employed in the business, spanning from gravediggers to CEOs of cemetery GPS navigation softwares.

Marleine van der Werf

Marleine van der Werf (1985, CH/NL) is a filmmaker/ visual artist with a documentary practice. She researches how to immerse in someone else’s experience. Her projects are inspired by people with a radically different perception of reality that challenge her assumptions. Van der Werf translates their experiences using haptic cinema and XR-installations, in order to question the understanding of the other and the self. She believes that knowledge does not come through intellect but through experience. By inviting an audience inside a different perception of reality, she aims to stimulate imagination and curiosity as a tool to reflect on polarization. Recurrent themes are embodiment, identity and our subjective perception of reality. Van der Werf collaborates with renowned experts in the field of science, art, and humanities. She studied Audiovisual Design at St. Joost Art Academy. Her projects have been broadcasted at television and shown at international festivals: IDFA (NL), Human Rights film festival Seoul (KR), FILE Festival in Sao Paolo (BR), Future of storytelling New York (USA) and Art Basel (CH). She won the NEXT Talent Award in 2018 (Playgrounds and partners), the Scientist Award (Abu Dhabi Imagine Science films festival) and the ACT award (STRP) in 2019. www.marleinevdwerf.com www.thelivingdead.nl mail@marleinevdwerf.com

Photo: Marleine van der Werf & Renee van Trier

MARLEINE VAN DER WERF

THE OTHER AS A MIRROR

This is why I became a filmmaker, to discover what I can learn from people who have a radically different perception of reality than me. To break free from my comfort zone and broaden my frame of reference. For me as a queer woman it can be quite uncomfortable to interview someone who says all queers will go to hell, because that is what his or her religion states. But unless we enter into a dialogue, nothing will change. We need to think of what connects us, instead of what divides us. It also means challenging one’s own, my own, assumptions when making a film about, say, hooligans of a soccer club, people that are homeless, have a disability, are extremely religious or, as in my new project, people who feel disembodied. What can we learn from each other’s perspective? What if a scientist can experience animal experiments from the perspective of a lab rat? Or a heterosexual man experiencing the harassment of a lesbian woman? An architect experiencing her design from the perception of a bee? Would this experience create an opportunity to reflect about our opinions and perspectives? What if we had artistic methods to break through these boundaries?

“What is it like to be a bat? What it is like is misleading, it doesn’t mean what in ‘our experience’ it resembles, but rather how it is for the subject himself. […] I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” Thomas Nagel, essay: What is it like to be a bat?

UNDERSTANDING THROUGH EXPERIENCING How to immerse in someone else's experience? What conditions are necessary to experience this 'other' perspective? Are there methods that filmmakers can use to break through their own subjective experience? And how do we use this to represent others? My focus used to lie solely with the character in a film. The goal was to get as close to the characters' experiences and portray this as accurately as possible. For that, I developed methods to enter their ‘worlds’. Before filming, I would collect everything about the person and take actively part in their daily life for months. It’s like falling in love: wanting to know everything about someone and trying to come as close as possible. Aside from observing and questioning, I would insert myself in the situation in which my main characters find themselves. This used to be an intuitive process. During the Master's programme, I came to understand it as a method: understanding through experiencing. My research then focused on developing this method further. To extend it beyond the concern with the characters in my films and installations towards an additional concern with the spectators or participants of my projects. I thus developed a cyclical working method with recurring steps: 1. How to map someone else’s experience? 2. How to assess if this is accurate? 3. How to translate this experience of a character into a film? 4. How to immerse the spectator in the experience of the main character? 5. How to assess what the spectator experiences during a film? 6. How to assess if the perception of the spectator changes through the experience of a film?

MASTER OF FILM 2021

THE OTHER AS A MIRROR When I was ten years old, I witnessed the psychoses of my father for three days. He saw snipers attacking us that I couldn’t see. That was frightening, but it also made me aware that we don’t share the same reality. How can we understand someone else’s perspective by interpreting it within our own subjective frame of reference?

During my time at the Master’s, I tested these steps in different films and installations I worked on and I used them to develop new methods, approaches and sensory techniques to research how to immerse in the experience of the other. As a side note: The work of William Turner is a great example on how this method of ‘understanding through experience’ influences the outcome of the artistic process. At a time when other painters depicted nautical scenes in a very static way, his paintings were wild and almost abstract. Turner ‘stepped into’ the situation he painted. He had himself tied to the mast of war ships and started to paint from that experience.

Projects testing the method. for details about these projects see www.marleinevdwerf.com

An example of using this method is the way I worked on the commissioned documentary The New Hospital. Most challenging was to understand the responsibility that doctors feel when they have to make the choice between life and death. In order to understand this sense of responsibility I spend a few months at the hospital, observing and participating in their

daily work, wearing a doctor’s lab-coat. This gave me a clearer picture of what their work entails. At one point, a new born baby was rushed into the hospital with her father. He was in shock because his wife had become dangerously ill, and he frantically followed his baby who was also in a critical state. When he saw me, he ran to me and asked what he should do and whether his baby daughter would make it. I froze up completely. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Luckily a nurse came by and calmly escorted the man to his baby daughter. Being in that position is completely different than observing how a nurse deals with a similar situation. It helped me to understand the daily pressure the medical staff is under. Having experienced it, also allowed me to connect with the nurses on a more intimate level during filming.

MARLEINE VAN DER WERF

This conscious working method of ‘stepping in’ or ‘inserting’ myself is an essential part of my practice. This inspired me to look for other methods or tools to understand through experiencing.

APPROPRIATING METHODS OF OTHER DISCIPLINES During the Master’s programme professor and filmmaker Eyal Sivan inspired me to search for knowledge about subjective experience in other disciplines. Simultaneously, I was invited by InScience FilmFestival and the Radboud University in Nijmegen to collaborate with Prof. Dr. De Lange. In his ‘Predictive brain lab’, he researches how visual perception generates our subjective reality. The result was a short film, The Prediction Machine. An important insight during this collaboration was how much overlap there was between De Lange’s question about how humans create their visual perception and my artistic practice. While he uses a scientific approach to understand what his participants see, I recreate in a visual style, through film, how a character perceives. While he puts participants in an MRI scanner and analyses their eye movements, I analyse with my characters whether this is indeed how they perceive reality. The main difference is the form the research takes. De Lange publishes his scientific data in a magazine, I use it to make films and installations. This led me to search for other disciplines that deal with similar questions but use different methods to immerse in the subjective experience.

As a result, I met with a writer, architect, neuroscientist, filmmaker, anthropologist, spiritual medium, choreographer and an FBI profiler. This generated an insight in completely different methodologies for studying the same subject matter. The profiler uses the facts of a crime scene to create an outline of the perpetrator, their background, how they think and whence the fascination of the perpetrator for what they did. The resemblance in the way we map, collect and obsess about

someone’s experience was an eye-opener. Another encounter I had with a different but similar method was during a series of workshops I taught about immersion in an animal perspective at the Technical University in Delft. The landscape architects researched how they could implement a non-human perspective in their architectural design. They collected information and did their ‘field work’, using objective information to map conditions, habitats and biotopes. One of the researchers observed a bee colony for a week. She discovered how the design of the campus negatively influenced their survival: because the grass and flowers had to be cut every two weeks to maintain the design, the bees lost their food source. Since then, the architect implements a non-human perspective in her design process. It told me that playfully changing one’s perspective to another species could change design attitudes. But how to embody another human’s physical experience? The dancers of the Motus Mori Institute showed me a beautiful method. Through kinetic interviews, choreographer Katja Heiman and her dancers archive movements of interviewees in their own bodies. Interestingly, the dancers told me that sometimes they felt that they lost their own movements while archiving those of others. I recognize this as a filmmaker, when you’re so immersed in someone else’s perspective that you have difficulty staying objective. The process of opening up sometimes means blurring the lines between how you and your character feel. Researching methods used in other disciplines – seeing them at work, understanding them, sometimes appropriating them – is very valuable and will remain part of my practice. It was exciting to exchange experiences with other researchers. It showed that different disciplines can have similar starting points and thought processes and that they differ only in the outcomes and the way they present these outcomes. It also made it clear to me, however, that in collaborations or exchanges, you cannot rely on the ‘language’ of your discipline. You cannot assume that others will understand your terminology. The encounters challenge us to critically question and specify what we actually mean and find a new language that both of us understand. It thus helps one to think outside of the box and reflect on ones discipline from a distance, which provides new insights.

SHIFT TO THE EXPERIENCE OF THE AUDIENCE During the research at the Master my focus has shifted from the experience of the character to that of the spectator or participant. Direct cause was the the response to my multi sensory-installation Be Boy Be Girl (co-director Frederik Duerinck). Between 2016 and 2019 around 200.000 people visited this installation, in which you choose to be a person of the opposite sex sunbathing at the beach. During the exhibition a participant said that he felt very vulnerable ‘being’ a woman in Virtual Reality. Especially when a surfer approached him from the sea. He was scared the surfer would come to ‘him’ for sex or even rape the woman that he embodied. At first I thought this was just a one-time encounter. But in different exhibitions in Europe, USA and Brazil men came to me with a similar experience. At the time it was surprising, but during the Masters programme I became aware of the significance of it. A dominant perception of Virtual Reality is that it works as an ‘empathy machine’. But as a filmmaker I noticed that the participants do not so much empathize with someone in VR reality, as that they project their own expectations of

The next step within my research is therefor to investigate how to immerse the spectator in the perspective of the character. Specifically, to investigate when they synchronize and when not? This changes also the way I structure my practice. I now concentrate less on the answers or the end product. Instead, I keep asking questions throughout the entire process. As a filmmaker you often only experience the interaction with the spectator at the end of a project, during and after the screening or in a Q&A session. But this is of course limited, because by that time you’re often already working on other projects. This means that the information about the experience of the spectator or participants gets lost. Now, rather than waiting until the premiere of the film or installation, I create prototypes earlier in the process, which I test with participants. I use the outcomes of those experiments to further develop the project. This means I am in constant interaction with the spectator, with the project being an ongoing research process.

THE LIVING DEAD Currently I’m engaged in such an ongoing research process, in the form a multidisciplinary project called The Living Dead. It’s an intimate journey in which the fragile relationship with our biological body is questioned. The ‘story’ is told from the perspective of someone suffering from Cotard Syndrome, a rare condition in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are already dead, do not exist or have lost body parts. To translate this experience, The Living Dead will use cinema, multi-sensory tools and a sensory deprivation tank. It will

also use the available knowledge on disembodiment, through collaboration with neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors and artists in the fields of dance, sound and image. It’s a project situated at the intersection of these different disciplines and, based on its investigative nature, researches ways to represent this experience in a diverse range of presentation forms, including a VR project, a multi-sensory installation and an essay film discussing the expectation of physicians, neuroscientists and philosophers who believe that Cotard Syndrome may be the key to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness. After seeing what it is to lose one’s mind, maintaining the connection to my body became a way to survive. In that sense, Cotard Syndrome embodies my greatest fear. The aim of The Living Dead project however is not to create a sensational or horrific experience. The aim is to learn from people who suffer from it and to invite the spectator to reflect on their own relationship with their body. Given Covid, rapid digitalization and robotization, The Living Dead invites us to consider what ‘we’ are and what our bodies mean to us.

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the situation, in this case fear. Of course, the experience of watching a 2-D horror film can be similar; you can also feel fear or anticipation of something that will happen. But the same scene of a woman sunbathing in a 2D-film and the first-person perspective of that scene in VR do not generate the same reactions of the participants. This led me to conclude that, in certain circumstances, a spectator or participant can understand something through experiencing. The question is how can we ascertain what such an experience means for whom? And why does this experience, in a mere 3 minutes, lead some people to project their fears on a body they do not own?

TO CONCLUDE The experience of witnessing my father’s psychosis, made me want to investigate how we can understand someone else’s perspective by interpreting it within our own subjective frame of reference. We tend to forget the basic fact that everything around us is subjective. Understanding that is even more relevant now, as there seems less and less room for discussion and conflicting opinions. Algorithms cause us to withdraw more and more into groups of like-minded people, where subjective perception comes to be taken for reality. It’s important that we find methods to break out of this polarization. Methods that stimulate curiosity and let us discover what we can learn from each other’s perspective in a playful manner. To unite and create understanding we need a meaningful discourse, and I'm hopeful that artistic research into immersion can challenge us to really engage with each other. I am very gratefull for the financial support of this research by: Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting SEC, Van Beek-Donner Stichting, Stichting Bekker-La Bastide-Fonds & Max Cohen Fonds and a special thanks to Concept editor: Eva Wijers

Mira Adoumier

MIRA ADOUMIER

PERIPHERAL LANDSCAPES

Mira Adoumier (1985, New York) is an author/independent filmmaker based in Beirut and Amsterdam. With an initial background in Psychology, Philosophy and Biology, she later completed a degree in Film Production at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema (Concordia University, Montreal). Through her fictional, essayistic works and video installations with landscapes, she explores the relationship between peripheries and centres, opening spaces and strata of possible and alternate realities. Her first feature, ERRANS, premiered at CPH:DOX 2020 in the next:wave competition. mira.adoumier@gmail.com www.miraadoumier.com

In our second semester on methodology, I started thinking of cinema and exile, in particular: What can the practice of cinema offer me to further define and explore the exilic position beyond mere representation? I was never really interested in the theme of exile as such but rather how I could convey through cinematic means the experience of the exilic position, the experience of alienation, of being in the liminality and the subjective experience of the specific relation of space-time that stems out of this external/peripheral position.

projects that I worked on: the periphery as a decentred landscape, a landscape from which I can look onto the centre more clearly than I could the other way around. These two landscapes were the forest and the night. I don’t know what came first. Whether the theory informed my practice or the other way around, but I started noticing that instead of filming the subject, be it a character or an idea, I would turn the camera around and film the landscapes that contain the subject. it started in 2017 with with my feature film ERRANS (2020), which follows a woman looking for a man she met many years ago. One day, he went back to Beirut and she never heard of him again. The film starts with her arriving in Beirut by the sea and as she enters the city, going to each of the places and neighbourhoods he told her about, where he grew up, lived, and walked. During my research on landscapes in cinema, I encountered an interesting concept. Fukei means landscape in Japanese. Fukeiron is a proposition developed by Japanese avantgarde filmmaker Masao Adachi in his A.K.A Serial Killer (1969). Instead of filming the subject of his film Adachi turned the camera around and filmed the landscapes in which the subject evolved and went through his life. When I was filming ERRANS, right before I entered the Master’s programme, I wasn’t aware of this cinematic proposition but I treated the landscape in which the man that the woman was looking for evolved, as a factor in how he evolved as a subject. But the relationship between life and landscape is also a reciprocal one. Landscapes in which we evolve not only influence us as a subject, but the perception of the landscape can also be a projection of our inner world onto it. According to the concept of topoanalysis developed by

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Your research centres around the notion of exile. What drove you to this topic? First and foremost, it is a condition in which I was born. My parents both fled the war in Lebanon in the eighties and after that we moved from one country to another. I was born in New York, lived in France, Indonesia, Malaysia, Tunisia... I was not only constantly living in exile, but also with a constant feeling of displacement. During my first semester at the Master, the focus was on subjectivity and our perspective as a filmmaker onto the world. I realized that as a subject, I have always evolved in the “in-between”: in between countries, cultures, languages, passports… I thought of this in-between space as a third space, at the junction of two spaces.

What I retain from my first year was the idea that there is a multiplicity, a multilayered potential encapsulated in that idea of periphery. The periphery is always multiple, whereas the centre is one. I started thinking more of peripher(ies) and the centre, and their relationship to each other, how they inform each other. How do you define being decentred? Being decentred underlines that there is a centre (of gravity) and as such, it is defined by it. Being decentred means living in multiplicity. I see the centre as a place of power and dominance. I also see it as a subject of interest. In my research I used the concept of ‘decentred’, and I explore it in the two

Gaston Bachelard, human identity is intrinsically related to the places people have inhabited throughout their lives, with memories being stored in our physical surrounding environment. Related to this idea, Merleau-Ponty perceived landscapes as the homeland of our thoughts. Here, I find a lot of inspiration in the Impressionism movement, which

became only possible as a form of painting when painting was “freed” from the imperatives of representation after the invention of photography. Painters were finally able to express and transpose their inner angst onto their surrounding landscapes. Landscapes never felt as charged as through the brush of Turner or Monet. To come back to ERRANS, the woman in the film, whose presence is manifested through a voice over, is looking for the traces of this man she is looking for in the landscape, as if parts of him had rubbed off onto his surroundings.

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The Fukeiron proposition is central in my approach to filmmaking. By turning the camera around 180 degrees, the idea is to expose state power and systemic violence which is necessarily embedded in the landscape. The thing missing for me in this approach are the impressionistic qualities that can be extracted in a landscape. If the outer world is nothing but a projection of our inner world onto it, then filming landscapes can also pertain to exposing an interiority. Beyond the political scope, it is something that I look for when I point my camera.

How do you use the periphery as landscape in the research projects you present during the Artistic Research Week? One of the outputs of my research is a three-channel installation called Dreams of a Wandering Octopus about a thousand-year-old forest in Lebanon. In this project I use the forest, which is on the edges of the mountain that is in the middle of Lebanon, as a peripheral landscape. The coastal parts of Lebanon contain its social and political centre. Instead of going on the streets where the revolutions were happening, I decided to go very far away to question and think about these events from the periphery. I was hiking in the forest between trees that are 2000 years old and imagining what they would tell me if they could speak. Part of the background research I did for this forest project was also looking into how forests are organized underground. Here, a whole network of structures is all functioning horizontally.

Trees reroute resources to parts of the forest that are missing them. Not because they share any socialist ideology, but more because if one of them dies, they all are exposed to more elements and have fewer chances to survive. It is better that all of us stand together, and it would be interesting to look at how nature or natural organizations are structured to rethink how we relate to one another and to the environment as well. In a way, a form of ‘political botanism’. My second project is a feature film project entitled The Night Came About. The Night Came About is a film I have been carrying with me for the past couple of years. It has been fed by my night excursions across Beirut over the years, observing the night and people I would encounter only there. Beirut is a small city, overcrowded, cramped, compartmentalized and where one cannot escape the constriction of conventions, where anonymity is impossible. The night offers a space of emancipation and a place where people of different social pockets can meet. Without idealizing it, the night was the only place where I could encounter over the course of the same night Palestinians living in refugee camps, university students, foreigners on a humanitarian mission, people from different spheres, class and worlds, people that didn’t have a place in the daylight. At dawn, I would watch these fortuitous groups separate, each disappearing into their burrows. I began to think of a night which, unlike the others, due to a certain accumulation in the atmosphere, suddenly transforms: Time stood still or rather, daybreak never came. An eternal night which could only end when the accumulation of tensions of all the violence stored in the bodies and in the memory of the landscape and its people would gather and turn towards the same horizon. The night would overflow, taking over the day, irrevocably changing the order of the old world maintained by the ineluctable succession of days and nights. In the end, isn’t this the essence of a revolution? A vertical breach in the horizontal course of time which, like a seismic wave, deviates its course in irrevocable, unforeseeable, and unimaginable ways? My third project was conceptualized during the production of Dreams of a Wandering Octopus. During my research, I started looking at different literature and scientific books written about forests, their ecosystem and particularly about how they organize, communicate, and distribute their resources underground through their roots and the web of mycelia that covers entire forests. I thought of ways to film or record this underground activity. As such, I decided to bury 35mm film rolls under the different areas and forests I was filming. At first, it was more of an experiment. I soon realized that the chemical reactions taking place differed according to the humidity level, the fungi structures, pH of the soil etc… The images that came out were like complex impressionist and abstract patterns. I thought to myself that if images are the result chemical reactions triggered and sculpted by light on film, these were also images resulting from chemical reactions except underground, without my intervention, a sort of a recording of the forest’s “subconscious” … Interview by Lianne Kersten

PROJECTS Dreams of a Wandering Octopus (2021, 21min, 3-channel video installation) I watch you disappear behind the rocky hill as you walk lightly away, looking for your way back through the forest we got lost in. You asked: Do we come to nature to preserve our limits or to surpass them? Three voices unfold over three screens as a woman plunges into the depth of a thousand-year-old enchanted forest. production The Camelia Committee with the support of the Beirut Art Center and the Master of Film editing Carine Doumit texts Mira Adoumier, Carine Doumit and Mohamed Abdel Gawad cinematography Mark Khalifé and Ramzi Hibri sound recording Tatiana el Dahdah sound design Jad Atoui voices Ziad Chakaroun & Carine Doumit coloring Chrystel Elias

script Mira Adoumier, Carine Doumit Recipient of Cinema Development fund by the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture

Impressions from the Underground (in-development, 35mm stills) Projections of 35mm still films buried for 2 to 4 months under trees located in different areas of in the thousand-year-old cedar forest in Mount-Lebanon.

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The Night Came About (2023-24, 90 min) The sun is setting for the last time over Beirut and the city plunges into the night. As the characters unfold one by one, they reveal a landscape ravaged by past wars and more recent traumatic events. The night is prolonged, never-ending, eternal. As they dance the night away, a strident sound infiltrates the sonic scape. The ones that can hear it seem to recognize each other. As they slowly gather, they set in motion the dawn of a new day.

With the help of Onno Petersen and Charbel Saade

Rami El-Nihawi

RAMI EL-NIHAWI

LIFE IS BUT A FANTASY

Rami El-Nihawi, born in Beirut in 1982, graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree from the Fine Arts Institute at the Lebanese University. He participated in various film and performing arts productions that focused on the social and political questions facing the ‘post-war’ generations in the Middle East. In 2011, with a group of independent filmmakers, he established Sakado, a production company that served as a platform for various artistic productions and collaborations and where he had the chance to play different roles, as an actor, writer, editor, director, and producer. rami.nihawi@gmail.com

I understand that before you studied at the Fine Arts Institute, you were a political activist in Lebanon. I was part of a generation looking for new forms of social and political organizations and for new spaces to maneuver within the reality we were born in. Our ambitions, at that time, were collapsing and reached their dead-end with the emergence of the toxic formula that was imposed on the whole world since the war on Iraq: “either with or against us”. A formula that keeps no space for any opposition to appear. So, when I decided to go to the Fine Arts Institute, I was looking for a lens that could help me reposition myself toward the defeat that we were facing as a generation. In the Fine Arts Institute, I found a magical space and the tools that helped me to deal with my defeats, my frustrations, and my confusions, to rearrange them, and to adopt different perspectives and ways to confront myself and my society with the social and political questions we are facing.

Let’s zoom in on the concepts of Exile and Home; how do you define these terms? I am using Home and Exile as titles that could represent the human experiences of longing and belonging. Starting from this understanding I am questioning the social and political aspects around those experiences – topics such as alienation, marginalization, privileges, and solidarity. In the globalized structure of power that we live in, experiences of longing and belonging are less linked to where you are now or where you came from. Exile is not anymore used as a punishment that requires forcing an individual to leave the

place that he called home. Marginalizing, isolating, neutralizing, arresting, or even assassinating an individual is much easier and much more effective than exile’s punishment. Exile, as a geographic exclusion, became a voluntary choice. The effective use of exile nowadays is in forcing entire communities and social groups to leave their homes, like what is happening in Palestine and Syria. As for individuals, the globalized structure of power developed different methods to make them feel exiled without the burden of moving them geographically. You are exiled by being banned from any power that could influence your surroundings, and that’s more than enough.

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Hi Rami. Given that your research is about exile and home, should we start at the beginning? I was born a few months before the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, in a family that is a mix of different religious and social backgrounds and different cultural and political affiliations and ambitions. The first eight years of my life were the final years of the Lebanese civil war, which continued to affect my life even after its sudden “end” in 1990. Until 1990, both my parents were politically active, my father was an Arab Nationalist of Syrian Muslim descent and my mother a Communist of a Lebanese Christian family. Within this exceptional mosaic in Lebanese society, I was always pushed to be the “Syrian” in my Lebanese circle and the “Lebanese” in my Syrian one. “The Muslim” for the Christians and “the Christian” for the Muslims. The war experience accompanied by the continuous otherness experience were the main factors that affected my childhood and influenced my research and work.

In your understanding Exile and Home are about internal displacement. You did move to Amsterdam. Did this affect your conceptualization of those terms in any way? I made the decision to move from Beirut because I needed some distance from the direct impacts of the Middle-East’s struggles on my life and work. I also needed to look back and reflect on everything I had produced during the fifteen

RAMI EL-NIHAWI

years of my artistic practice and to take the time to analyze it and reach conclusions in order to create different working conditions. When I came to Amsterdam, I was expecting a different experience of alienation and marginalization to appear. So, I can say, indeed, I was looking for a new, or let’s say wider, meaning or understanding of those concepts and I guess that’s what I got. How do you define the concept of belonging in this wider understanding? CLR James’s said, "Exile is always a one-way trip even if you do end up returning". From the geographical-exclusion aspect of exile, this is true. The geographical return of someone to the place that he once felt like he belongs to, would most probably evoke a conflict between his memories about the place, and the place’s present reality. Trying to get back to our memories; images, smells, sounds, and moments that we preserved of “home”, is not the same as trying to get back home. It’s an attempt to travel back-in-time, which will fail sooner or later. Through questioning what constituted the feelings of belonging that we lost, we can maybe find how to build those feelings back. Exile is more than a geographical exclusion; it is a rupture in time, a crack in the narrative of the exiled self. So instead of looking to get back to a certain place, believing in the illusion of getting back home, I am looking for new connections that can create new homes and a new understanding of those concepts. To belong means for me today, to find my ways of making, of producing, of influencing, and get influenced by my surroundings. I think I feel at home when I am in an organic network of being, surrounded by a community that sees and appreciates the value of my making. The master is focused on research in and through cinema. How would you describe your work in these terms? It wasn’t so surprising to see the same topics I am researching through cinema appearing in the process of analyzing my previous productions and their working condition; alienation, marginalization, privileges... The main aim of the entertainment industry machine is to create consumers for the market. An artist is confronted with marginalization, control of production, and endless passages of filtering systems – from the workshops you partake in at school, to the festivals where your film is screened. Even when you try to challenge the market structure from its inside, it will either swallow you or exclude you. Thus, the in-cinema questions that I am researching are related to spectatorship, and the need for the film as an end product in cinema. The end product for me today is a market necessity more than an artistic or social one. The necessity of Arts for the artists and for the societies, from my perspective, is the need for the imagination as a tool to reflect and to discuss our social and political taboos. The real question for me today is how to liberate my work

from the usual illusions and limitations, of the entertainment market and to build a more organic economic, social, and political working frame. Interview by Lianne Kersten

WORKS IN PROGRESS My research deals with the theme of exile and the re-appropriation of our narratives as a way to overcome this traumatic experience. I’m developing those in the form of a trilogy, using an interactive medium of film-making. That allows me to avoid the trap of an end-product film and to bring the audience’s attention to the cinematographic experience, and the debate that this kind of experience is intended to provoke. It is an attempt to destabilize the spectators’ passive

consumer position by involving them more in the film-making process, and to confront them with their responsibilities as partners in that creative process. THE TRILOGY: Three films that will be presented through the interactive medium of film-making: “Until further notice”, deals with the Lebanese “organized chaos” through the story of three characters: Yusuf, who returns to Lebanon after thirty years of exile, and who has been hit by Mahmoud's car on the day of his arrival. Mahmoud, the salesperson who is hiding his poor eyesight from his employers for fear of losing his job. And Ayoub, the witness of the accident who will be dragged into a series of events leading him to reconsider his emigration plans.

“Life is but a fantasy”, deals with the global “organized chaos” through an observational film about dreams and nightmares, and their accumulations that indicate that someone’s dream, often, could be someone else’s nightmare. Ali, dreaming about escaping hell and reaching Europe in order to have a safe and peaceful life. Alek, struggling with his nightmares about migrants and refugees invading his society. And X, the observer who is trying to use lucid dreams as a method to find a solution for these conflicting desires and fears.

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“Possible memories”, deals with the Middle-Eastern “organized chaos”, through a making-of movie that follows the fiasco of a filmmaker and his producer in carrying out a documentary project about three female activists from different generations and countries. Salma, a Lebanese young activist who is following the traces of an old forgotten letter that has come in her way. Layla, an Egyptian belly dancer, in her forties, trying to make her choice between the Islamist or the military candidate for the presidential election. And Khadija, an old Palestinian militant, and owner of the letter that Salma found in Beirut. She will find herself in an urgent mission of reconstructing false memories to change History.

DIALOGUES OF EXILED My research also focuses on the conditions of film production and distribution, which has led me to propose a collaborative online platform to help member artists and their wider community to regain independence from traditional institutions in the creation process. Dialogues of exiled, a title referencing Berthold Brecht, is a platform where artists and their audience, believing that the role of arts is to stimulate discussions around the subjects that concern their societies, are invited to be part of a community where they can develop and produce artistic projects within an open democratic environment. The platform will be composed of three layers of accessibility, the first one being for the public users to read and watch the different elements (texts, videos, lectures, reference library) that explain the idea behind the creation of the platform. The second layer is for the community members, who will have access to all the above-mentioned pages and, in addition, to the community’s library of projects in development including the elements provided by the production units about each project. Last but not least, the third layer of accessibility will be limited to the production units themselves, to share the data they are working on.

SARAH FERNANDEZ

Sarah Fernandez

FROM SCANNING TO SKINNING: HOW TO SWIM IN LAYERS OF VIRTUAL SCUM A (SCAM) RESEARCH ON DIGITAL SPECTRUMS

Sarah Fernandez, also called SEVC, is not a digital native, she was born in the early 90s. In a time just before the quick spread of digital culture that fascinates her today. She graduated in Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University Pantheon-Sorbonne where she took a special interest in questioning the logic and reality of our so-called ‘best of all possible worlds’. Her areas of interest circulate around virtual realities and speculative philosophy with an affinity for hybridization and anarchism. She took her obsessions in the visual realms and pursued her research through art when she joined the postgraduate program in the Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires. There she produced several animations that already used a mix of different film formats and techniques. Since 2019, Sevc is investigating new digital ecologies. Through her practice of 3d scanning and modeling she is fictionalizing our shared world to displace it in the virtual realms where new truths can be unveiled. The raw, imperfect and seemingly incomplete outcomes of her experiments offer an experience of estrangement to the viewer by exposing and demystifying current technologies. Her latest piece focuses on the scanning of a female body and the portrayal of her hometown wetlands of Camargue. IG: sevcfernandez sevcfz@gmail.com

Scanning means either looking carefully at something in detail or overlooking something quickly to get the general idea. It is linking two different speeds and degrees of attention in one act. It is also defined as looking through something to take an image of an inside. Although, even if we might be able to fold and unfold space digitally by mapping the world, we cannot render its insides, its guts. Only the skin of it. Even in medical images, what we see is an ethereal extrapolation of data, not the insides as they are if we were to cut open the body.

Lidar, the acronym for ‘Light detection and ranging’, is a laser-based method that extracts data (ranges) by measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. It is mapping the heights, the up and downs of an object based on its coordinates. It is a time-space method that allows the passage from the solid state into its a fluid, digital state. This mutation leaves behind traces and impurities. In this process of digital revelation something has been caught. It is as if by undergoing this transformation from one state of matter to another, back and forth, a new kind of materiality has been secreted. Meshing, that is to say unfolding the network of textured data collected and extrapolated, creates a digital matter that has the double intensity of a mesh and a fluid. In the manner of an undercurrent elusive by nature, yet creating its own flows and shapes.

This transformation, almost an alchemical process, takes advantage of the in-betweenness of the medium to reveal errors and glitches. Instead of smoothing and erasing them, I decided looking at those anomalies and even highlighting them. Polishing the cyberspace as something sleek, clear and clean is an act of dissimulation, of judgment of what is acceptable, of what should be shown and what should be hidden. Seeing digital spaces as a mere reproduction of our world: that's the real scam. Instead, I think of it as a spectrum. An extension of our reality in another realm, under a different regime. Since it is a continuum, those dimensions are communicating between each other. Indeed, 3D models are more

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With the rapid democratisation of 3D visualization and representation tools we start to integrate this new photographic style in our contemporary aesthetic and make new use of it.

malleable than our material world. By manipulating them, I reinvent for myself new ways of relating to the world. Creating a virtual world means fictionalising our own shared world. Just as good fiction can contain more truth than documentary, what is now called worldling (creating parallel, convergent or divergent worlds that diverge from our physical one) can unveil some deep truths about our world that we often miss by living in it.

Because decentralizing does not equal erasing, the human figure still haunts the land. In fact, we encounter many humanoids wandering in and out the digital swamp. Each human-like figure embodies a different aspect of the human experience.

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By showing the inaccuracy and inadequacy of the world I’m creating, I’m being more honest than those working toward a believable simulation.

The installation you will walk in, is a wild tale aimed at decentering our human perception. A speculative Camargue made of dreams of new ecological awareness, new relations between human and non-human. That of the insects, animals, vegetal, elemental or of the statues and avatars.

This meshy fluid aesthetic is that of the primordial gruel, or the original world of clay and shadows. And it is not a coincidence that the landscape portrayed in the VR-installation is that of the moist and misty swamps of my homeland Camargue. Fertile and troubled waters where fiction and reality dissolve into each other like the earth, water and sky, never totally fully one or the other. This scattered portrait looks at the human from a displaced point of view, through glimpses that never fixe those humanoid shapes, but allows them to mutate and extend into something else.

Maybe by not looking straight and hard, but through the distorted and ever-changing medium of the digital could we finally intercept something too subtle to be captured. With the use of a motion-capture system and the interplay between the physical and digital we will attempt to do so, in a series of live performances.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

This project was born and grew in discussion and collaboration with Ailin Formi and was made possible with the support of the VRSpace and the help of Jilt van Moorst.

Vasili Vikhliaev

THE UNLIKABLE I

VASILI VIKHLIAEV

ENGAGEMENT WITH THE FOREIGN ELEMENT

Vasili Vikhlaev (1983 Moscow) is a Russian born, German based filmmaker. His artistic background is music, documentary directing and editing. He graduated from ZeLIG School for Documentary in Bolzano, Italy and was part of the Script-Lab (Drehbuchwerkstatt) at the Munich Film Academy, where he is a part time editing mentor. Vasili uses the camera as a tool to bump into, confront and wander around areas of himself and his surroundings. Can the camera be blamed for this unlikable character? Can the camera be likable itself? Vasili uses filmmaking to explore family relationships through play and dialogue. vasiliv@gmx.de vasiliv3.wixsite.com/researchpublication

THE UNLIKABLE I - DEVELOPMENT OF A CHARACTER I was taught two ways to breathe during my early childhood: while speaking Russian and while playing the accordion. Then we moved to Germany, and I kept playing the accordion. The German language fought for supremacy, twisting itself around my mother tongue, eventually trading places. I noticed it for the first time when I involuntarily cursed in German: Scheisse! сука!

the alpha douche bag / the jealous lover / the condescending brother / the pick-up artist / the coward / the patriarchal asshole What is his morning routine like? Does he skip breakfast, like I do? Does he do his own laundry or does he ask his mother, because he could never be bothered to learn how to use the washing machine? Who are these characters? What are these labels? Did they exist before cinema was invented? Were they part of me before I discovered filmmaking?

My foreign self appeared after my self became foreign. The accordion remained the solid, unmovable language.

As a child I never knew what to do with my hands when I got nervous. Trading the soviet-bunkers for posh Munich made my hands very nervous. Everyone seemed aloof and so effortlessly stylish. I never knew whether my clothes or hairstyle were cool enough for this cool new home. The camera became a kind of cure against these insecurities. Something to hold onto, to focus on and most importantly, to hide behind. The camera became a shield, a protection and an instrument to dream of proximity - at a distance. Filmmaking became a distancing practice for me. Investigating childhood memories, already at a distance, through the lens of my distancing camera: somehow, I felt my memories come closer. When I was a Moscow-City child I had a gorgeous red warrior-shield, made of cheap Soviet plastic (it smelled of iced motor oil). My best friend had exactly the same shield. We used to run into each other with our shields. Whoever fell backwards, lost. (I usually won, but not always)

My artistic research is like this: I use my camera as a shield to run against all that scares me: - the block of ice that grew between me and my brother and between me and other people (and between me and my self) and: - the parts of me that would prefer to be forgotten: the alpha douche bag, the jealous lover, the condescending brother, the coward, the guilty, the shameful… the unlikable character, the despicable me-man, formed at the intersections of capitalism, xenophobia, patriarchal gender roles and private insecurities. I use filmmaking as an interrogation technique to explore the brutal reality of social roles and hierarchies as they manifest themselves in me, my family structures and all other relationships.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

The first time I met my inner asshole was when saw myself on film footage after I had turned the camera on myself for the first time (a year ago). I cringed when I saw my stonecold face next to the vulnerability on the face of my little brother sitting beside me. Who is that condescending prick?

The camera is more than just a passive observer. Sometimes the protective layer of the lens is needed to face the things that make your hands sweat: the parts of yourself that drive you mad or cause you shame. The unlikable character appears on film footage. Where does he go from there?

A game for boys who could not hug and had to use a form of violence to experience some kind of bodily contact. The impact was the highlight of the game, the ersatz intimacy. The impact was the purpose and the shield was the point of connection. The shield enabled the impact in the first place - by cushioning the violence of the collision. Just like boxing gloves are the necessary condition for full contact fighting. (What I loved most about boxing was the heartfelt hug of your opponent after the fight) ((I often wonder why I cannot hug my brother?)) “When I feel an inspiration, I die of fear because I know that once again I’ll be traveling alone in a world that repels me. But my characters are not to blame and I treat them as best I can.“ Clarice Lispector from A Breath of Life.

Something happened between me and my brother around that time. I don’t know what exactly. Our estrangement runs deep and is layered. I’m peeling a half-rotten onion.

WORK IN PROGRESS: MY BROTHER’S NAME IS VOVA

VASILI VIKHLIAEV

Can I use filmmaking as a tool to start the dialogue? |I record a video letter for Vova and let him reply.

Vova: Could you maybe not smoke? Me: Relax. It’s just smoke. nothing will happen to you... (I never even look at him)

Me: Let’s reverse the dynamics. You teach me salsa dancing. You’ll be the master, I’ll be the student. I want you to be in charge! Vova: If that’s what you want… (…) Vova: 1-2-3- and on 4 you stay still. The fourth beat is a pause. (…) Vova (smile): Because, you know, Cubans love to take breaks. Me (smug smirk): that’s racist. Vova (flustered): No, it’s not. I mean, everybody likes to take breaks.

Vova remembers our stepfather calling us “faggots” because we played with dolls. (I don‘t remember that...) he also remembers me smashing his toys shortly after. (I don‘t remember that either...) ((Was that the birth of the alpha douche bag?))

I’m filming our family cat being gentle and caring to my brother. Does it make my filming “gentle and caring” by association?

Another big inspiration for me was Ben Almassi’s paper Feminist Reclamations of Normative Masculinity: On Democratic Manhood, Feminist Masculinity, and Allyship Practices (2015) Almassi suggests to adapt the practice of allyship to the feminist cause that is grounded in feminist values as a new form of normative masculinity. An ally is a supporting character who doesn’t claim to be at the center of the struggle. He occupies the margins and takes pride in helping to achieve justice and equality.

the good-hearted saint-like figure is the main character of the novel, even though he always plays the supporting role in the stories of his brothers. He doesn’t drive the plot, he reacts, supports and analyses. On Wikipedia Alyosha is described as “immensely likable”, but rumor has it that Dostoevsky planned on turning Alyosha into a revolutionary against the Czar in the sequel novel, one that Dostoyevsky could not write because he died. Alyosha’s transformation from a monk to a revolutionary was never written, but it makes sense, considered his position as the radical ally.

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The theoretical foundation of my work is critical theory and feminism. bell hook’s book The Will to Change has drastically influenced my thoughts about the toxic mask of patriarchal masculinity and has fueled my desire to rethink and transform my masculinity without giving it up entirely.

I want to understand what is the potential of the (immensely) unlikable character. Can he be an ally, a supporting character as well? My research is still ongoing.

This echoes Dostoevsky’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the author makes clear that Alyosha,

VICTORINE VAN ALPHEN

Victorine Van Alphen

CHOREOGRAPHING MODES OF BEING Audiovisual artist, philosopher & curator Victorine van Alphen (1988) creates trans-media works that (mis)use and extrapolate current techno-cultural trends into futuristic experiences. She combines media to imagine beyond ‘western’ dichotomies such as nature-culture, rational-sensual, control-surrender, material-immaterial, and real-virtual. To create (digital) life - beyond these dichotomies - Van Alphen set out a radical research journey and found procedural technologies she now uses to grow ‘cyborgs’ in which complexity and chaos are crucial for the ‘aliveness’ of these creatures. She embedded these cyborgs in an immersive ‘institutional-ritual’: IVF-X posthuman parenting in hybrid reality, selected for the Golden Calf competition ‘Digital Culture’ by the Netherlands Film Festival. One moment her work seduces you visually, the next it challenges you intellectually, and yet at another time it requires your bodily or social response. This way, the works require you to shift through various modes of perceiving the work, or modes of being as Van Alphen terms them. Van Alphen graduated in philosophy and interdisciplinary science, while performing as a dancer and experimenting with audiences as curator. She then studied Audiovisual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy through which she received a Scholarship at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art (NYC). Her trans-disciplinary approach sharpened into her method ‘choreographing modes of being’. victorinevanalphen@icloud.com www.victorinevanalphen.nl

Process sketch problematizing the abandoned body in VR. (Using a cut out of a naked poet Sieger Baljon in ‘De Achtste Dag’ - a transmedia performance in which Victorine van Alphen collaboratively explored the human desire to imagine the future.)

CHOREOGRAPHING MODES OF BEING How does this magazine choreograph you? How do you hold it, what movements does it allow you to make? Do you desire distance to it, or intimacy with it? What mode of being do you enter reading these words? A mode of intellectual analysis? A playful mode? Or maybe a dreamy associative state? What senses are you focused on? Your sight? Touch? What parts of your body are active? Mainly your eyes, your head? Do you think only with your head? Do you hear your own voice reading these words?

tions-on-an-iPad]. Every minor decision may prove essential to choreographing you. What if I adjust the light temperature? Show or censure a close-up of a vagina in the middle of labour? I may seduce you to go in reading mode through offering you this magazine. But I do not have control over what you think or feel. Your interpretation is yours, I need you to fill that in. I’ll listen. I’ll listen disguised in a holographic suit as your guide through the experience: to hear or even feel how you respond. It taught me a lot about you.

I notice my awareness is focused on my eyes, or rather on the sentences that I read through these eyes. I hear an inner voice reading these words, is it hearing? At times, thoughts appear, related thoughts, flashing inside of me like condensed films. At times I am distracted by or simply aware of my surroundings through sounds. I notice discomfort of my bodily position, or the texture of paper. You might be very different, but I noticed that the closer I observe myself, the closer I get to understanding you. Sofa = Software The observations above are of course not for the sake of a mindfulness exercise but to understand how specific technologies offer themselves to be (ab)used and perceived by us: how do they choreograph us? It’s the first step of my approach to (upcoming) technologies and media. I treat a divan - which choreographs my audience to lie down and be more inward - the same as I treat procedural software which choreographs me to think in processes. Now - after I observed how we change through technologies - follows step two: I explore ways to choreograph you through speciﬁc modes of being, i.e. by transitioning you from the mode of [reading-peacefully] to [needing-to-decide-on-an-ethically-ambiguous-question-through-intuitively-moving-a-slider-between-two-equally-important-op-

MASTER OF FILM 2021

Now, the next step: How would I answer these questions for you? I would put myself in your shoes, use myself as a guinea pig to imagine or rather experience your situation: I pick up the magazine, hold it and observe myself: what senses and body-parts are activated? How does reading allow me to act or compel me not to act at all? I observe closely what it allows me to do, think, feel. What mode of being does it put me in?

So, what do I want? I intend to choreograph not dancers, but you directly, and for that I use technologies - from sofa’s to softwares. I embed these technologies in social contexts you are familiar with: something that looks like a waiting room, a therapy session, a party. Then I invite you to play with its forms and rules, using technology. You easily accept the social forms you know, even if I put in absurd elements. If I look like an institution, you will fill in my forms, navigate my interface. Why would I choreograph you through specific modes of being? I aim to take you through an experience that has many layers, since you are complex: feeling it is not the same as doing it is not the same as seeing it is not the same as making it. So I take you carefully, smoothly, radically through all these roles. By choreographing a transition - from for example ‘feeling-while-watching-a-visceral-video’ to ‘choosing-the-skin-color-for-your-posthuman-offspring’ - I belief one role reveals something about the other, leaves you with a gap to bridge. Your gap-bridging-need, your meaning-making-mechanism is my artistic material.

IVF-X: POSTHUMAN PARENTING IN HYBRID REALITY Is it a CyborgBabyClinic? An institution? An immersive reality ritual? An audiovisual installation? A human guided performance? A glimpse into a possible future?

Phase 1 Motivation room ‘Actor’

Phase 2 Donor room ‘Creator’

VICTORINE VAN ALPHEN

*the right screen shows Motherhood/Analog, a visceral YouTube-footage based film exploring vulnerability and physicality of biological reproduction.

THE BIRTH OF IVF-X When my friends started making babies, as artist of reproductional age I got curious about how to artistically reflect on life-making and how it felt holding those unique dysfunctional babies in my arms… to me they were radiating presence. A fundamental human quality we tend to forget about while being functional. After making a few essayistic videos (one of which ended up in the IVF-X Motivation room) I learnt that shooting a video was not the mode of making that the subject required. Could I instead explore the presence of a human being, through creating it, visually, artistically? Would it be possible to create a post-human presence? Perhaps a digital one? I set out to create a ‘living’ digital presence not because I thought it was possible but because I assumed it was not. To me everything could be digitized except presence. Presence had attracted me as an 8-year old to performers, becoming one myself later. ‘Human presence needs physicality’ was my assumption. Nine months of audiovisual experiments later my newborn cyborg babies have proven my skepticism towards a digital presence wrong. Or rather, it was you - as interacting audience - that have proven me wrong when you started feeling for your cyborg babies, forming bonds with them and calling them 'alive'. When I asked you to compare the cyborgs’ presence to the presence of a chair, a screen, a fish, a human…. you replied: “Somewhere between human and amoeba”. Or “Like an alien” or “Alive for sure but it is not like anything else”. Rarely did you feel nothing, sometimes you would sing to it or say: “It is mine somehow” or even “I think I could love it”.

Phase 3 Encounter room ‘Procreator'

What is IVF-X? Speculating on the future of human reproduction, IVF-X is a post-human reproduction experience where you can ‘breed’ and meet your own Cyborg-baby. As one of the visitors put it: “It's an immersive Black Mirror-like sci-fi experience”. You enter the experience alone or as a couple for 20 minutes, going through 3 rooms/phases. Each room requires you to take a slightly different role: you are being guided through different 'modes of being' with the use of various social-theatrical situations and digital technologies that condition your perceptual, intellectual and emotional disposition: you are invited to think, perceive and act differently in each of the rooms. Phase 1 # Conditions a visceral but passive experience before requiring you to act. You are confronted with a video about the vulnerability of analog reproduction next to an abstract simulation of digital evolution processes. After this your motivation, including your personal reproduction desires and dilemmas, are discussed in an intimate intake. Phase 2 # Enables an ethical, yet strangely private and intuitive experience (due to its slider-based interface which confuses the intellectual decision due to the tactile component). In the light of the digital womb (video projection) you are being asked by the retro-futuristic iPad interface to make crucial choices. Phase 3 # Focuses on an immersive encounter with your digital cyborg in hybrid reality where VR and physical realities merge. Your cyborg is digitally ‘grown' for you. It's based on your choices but processed by a mysterious visual-simulation procedure. Why Cyborgs? Existing beyond binaries. The last phase of the encounter is essential to the IVF-X. The experiencers meet their cyborg babies - creatures existing on a spectrum between the uncanny and cute, between system and organism. This type of ambiguity can only be experienced, as it shatters binary distinctions in our language, leaving the audience fascinated by but unable to describe their cyborg babies. Dystopian or emancipatory? Although I ‘market’ IVF-X as an installation in which your cyborg can be customized, due to the procedural technology involved the result is never as expected. IVF-X is an (un)controllable creation process strangely resembling both artist-hood as well as parenthood: a tangible vision on the future. Welcome to visit us 16-30 October in LAB111, as part of the Imagine Film Festival.

TECHNO-TOPIA: HOW TO MAKE A CYBORG CLINIC? What drives me is my desire to discover that which goes beyond my human imagination. Therefor I chose to be guided by technologies: follow their internal and external logics no matter what absurdities and glitches they would lead to (see image to the right). I decided to study for six months at the special effects & immersive media department of the Film Academy to find the right soft- and hardwares. It was a long journey through voxels and squabs, until I found the procedural visual technology named ‘Houdini’.

Creating the ‘Creator’. In retrospect, making the cyborg was only the beginning. What proved the next crucial step was to transfer my role as 'creator' to my audience. This invited you to explore the layered subject of human reproduction with me: (Why)/(How) do I want (what) offspring? What will the future of human reproduction look like? What dilemmas, and possibilities will it enable? And last but not least: can I relate to a digital being? In IVF-X you are confronted with these questions implicitly and explicitly. You decide. Creating the box & beyond: Conditioning the encounter Observing how people react to cyborgs in our Virtual Reality tests, we quickly noticed their immediate urge to touch them. The cyborgs being virtual there was nothing to touch, and our test subjects’ hands were travelling through the thin air, diminishing the sense of presence. In response to that,

*Crystal-like white tubular structure around the box, designed through the ab-use of ‘vertex displacement’ in VR

the director of the VR Academy generously offered to buy high-tech haptic gloves that would add a sense of touch to the experience. But the experiment made me realize that this whole encounter wasn't about touching the cyborg - proving or disproving its existence. Not unlike the first date with a stranger - it had to be subtle and precarious. Would you touch someone during your very first encounter? I realized that for me the experience of someone’s presence is beyond touch. And so, we designed the ‘hybrid incubator’ at the centre of the Incubator-room. This physical black box became the ‘enriching limitation’ containing the virtual child - a thing you can touch with your bare hand and also see in virtual reality. Both an obstruction and a comforting presence. What followed next was the process of tweaking every single aspect of the experience. Such things as the light temperature in VR or the carafes with water to welcome you at the entrance, all proved crucial for choreographing your expectations, and thus the whole experience. The project that started with several video essays, became IVF-X: a human-guided 'institutional' role-play, with ethically dubious iPad-based interfaces, embedded in an intimate audiovisual installation. All designed to condition an experience of meeting your own custom-made cyborg baby in hybrid reality.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

After seeing Nipple Erotica by Houdini artist Ferguson, I realized this software could allow me to create the deeply ambiguous cyborgs I aimed for. Houdini uses physics-based rendering and procedures. By adding chaos to the procedures and evolving complexity from simulations, the cyborg could ‘grow’ rather than simply be designed. To me, most appealing about reality is its infinite detail which lies in its ‘imperfection’, its nuance. A bruise shows the complexity and thus vulnerability and depth of our skin, a small world of materials and time interacting. Based on simulation, Houdini brought me lifelike ‘imperfection’.

From personal to universal Only when The New York Times, Forbes Central America, The Nigerian Post and many more journalists picked up on IVF-X and published articles about it, did I realize how contemporary and universal the subject of reproduction really is. Disguised as an IVF-X guide in a holographic suit, I was thankful to witness the intimate desires and dilemmas of cyborg-parents, who have let me eavesdrop on their process of (mediated) creation.

THE CYBORG MATRIX: A METHOD FOR THE AMBIGUOUS. A cyborg is popularly described to be ‘an organism in which technology is integrated’ such as a ‘human-machine’. My cyborgs rather combine human aspects in post-human digital forms. Inspired by Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) I take cyborgs to be creatures that combine cultural dichotomies present within ourselves. Therefore IVF-X aspires to defy these dominant (western) dichotomies by creating ambiguous digital beings: whose existence merges artificial - natural, male - female, material - immaterial, organism - system. I used the cyborg matrix to communicate with my team of specialists what we are looking for: tweaking the cyborgs, materials and movements to feel/look somewhere in the ambiguous and subjective middle.

Viktor Zahtila

VIKTOR ZAHTILA

PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION

Viktor Zahtila (b. Pula, Croatia) is an activist, a journalist and a filmmaker. In his teens and early 20's he was a prominent LGBT activist in Croatia. He also worked as a political journalist in various print and digital media. In 2017 he was named the best young film critic by the Croatian Society of Film Critics. In 2018 he received a B.A. in Film and TV Directing at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. His short student film After-party, where he documented the last days of his romantic relationship, had a healthy run in the festival circuit and won several awards. Viktor uses his artistic practice as a vehicle to explore sexuality, including his own, advocating sexual and emotional liberation and a cultural shift, especially in the audio-visual representation of sex, bodies and interpersonal relationships, as a precondition for any kind of progress and transformation of our sexuality. laerem@gmail.com

I came out as gay publicly when I was 17, after a brutal homophobic attack. When someone is hitting you it's hard to say “fuck off”. That's what activism represented to me at the time - not social change, not emancipation, but an opportunity to stand up for myself and say a giant fuck you to a society that fermented this type of violence. I appeared on TV and in the press, which, for a while, made me the public face of homosexuality in Croatia. Having people from my neighborhood know who and what I was, meant that I had to take certain precautions. My route back home from school was full of winding detours and sudden turns, so as to avoid any possible confrontation. I often took a path that led through a dimly lit park with a single yellow tinted light. As I was returning home one night I spotted a man in his 20's or 30's – it was hard to tell because a hoodie obscured his face – standing by a tree, his head turned towards me. It took me a moment to realize that he was holding his cock in his hand. “Come hold it while I piss”, he said menacingly, his voice stopping me in my tracks like a rabbit in the headlights. I so desperately wanted to go down him that my knees were shaking, but fear got the best of me. After a moment of hesitation that seemed like an eternity, I walked away. When I came home I was so horny that I masturbated until my cock got sore. I imagined him forcing me to suck him off, as a ‘punishment’ for being gay. For the next few nights

I gradually expanded my fantasy: he would cum all over my face, then would piss in my mouth, then call me a fag and even threaten to beat me up. Now, how did this fantasy develop? Who directed it and who wrote the script? The mise en scene is typical of horror or thriller: a dark alley, a potentially violent man. But in the end there is a surprise twist and we are suddenly in an almost-romantic comedy, in which a teenage boy gets the man of his dreams, someone who looks and acts like a bully, but is really a sweetheart, and the film ends in a heartwarming golden shower scene. Of course this scenario is absurd. Of course it is unrealistic. But to me this willful suspension of disbelief is a testament to the power of human sexuality to digest traumatic encounters and snatch pleasure from the jaws of something terrifying. It would be too neat to say that fear turned me on; rather, it is the overcoming of fear and humiliation, mediated by my own sexuality, which is the true source of pleasure. This movement is what I call the erotic arc, singular to each individual, and in my artistic practice I strive to find methods and aesthetics to give it shape. If we imagine fear to be this grand, ominous, monolithic tree, then our sexuality entwines it like a vine, gradually sucking the life out of it, with peculiar kinks and fetishes as its fruit. In a future video piece I plan to use various types of plants, flowers, their buds and petals, foliage in general, and aesthetically fuse them with body parts, especially erogenous zones, so as to reimagine various sexual acts – rimming, pissing, bleeding, eating cum, you name it – in a more natural light and to observe it as an ecologist. This will be supplemented – or perhaps this supplement will eventually grow into a separate project – by conversations that strive not just to flesh out a multitude of sexual histories, but to eroticize the very act of speaking about them. These conversations are experimental and have several stages, but their central aim is to create a safe space wherein a physical manifestation of desire could emerge.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

To be a gay kid in a central European country like Croatia in the late nineties and early aughts meant having fear as your most intimate companion. Any masculine figure I encountered during nighttime on one of my solitary walks back home felt like a potential threat. The paranoia was palpable, but not all that irrational. You really had to take extra precautions when you would meet someone; even the sensation of arousal could make your body feel treacherous. To show affection in public meant risking your own life. I paid a dear price, more than once, for disregarding that fact. To make things worse, effeminate boys were routinely beaten straight and the culture sexually exalted a brutish sort of man, exactly the type that tended to engage in homophobic violence. And when puberty hit, the first encounters with a naked male body was in the boys locker room, a place pungent with sweat and hormones, mixed with violent machismo.

After a preliminary talk with my subjects about their intimate lives, I engage in role-play by embodying a particular object of their desire, whether from their past or present, or even from their imagination. While my interlocutor is describing somebody he or she is attracted to, I ask them to look directly into the camera and speak in the second person

– addressing the person they are talking about as ‘you’. (“I love how every time you cum your body trembles” / “I get goose bumps when you look at me that way”). This has the potential to create sexual and emotional tension between the person behind and in front of the camera. It can also change the quality of a person’s voice and steer the conversation in a completely different direction. Every individual sexual fantasy tells a personal history. The approach to them is archeological: an attempt to excavate all the strata of shame, guilt, fear and humiliation that is at the base of the sexual desire of so many gay men, so we can fully embrace it as what it is, and not just discard it as a simple kink. Perhaps it seems outdated, in our proudly progressive era, to (re)connect sex and trauma. And of course the link between a certain life experience and sexual pleasure is never a straight line. But my wager is that, regardless of sexual orientation, there is always some form of societal pressure exerted upon us that our sexual energy assimilates and transforms.

VIKTOR ZAHTILA

The artistic holy grail for me would be to capture the physical manifestation of shame in my subjects, and then witness as it dissipates. Shame is like mold – it subsides in the light of acceptance. This can be a beautiful, transformative experience, because it fundamentally changes your self-image. And for many LGBT people, especially gay men, that image is disfigured by shame - primarily sexual shame. To overcome it is not only moving – it can be deeply erotic. Eventually, I plan to film experimental porn films which would have emotional depth, a formal curiosity and fully fleshed human beings. They would reintegrate and eroticize all the parts of our sexuality which are not conventionally considered to be erotic, and are sorely missing from most porn, giving us an unrealistic view of sex. Most gay porn completely disregards and eliminates all insecurities, vulnerabilities, hesitations, discomforts, mid-sex conversations, the great care you invest for someone to feel safe, the sudden realization that the sex is cold and mechanical, the ever-present contradiction between the need for tenderness and the desire for ruthlessness, to be loved as a human being and simultaneously treated as a mere sex object. But for me this contradiction and ambiguity between tenderness and ruthlessness, the maturity not to force an orgasm, the expression on your face when you are doing something out of love, the complicated and multifaceted meanings sex can suddenly take - there is so much to explore that I think we’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg. Visual experiment: in collaboration with samonikla Thanks: Tajana Bakota, Marko Juričić, Nikola Pezić, Dino Topčagić, Goran Zgrablić

professional one. Search for passionate lovers, who have something to bring to the table. It is the same as in filming an observational documentary – you have to find subjects who spark your interest. 5. Do not follow the script. Even if you have one. Which you absolutely do not need. I cannot stress how important this is. True eroticism cannot be scripted. It does not follow a linear narrative thread: kiss, blowjob, penetration, ejaculation – the formula for unrealistic expectations in sex. It depends on the moment and the mood between all the people involved. This means that a humanistic porn film is always, to a certain extent, a documentary. 6. Do not cut the ‘unerotic’ parts out. Rather, make them erotic. It is practically impossible to see a penis go limp in a porn film. One cannot stress enough how often this happens in real sexual situations. As does taking a break, smoking a cigarette, eating something, cuddling, slowing down, wiping shit off your dick in anal sex, feeling vulnerable, unsure, insecure, selfaware... these moments are essential and revealing. 7. Take your time. Slow down! Getting people to relax enough to fuck in front of the camera takes a lot of time. Trust is not just intellectual, it is emotional, physical, it grows at its own pace. This is where the porn industry fails miserably - the ticking time clock kills all passion. You cannot produce a porn film as you would a regular fiction film because you cannot expect people’s desire to follow an itinerary. You cannot ‘plan’ what you will get from shooting days. Shoot long. You’re in no hurry. 8. Build anticipation. The worst thing about porn is that it hurries to get to the point – which is usually ejaculation. But eroticism doesn’t have a single point. It doesn’t need to ejaculate. It appreciates every moment. It is curious. It explores every nuance. It looks you in the eye until you start to feel vulnerable. It revels in the act of undressing. It is as patient as a Buddhist monk. It remembers to breathe. It flows. 9. Use all filmmaking tools. Porn oversaturated our minds with images of sex so much it is difficult to watch a sex act on film for long before succumbing to tedium. This requires us to use all the available filmmaking tools - costumes, set design, CGI, editing techniques – to make these images unfamiliar enough to truly arouse, not only for our genitals, but also our intellect, our compassion and our sense of beauty. 10. Set boundaries. But not borders. When shooting people having sex there has to be an extraordinary amount of trust for the filmmaking process to work. What are your subjects comfortable with? What are you comfortable with? Perhaps you are filming your own lovers? Are you merely observing or are you participating? Every situation demands a new set rules, so be honest and respectful.

MASTER OF FILM 2021

TOWARDS A MORE HUMANE PORN I am an average consumer of gay porn. But even a moderate amount often feels like too much. It is, for the most part, joyless, self-serious and utterly conventional. There is much talk about the so-called male gaze, especially about the sexual objectification of women in the visual arts, but very little is said about what it actually does to men and their own sexuality. Representation is key, not only for what kind of bodies we might find attractive, but also in how we look at them, what we look for when we look at them, and for how long we look at certain parts of them. Of course, I can only talk about how I feel it affects me, but I also assume there are other men who are affected similarly. And the way gay porn guides my attention feels exploitative of my own weaknesses, especially in how it fortifies, through repetition and lingering fixation, a certain compulsive behavior and lack of imagination. But a critique is impotent without an example of how one would do it differently. Therefore, I have devised a set of instructions that strives to transcend this impasse, a kind of Dogme 95 for porn. But porn is already austere enough in its form. So, in opposition to Dogme, which reads like a set of prohibitions, I want to utilize every possible filmmaking tool to pierce through the stale and depressing images of sex that made our imagination so rigid, unexciting and prone to repetition. 1. Use a narrow lens and/or small depth of field. Most porn is shot in wide lens, so everything is visible and sharp. But this has a dehumanizing effect, because in sex we are usually so close to someone that we only see a small fragment of their bodies. Try it now, get within a few inches of someone. What do you see? When you are physically close to someone, most of their body is not visible or it is out of our focus. That is why tighter lenses feel more intimate. Also, the devil is in the details. Using a tighter lens allows you to focus on the subtlest of movements, little facial tics, changes in expression, the way a finger teases an asshole, the way a mouth contorts from the initial pain of penetration, little droplets of passion that often go unobserved. 2. Avoid artificial lights. Porn is in awe of artificial lights, of everything being ironed out by megawatts of light. But shadows don’t only obscure, they also reveal a certain texture, curvature, mood. It also visually brings sex closure to nature. Not to mention that most people don’t find it comfortable fucking under these conditions. 3. Do not linger. Nothing fuels fixation of certain body parts as does porn’s insistence on prolonged closeups on the point of penetration. You’re making a film, when nothing new happens in a shot, you cut. When in doubt, think like Dreyer: More faces, less genitals. 4. Do not use actors, use lovers. One of the main reasons porn is so dispassionate is that it pairs professional porn actors without any regard to their personal chemistry and it never gives them enough time to develop it. This lack of chemistry is visible in cringe inducing overacting and poorly simulated moans of pleasure that teach us nothing but how to only pretend we are enjoying ourselves. That is why even amateur porn oftentimes feels as fake as the

Artistic Research Week | Can everyone turn their camera on (Master of Film Graduation Show) is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 6-19 October 2021 Generously supported by festival partner Keep an Eye Foundation Master of Film, Netherlands Film Academy Director Netherlands Film Academy Bart Römer Programme Director Master of Film Mieke Bernink Coordinator Master of Film Kris Dekkers Programme Coordinator Sabien Schütte Mentors Tessa Boerman, Manon Bovenkerk, Julian Ross, Rada Šešić, Maartje Nevejan Curators Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, Petra Heck, Stanislaw Liguziński Production POPkraft (Tom Lavrenenko, Jonas Kraft) Interviews Lianne Kersten, Stanislaw Liguziński Design Dog and Pony Many thanks to: Ido Abram (EYE), Dajo Bodisco (MACA), Alexandra Lodewijkx, Michiel de Rooij (EYE), Martin Schrevelius (EYE) Mike van Wetten (MACA)

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MASTER OF FILM 2021

Magazine Master of Film – Researchers 2021

Articles inside

VIKTOR ZAHTILA

VICTORINE VAN ALPHEN

VASILI VIKHLIAEV

SARAH FERNANDEZ

ABHAY KUMAR

INTRODUCTION / CAN EVERYONE

MARLEINE VAN DER WERF

RAMI EL-NIHAWI

HADAS NEUMAN

NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA

JORIK AMIT GALAMA

MIRA ADOUMIER