INTRODUCTION / CAN EVERYONE

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.

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).

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