2018
In Process
The master Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy is a two-year international course for a select group of filmmakers and artists with several years of experience under their belt. They are offered time and space to research and experiment in an open-ended trajectory in which thinking and making are one. The programme privileges questions over answers, process over product, experimentation over mere execution and long-term effects over short term gain… During the Artistic Research Week, the graduates present their research and the projects related to it — proposals, films, installations… These lectures, performances and workshops contextualise the projects and raise questions for further development. More information about the course: www.masteroffilm.nl and the Artistic Research Week programme www.filmacademie.ahk.nl/master-arw
INTRODUCTION / IN PROCESS
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DIEGO ARIAS ASCH
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SAM ASHBY
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ÁRON BIRTALAN
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ANA BRAVO–PÉREZ
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STEPHEN GRAVES
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SABINA MIKELIĆ
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FRANCESCO RAGAZZI
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DAVID WASCH
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COLOFON
MASTER OF FILM 2018
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IN PROCESS The Master of Film, focusing on Artistic Research in and through Cinema, is a process driven programme. Its focus on process is a necessary counterweight to a professional film world that is extremely product or production driven and can understand process only in terms of necessary preparation for a product — to be quickly forgotten once the film has been realised. Such a waste… Because there’s so much in an artistic process that’s worth taking note of, worth exploring and worth sharing, that disregarding the process means losing out on potentially surprising and valuable ideas and insights.
INTRODUCTION
That the researchers graduating this year have chosen to connect their presentations, films in progress, installations, books and lecture-performances under the theme of ‘in process’, thus signifies their profound understanding of artistic research as an attitude. An attitude that privileges questions over answers, experimentation over mere execution and long-term gain over short term effect. Artistic research is a necessarily open-ended process, with no fixed end goal, no predicted result. There’s just the journey and the questions, needs and desires that propel that journey. And that journey doesn’t end with something like a graduation… This year’s Artistic Research Week then is an homage to the practice of process. Using the language and tools of cinema, the eight graduating filmmakers and visual artists researched the parameters of cinema and the cinematic process to allow us and themselves to see and create new connections. Not interested in just telling a story, but in asking how we tell stories and whose stories we’re telling, all of this year’s research projects are, each in their own way, deeply political. Political not in the sense of politics with a capital P, but political in the sense of a politics of everyday human relations. THE GRADUATES AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS Diego Arias Asch from Costa Rica carved out his own scriptwriting method for deepening characters and storylines, focusing on the technique of ‘emulating different perspectives’, summarized in the title of his research ‘Milk the farmer, drink the cow’. The result of this singular method will lead to a feature length animation film for which he in the process of creating a short prologue, We Are (working title). British visual artist Sam Ashby is driven by the desire to uncover hidden stories of homosexual life and forging a connection between that hidden past and the present. Cruising the archives like one cruises a park for sexual encounters, he came across the Eagle Street College, a 19th Century working class male literary society in rural England, discussing the poetry of Walt Whitman. His film treatment, The Eagle Street College, explores socialism, sex and spirituality at a moment in history when the notion of homosexual identity was first conceived.
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Fleeing the violence in her home country, Colombia, Ana Bravo-Pérez has spent the last ten years migrating from country to country, carrying with her a suitcase full of hard drives and film reels. Unpacking her archive, she embarked on a research journey focusing on migration, memory and decoloniality, and extended her affinity with the material of film — celluloid — to other materials: porcelain and gold. Used symbolically, these materials enabled her to reconnect with her family history. Her installation The White Gold Screen deals in a ritual manner with the ‘colonial wound’ and reconciliation. American filmmaker Stephen Graves’ research deals with the relation between collaborative filmmaking and authorship. How do practices of collaborative filmmaking effect authorship? Can a participatory mode of filmmaking undermine traditional relations of power and help us imagine other forms of expression and experimentation? Stephen’s film-in-progress, Forms of Available Love, made as part of his research, is a mixed genre hybrid film dealing with questions of identity and the fragmentary self.
Dutch visual artist David Wasch used his painterly eye for detail in his research into moving images. Focusing initially on the notion of frame and framing, his continuous experiments then led him to extend his cinematic quest to the issue of positioning and spectatorship. His installation Inside Nature, Outside the Square is what he calls a ‘spatial get-together of different experiments’, allowing the visitor to ponder about the question ‘when does our position change reality and when does reality change our position?’ Mieke Bernink Head of the Master’s department / Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy
MASTER OF FILM 2018
With a background in music, writing and role-playing, Áron Birtalan’s research trajectory led him to explore the nature of human interaction by facilitating a collaborative practice called Transformation Games. Inspired by the so called fictional Kingdoms of his youth in Hungary, in which children would play for weeks on end in their self-imagined kingdoms, Áron emphasizes the transformative power of play. His publication What is Within? (working title) tries to create an experiential understanding of the political value of so called Ludic Societies, societies that have playing and playfulness at heart.
The research of Croatian visual artist and filmmaker Sabina Mikelić revolves around questions of method. Meticulously investigating the tools of cinema — from the use of the camera and framing, to mise-en-scène and editing — she found a way to give cinematic form to her desire to connect to the world around her. Using the act of filming to create trust and build a connection; using film to create a space in which something new can come into existence; using cinema to go beyond cinema… In her research project Beyond the Choir she uses her method to connect to the 7 men that make up the traditional male choir, Krijanca, from the island Rab that she comes from. Francesco Ragazzi is an Italian / French political scientist who set out to discover how to use ‘artistic research’ as one possible method for research into social phenomena but found out that artistic research is a form of research and knowledge production in its own right. A fundamental change of perspective: while in the social sciences theory drives research, in artistic research it’s the maker’s embodied subjectivity. Making what became 13 Attempts to Shoot my Father (Working Title) represents the ‘rite de passage’, in anthropological terms, required to embody this new perspective.
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Diego Arias Asch
DIEGO ARIAS ASCH
WHAT KIND OF SORCERY IS THIS?
Diego Arias Asch (1988) grew up in Costa Rica and is based in Amsterdam since 2016. Academically, he is a communicator. Money comes from this source as well. In the past years he moved from doing commercial to cultural to political communication, working for a medical cannabis lobby group and an award-winning politician. He has received training in academic drawing, painting, and 2D animation. His artworks have been displayed, among others, in the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (Costa Rica), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Perú), King Juan Carlos I Cultural Center (USA), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (Spain) and Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico).
milkthefarmer.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2018
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DIEGO ARIAS ASCH
MASTER OF FILM 2018
MILK THE FARMER, DRINK THE COW
The research is a methodology for a writer to substantially explore and better understand the elements of a fictional story (characters, settings). To do so, the writer either makes or commissions visual or performative artworks. These pieces are questioned by the writer and his collaborators from different perspectives. For instance, the perspective of a historian, or a forensic psychologist. This questioning process happens from the moment of conceptualisation of the piece and continues after its completion. It is by addressing these questions that the writer gathers information about the characters and the world they inhabit. The use of different perspectives lets the writer consider possibilities he might otherwise miss. www.milkthefarmer.com
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Sam Ashby
Sam Ashby is a British artist and graphic designer. He graduated with a BA (Hons) in History of Art, Sheffield Hallam University, and went on to work as a film poster designer, creating awardwinning artwork for independent and arthouse films for the UK and international markets. Since 2010 he has collaborated with writers, academics and artists on his publication Little Joe, ‘a magazine about queers and cinema, mostly.’ Sam’s first film, The Colour of His Hair, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017 and won the Best Documentary prize at the London Short Film Festival 2018. He is a recipient of the Van Abbemuseum’s Deviant Practice 2018 research grant.
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A tintype/ferrotype from late-1800s, anonymous. Courtesy of the IHLIA LGBT Heritage Archives, Amsterdam.
SAM ASHBY
CRUISING THE PAST: EXPLORING THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE OF LONGING AND DESIRE
RESEARCH
PROJECT
CRUISING AS A METHODOLOGY What does it mean to take pleasure in research? To seek desire in the institution and find identification in the shelves and stacks of libraries and archives? Can I cruise the past?
The Eagle Street College The Eagle Street College is a proposal for a narrative feature film drawn from archival research into an informal male literary society established in the working class community of Bolton, England in the late-19th Century. Known today as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship, the group met regularly to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman and his lifelong work Leaves of Grass, which inspired a profound comradeship and political consciousness in them.
Cruising — the act of looking for anonymous sex in public spaces — is a practice which feels like tradition, a queer inheritance passed down from generations of elders and forefathers. I was never taught to ‘cruise’, but somehow it became a practice that I understood. Somehow, I knew where to go. Somehow, I knew how to read the clues, the gestures, the glances. I was never interested in History at school because I didn’t find myself in it. Instead I sought out other histories, in the lives of those whose experience on the margins reflected my own. But I had to learn to read the clues, to recognise the furtive gestures of the past.
Within this unusual milieu, I have weaved a narrative in part from diaries and letters held at the Bolton Archives, to reveal a unique story at a moment in history when notions of a homosexual identity were first being conceived. Like much of my work, The Eagle Street College looks to the past to as a way to comment on contemporary constructions of sexuality and gender.
Cruising is a largely solitary act dependent on the potential of an encounter with a subject. It is an act of patience; pleasure or disappointment are its inevitable outcomes. Writer/Director Sam Ashby Script Supervisor Anna Seifert-Speck Additional Research Yaël Levy
When I cruise, it is a longing for an inaccessible past, but also a passionate engagement with the present. I look at the archive, and the archive looks back.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
For me, artistic research is a loosely defined and open-ended practice akin to cruising. My subjects are often shifting territories, underrepresented lives. My encounters with them are ephemeral and yet are filled with potential new narratives and forms.
Still from preliminary research at IHLIA LGBT Heritage at Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (OBA). With special thanks to Jasper Wiedeman.
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SAM ASHBY
Still from preliminary research at IHLIA LGBT Heritage at Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (OBA). With special thanks to Jasper Wiedeman.
OUT OF TIME, OUT OF PLACE Extract by Jon Davies The traditional narrative of queer progress recounts how determined kids in the countryside and the suburbs leave their stifling biological families behind. Instead they migrate to join their spiritual brothers and sisters in big cities, which provide a degree of anonymity that nurtures sexual experimentation and the space to fashion one’s identity anew. But surely the innovative modes of psychic and cultural survival we honed for ourselves as youth in varying degrees of homophobic isolation deserve to be kept close to our hearts? These abject experiences form queer ways of being that hold onto feelings of shame and difference, allowing one to read between the lines and look askance at the dominant culture’s falsehoods. Sam Ashby grew up in rural Hampshire, England in the 1980s and 90s. By contrast, I was swishing around a homogeneous white middle-class suburb of Montreal, Canada. These cultural wastelands provided appropriately bleak backdrops for our coming of age alongside the evolving AIDS pandemic: we developed our nascent queer identities under its life-threatening shadow, never far from the reminder that if you are gay every sexual encounter could mean death. Sam and I share a fascination with the idiosyncratic, difficult and circuitous routes that young people of our generation and older had to journey in order to find traces of queer culture that spoke to us seemingly against all odds, allowing us to imagine futures for ourselves beyond our drab straight surroundings. In my case it was through glimpsing the subcultural world recreated in Mary Harron’s feature film
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I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and miraculously discovering some of Kenneth Anger’s and John Greyson’s experimental works on video at the local library. I think of myself as part of the last queer generation in the West to have been forced to seek out these life-giving discoveries before the Internet made even the most underground queer cultural object accessible to all. I can’t help but feel that something is lost — a sensitising experience of marginality, perhaps — when the queer cultural archive is easily accessible and no longer needs to be gleaned through whispers and fragments. The Internet not only (falsely) promises that everything that one could ever possibly want to know about the past is available to you, but that the images of LGBT life that are most widely disseminated are still those that are the most affirmative. Affirmative in the sense of telling you that being LGBT is ok and “it gets better,” but also affirmative of neoliberal capitalism, which now has a place set for you — and your monogamous, gainfully employed life partner -at the IKEA dinner table. Cruising Sam’s work as well as his notes and proposals for future projects, I am struck by the fervour of his desire to forge a connection to a buried queer past. Turning away from contemporary models of identity that frame LGBT citizenship through state approval, he instead looks backwards to how people found each other in love and lust before “queer.” Ecstatically “out of time,” Sam almost seems to be seeking belated communion with the ephemeral couplings and fragile collectivities he finds. —Jon Davies is a writer, curator and PhD student in Art History at Stanford University. This text was commissioned as part of my research publication.
OTHER PROJECTS Rural Queer Networks Contrary to the assumed narrative that queer people need to move to cities in order to lead more fulfilled lives, this ongoing research project, initiated while on the Master of Film programme, aims to recover alternative narratives in order to show that queer migration to and collectivity in rural areas has also taken place. By drawing focus on the rural, I am also interested in questioning what it means to be queer outside of the city, where so much of our identity is coded and enacted through our relationship to designed space and architecture, metropolitan networks, and capitalist economies.
The Colour of His Hair The Colour of His Hair merges drama and documentary into an impressionistic meditation on queer life before and after the partial legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. The film is based on an unrealised film script written in 1964 for The Homosexual Law Reform Society, a British organisation that campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexual relations between men. Completed while on the Master of Film program, The Colour of His Hair premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017 and won the Best Documentary prize at the London Short Film Festival 2018. Director Sam Ashby Writer Elizabeth Montagu Cast Sean Hart, Josh O’Connor Camera Jessica Sarah Rinland Music Leslie Deere Sound Joe Campbell Colourist Chloe Thorne Funded by BFI, Wellcome Trust
MASTER OF FILM 2018
Funded by Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Et in Arcadia Ego Et in Arcadia Ego takes the recent discussion around the closure of queer safe spaces and focusses it on the closure of public toilets. By documenting many of London’s ‘cottages’ on Super8, I explored them as a series of contemporary ruins evoking a lost language. The film was commissioned by London Short Film Festival as a companion to William E. Jones’ Tearoom (1962/2007) and was completed while on the Master of Film programme.
Director Sam Ashby Music Jordan Hunt Sound Joe Campbell Colourist Chloe Thorne Commissioner London Short Film Festival Funded by Arts Council England
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ÁRON BIRTALAN
Áron Birtalan
WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE? Áron Birtalan (Budapest, 1990) is an artist who makes playful experiences in everyday environments. Working together with participants and their imagination as an artistic medium, he explores the nature of human interaction by facilitating a collaborative practice, called Transformation Games. Through his work, Áron encourages people to tap into a playful territory, where art, games, and magic mingle. In this territory, one has the possibility to create and experience new ways of seeing, being and new understandings, that otherwise would not occur. His work draws upon the history of transformation through rituals, and as a whole, rituals’ role in society. He currently lives in the Netherlands, running the experimental platform Secret Fiction. With a background in music, writing, and role-playing, Áron is interested in delivering his practice outside of the conventional realms of art and into alternative platforms of politics and education. He is also active as a musician and co-runs a threeweek children’s fantasy camp in rural Hungary.
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Do you have a name for this practice? Yes, Transformation Games. Who is this for? Everyone, since no one is ill-fit to play. What happens in your work? Imagined and thus highly subjective and unrepeatable situations arise. Either on an individual or on a collective level. The role of the work (and my role) is to help these situations take shape in reality, to facilitate the conditions for the experiences to emerge. What else? In playing, one is introduced to a fictional world, within our world, where the governing thoughts are the rules of the game. Conversely, the rules, roles and structures of the outside world are temporarily suspended, inviting the participants of the game to step outside of their everyday reality. On the one hand this allows one to experience ways of being, seeing, thinking and behaving that are beyond the mundane. On the other hand, stepping into the artificially created world of the game also points back at the artificially created structure of one’s everyday life. Through playing, we can understand that our daily social and political structures are no different than the arbitrary structure of any game. And through this understanding we gain the agency to change, to transform these structures.
And how? Elements of rituals, role-playing, and exercises in movement, imagination and attention are incorporated into the everyday reality, thus interacting with it, and transforming it. How long does it take? How many people are usually involved? That varies a lot! From a couple of people and a few hours, to large groups playing together for days, or even weeks on end. How do you develop these Games? Through trial and error. I co-run Secret Fiction, a platform where we invite participants to try out and collectively develop different games, rituals, exercises and so on. We do this through labs, workshops, short retreats, et cetera. We then take the experiences we have as a base to develop works for the future. This process is also the way we collectively produce most of the knowledge and ideas that shape the practice of Transformation Games – making it an empirical practice. What is your role in a Game? I provide the framework, the guidance and the support so that this experience can become something powerful, yet still safe to undergo. To put it bluntly, I’m the facilitator between the participants and the structure of the Game itself – a living extension of it.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
So, what are you doing exactly? I work through a practice in which I facilitate playful experiences for people. These experiences use the act of ‘playing together’ to create different ways of being, seeing, thinking and interacting with the world, with our thoughts and with each other.
Participants Playing ‘Covenant, a Transformation Game by Áron Birtalan. Photo by Jesus Iglesias 2017 — DNR, The Hague, NL
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ÁRON BIRTALAN
Participants Playing ‘SEE’, a Transformation Game by Áron Birtalan. Photo by Julia Willms 2017 — Frascati, Amsterdam, NL
Children playing in a suburban park (detail). Photo by David Seymour 1948 — Budapest, Hungary
Where does this practice come from? As a child, I would spend all my summers playing with other kids, for weeks on end. We would pretend that we are the citizens of a fictional kingdom – a Kingdom where all that happens is up to us to decide. We could become whoever we wanted to be – knights, wizards, explorers, merchants, kings and queens, you name it. Besides the fact that it was great fun to do all this, what I found was that the moment I returned to my everyday life, I was somehow not the same as before. The experiences I had while I was embodying a fictional character also affected me as a real person. To this day I hold onto these experiences as the most transformative thing that ever happened to me.
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I see, but how does that translate to your present practice? Years later I found myself coming back to these experiences and started to wonder what role they can have in my life now that I’m an adult. A role that is beyond just a memory of my childhood summers. This is where the practice of Transformation Games came in. To put it very simply, Transformation Games happened when my path as maker started to consciously enter into a dialogue with my past as a citizen in the fictional Kingdoms of my childhood. From what I experienced as a kid, I’d like to believe that there is way more to what playing can offer us – something that helps us shape and navigate ourselves in the world we live in.
What is the purpose of this practice? There is no explicit purpose or governing ideology — playing is only ‘playful’ as long as it is not tainted by any rhetoric. Transformation Games is a practice that is intended to facilitate the conditions for new experiences and understandings to happen, rather than to propose specific ones. In this sense Transformation Games are anti-games: There is no winner or loser in a Transformation Game; ‘creating an experience itself’ is the only goal. This sounds a lot like performance art, improvisation, participatory theatre. What is the difference? Firstly, there is no audience or cameras involved – no one to perform to. Secondly, it is a collaborative practice in which every participant of the experience is also the creator of it. It is not scripted and there is no division between active and passive roles. We do not have artists, performers or audience here. We are the things itself. This sounds a lot like role-playing. What is the difference? There is no dress-up involved and no fixed roles to adopt — unlike the classic image of Live Action Role Playing (LARP). Instead, a neutral space is the backdrop and participants themselves create the experience, based on a rudimentary outline, developed and guided by the facilitator.
or having dinner with the family. Here, since we are only playing, we can be daring, while taking care of one another. This is not Stanford, or Milgram. Nothing is compulsory and you can opt out any time, without any consequence. This is the emancipatory power of playing – it allows us the safety to bravely approach the unknown. What are you doing these days? I hope to develop Transformation Games into a practice that goes beyond me – that is, that it becomes a practice that can be passed on, picked up, adapted by anyone interested. I think of my role as being a part of a process, intertwining with the inherent human desire to play. Because of that, it would make sense to explore how my practice can become something that is not just mine anymore. Can I read more about the practice and where does it come from? Yes! Thing is, I’m working on a publication now – Which is also my graduation project. It’s called ‘What is Within?’ It’s is a publication-in-themaking that explores playing and playfulness both as an autonomous form of art and as a tool for political transformation. Taking the practice of Transformation Games, and its roots found in a Hungarian counter-cultural tradition, ‘What is Within?’ sets out to reintroduce playing as the active social agent it is, in exercising autonomous thinking and behaving. Furthermore, ‘What is Within? ‘hopes to become a manual and handbook, proposing a playful practice to create and experience new realities – and to transform the reality we have. The publication is a collaboration between artist Áron Birtalan and graphic designer Márton Kabai, with the support of AHK Amsterdam, STROOM Den Haag and Fonds Kwadraat www.whatiswithin.com
MASTER OF FILM 2018
So is this also a political practice then? Yes. I think of Transformation Games both as an artistic and as a political practice. Playing is an active social agent in discovering other ways of seeing, being and behaving. It allows us to step into a space where we can create, explore, and experience, and embody realities that would not happen otherwise. And these realities can lead us to new understandings about ourselves and the reality we live in. Not only that, these understandings can also make us realise the means and the potential we possess to re-imagine and transform the structures that govern our everyday life.
This sounds a lot like some sort of therapy, psychodrama, or alike. What is the difference? In a Transformation Game one’s everyday responsibilities, hierarchies and social roles are temporarily suspended. This is the great power of playing games, overall: The frame of a game provides one with the opportunity to safely interact and make decisions outside the mundane way of thinking. Transformation Games are designed to be safe, yet powerful to undergo, keeping the fact in mind that the experiences of the fictional and the real often overlap. These principles are present in many forms of alternative therapy. What sets Transformation Games apart from practices like Psychodrama, Family Constellations and so on, is that in Transformation Games there is no explicit therapeutic goal involved. Of course, transformative experiences can and do arise during these Games. However, I’d like to think, that that is what should be the case with art in general – art should allow us to undergo experiences that we would not have otherwise. Isn’t this whole thing dangerous to do? No, not really. Especially compared to other social situations in life, like going to school, being employed at a company
Master Wizard (right) teaching his apprentice in his own practice of magic. Photo by Gyöngyi Barta 2017 — Children’s Kingdom of Caer Cadarn, Hungary
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Ana Bravo–Pérez
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN TO CRY. ANA BRAVO–PÉREZ
A TACTILE DECOLONIAL MANIFESTO
Born in the city of Pasto, southwest Colombia, Ana Bravo-Pérez’ studies, publications and work in documentary film and the visual arts have taken her from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, to Caracas, Venezuela; and from the International Film School (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, to the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ana has participated in numerous group exhibitions and film festivals internationally, but also uses non-traditional places of expression to raise questions about the need to decolonise knowledge, history, aesthetics and filmmaking. Her multimedia work revolves around decoloniality, migration and memory.
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For me, these materials come from the same source: The Earth. They belong to a particular location, are taken to other places and made into products like celluloid, a derivative of oil, in a process that implies abuse of the environment and people and causes displacement and death. This produces colonial trauma and fragments both my personal memory and the collective memory. I materialise this fragmentation using these media to reconnect with my family history. Migration enables me to hear the stories of others and realise that we share the colonial wound: the pain of wanting to learn our history but finding only fragments, because colonialism destroyed parts of the story, forced people to forget other parts and introduced the colonisers’ perspective which denies and makes invisible our own stories. By working with my hands, I connected pieces of the history of the Andean region of Colombia where I was born with other fragmented histories. Through this re-signification of porcelain, celluloid and gold I remembered the teaching I inherited from my mother about “love and patience”, and the reciprocal and responsible relationship we should have with the Earth. It was the death of my mother that triggered the connection between personal and collective memory. Ritual- performance enabled me to deal with the pain leading to transformation and healing.
A JOURNEY OF MIGRATIONS: 4 CASE STUDIES My artistic journey emerged from my desire to move away from the ethnographic interest in explaining ‘the other’ through film and through travel narratives through ‘exotic’ landscapes. The Woman with a Suitcase, shot in 16mm, is my first fiction film (produced collectively), focusing on migration. It explores the perception of time and the transition to an unknown space with unexpected events. The camera follows the woman, travelling across a green landscape without explanation. My next work, A Cartography of the Body, migrated away from 16mm to super 8mm in a three-minute exploration of the unseen, in which the camera travels across the body as territory. With this work, I then moved away from the limits of the visual towards the tactile when I created the ritual-performance of burying the film in the Botanical Garden Zuid, a space filled with plants taken from colonized locations. Ceramics enabled me to work with my hands and reconnect my body with the earth and memory of Colombia. With the research and the tactile practice required to produce my next work, I learned that porcelain came from another colonized territory, and it is a fragile material that requires love and patience because it fractures easily. The Seduction of Brutality brings together two locations of the colonial wound as it unveils the numbers of displaced people in Colombia on fragments of porcelain. In the last stage of my artistic research, I migrated from porcelain to gold. There is a river in a town called Barbacoas close to my homeland where people used to find small gold nuggets and make gifts for the family. Today it is a site of violence and displacement due to the exploitation of gold and other resources. In The Factory of Tears I started to create porcelain tears and ended up with three gold tears. Through this process I felt that re-signifying these materials was a move towards healing and transformation.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
In 2016 I left Latin America and crossed the Atlantic Ocean with a suitcase filled with my personal archive of hard drives, film reels and a few objects, gathered over the 10 years of being a migrant. The process of de-archiving was the point of departure for my research, which revolves around the concepts of Migration, Memory and (De) Coloniality. I interrogate colonial history and neoliberalism through the exercise of memory and research into the origin of materials I work with: porcelain, celluloid and gold.
QUIPU In 1616, the Quechua writer Felipe Goman Poma de Ayala, wrote what is now the main historical reference for the Andean history, in which he introduced the system of quipu. Quipu is a tactile system of threads and knots, that required substantial time, patience and an alternative thought process for its creation and interpretation. It was use for tax and census-keeping as well as for conveying complex messages and for storytelling. All my titles begin with the word quipu.
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Quipu: how does one become a filmmaker while learning to be a migrant? The Woman with a Suitcase 09´ 20 16mm / colour 2015—2017
ANA BRAVO–PÉREZ
Being in permanent movement In transit, semi-permanent Semi-nomad Sometimes with light luggage Sometimes with heavy belongings
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Director Ana Bravo-Pérez Cast Magali Fugini and Guadalupe Alessandro Producers Paulo Pecora and Natalia Bianchi First AD Valeria Curcio Production Designer Lorena Morris Costume Designer Gabriela Grajales Editors Natalia Bianchi / Ana Bravo Pérez Cinematography Martin Patlis Focus Puller Camila Suarez Folch Stills Photography Mayra Gomez Colourist Lujan Montes Backstage s8mm Paulo Pecora Associate Producers Tania Giuliani and Mayra Gomez With the support of Itekoa and Filmwerkplaats WORM Rotterdam
A Cartography of the Body S8mm / reversal film / b&w / silent / co-creation with nature 2017—2018
The 23rd of November 2017 in a ritual-performance that I called, My Second Burial. I buried the film A Cartography of The Body with some other elements. The film was disinterred in June 2018, completing 7 months of being subjected to the soil and weather conditions at Botanical Garden Zuid in Amsterdam. Special Thanks to Juan Pablo Mendez, Bernardo Zanota, Vesna Petresin, Kristina Daurova, Timon Hagen, Mikko Keskiivari, Sergio Gonzáles Cuervo, Nick Carbone and Eyal Sivan.
Quipu: A Thousand Broken Pieces
Quipu: The Factory of Tears
Quipu: The Seduction of Brutality
Porcelain and gold leaf 24k Dimensions variable
Porcelain Dimensions variable
The White Gold Screen How to decolonise film?
These three works are on display inside an octagonal projection room that adapts the form of Chakana, a geometric form present in different constructions in The Andes before colonisation.
Analogue Film Installation
Historically, film has been used as a tool for colonisation; in its form lies a legacy of colonial content and practice. It is this inheritance that encouraged me to imagine and propose different artistic gestures in an attempt to decolonise film. The White Gold Screen is a film installation composed of three works: — A Thousand Broken Pieces (porcelain screen) —A Cartography of the Body (S8mm b&w film), a co-creation with nature. — T he Migrating Film (16mm colour film), a co-creation with airports X-ray systems. I took a can of 16mm film with me on my journeys migrating from country to country. Doing so the film was exposed to airport x-ray systems more than 12 times.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
Porcelain Dimensions variable
The film installation tries to interrogate the cinematographic ‘dispositif’ in its primordial dimensions: architectural (the conditions for image projection), technological (production and distribution) and discursive (a film that traditionally tells a story). In the process of making each piece, the original research question about film became increasingly connected to the broader question about how to heal the colonial wound? Created by Ana Bravo Pérez Sound design and electronic sound objects by Juan Orozco With the support of Botanical Garden Zuid, Mincultura (Col) and Filmwerkplaats WORM.
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Stephen Graves
STEPHEN GRAVES
COLLABORATION AND AUTHORSHIP
Stephen Graves was born in 1989 in New York City and grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida. Since infancy he was exposed to painting and swimming — foundations which have nurtured his explorations across various artistic and somatic disciplines. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2011 with a BA in Comparative Literature. The following year he completed his first feature film, A Body Without Organs, which he directed, filmed, and edited. A Body without Organs premiered at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, where it won the festival’s top prize, the Most Visionary Film Award. He currently lives in Amsterdam, working on a collaborative film about squatting and the afterlives and resilience of the city’s autonomous social movements, and developing a dramatic narrative screenplay for an original story about love, crime and insurrection. stephen.lev.graves@gmail.com
How do I locate my own authorship within collaborative or participatory filmmaking processes? How do diverse modes and methods of participatory filmmaking affect positions of authorship?
I theorise my practice when I articulate my position. I theorise my practice when I understand it, when I inhabit it. I practice authorship when I appropriate my understanding to transform and refocus my practice. I practice authorship when I am inside a practice I am directing. During the last year and a half, I’ve experimented with different methods of filmmaking. Different forms of practice.
How can I facilitate the conditions for thinking and working together in consensual and mutually enriching ways?
These experiments always involved other people. They involved other people in a variety of roles, in a variety of ways.
Can participatory filmmaking practices help us to deconstruct existent matrixes of oppression and domination in order to imagine, pre-view, and pre-enact in the present safer, more emancipated spaces for the free expression and experimentation in ex-centric forms of life?
Some of these experiments have been inspired, enabled, catalysed through my encounter with another person. Without the encounter, the practice would not have taken place. Without the collaboration, there would be no authorship.
If I’ve come to understand one thing through my research at the Master of Film, it’s that practice elucidates theory. It is through practicing filmmaking that I can reflect on my practice, and through reflecting on my practice I can learn about it.
I view this cinematic research as allegorical to broader questions of difference, opacity and subjectivity, as they pertain to organizing new social and political structures.
This understanding allows me to position myself. I position myself when I see what I am doing which is helping me to grow and change. I position myself when I see that what I am doing is harmful to my practice.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
My research revolves around the relationship between authorship and collaboration in and through cinema, where authorship is conceptualised as the artistic expression of subjectivity.
Still from Forms of Available Love
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The Subversion of Politics A chronicle in the lives of a crew of Amsterdam squatters, through a winter of evictions, occupations, and interpersonal upheavals.
STEPHEN GRAVES
The Subversion of Politics is currently part of an ongoing production on the afterlives and resilience of Amsterdam’s autonomous social movements.
Stills from The Subversion of Politics
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Forms of Available Love How can I create a structure for a temporary, autonomous, collective experience of filmmaking, and how do I situate myself as an author within that process, and how can the result of that process also serve as its own evidence, a selfreferential testimony of its own method?
The film, Forms of Available Love, is a mixed genre hybrid, combining scripted footage shot on set in Sweden with diary films from my personal archive. Forms of Available Love is an experimental, poetic allegory for the fragmentary and multiple nature of the self, where memory is circuitous, persistent, and always lived in the present. Featuring the work of Elis, Summer, Tuuli, Carina, Ron, Roni, Xenia, Kalan, Hannah, and Aio
MASTER OF FILM 2018
That question served as a foundation for the research process which, over one year, has evolved and crystalised into a film, Forms of Available Love. Last winter I organized a ten-day experiment in participatory filmmaking. A group of us lived together at a secluded house in the Swedish forest, filming a script I had written. The house itself became a central character — encapsulating the eerie otherworldliness of the film, where the protagonist
undergoes a series of encounters with mysterious strangers, and his own memories.
Stills from Forms of Available Love
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Sabina Mikelić
FILMING BEYOND VOICING RELATIONS
SABINA MIKELIĆ
An experimental research on the act of filming as a pretext for social interaction and on the frame as a space of expression, unveiling and empowerment.
Sabina Mikelić is a visual and multimedia artist (Croatia,1981), who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2013 with an MA in New Media and Animation. She started exhibiting in 2002 and has since had many national and international exhibitions (T-com MSU, Transform, Sofia, VIG – special invitation), film screenings (Days of Croatian Film, Liburnia Film Festival / Award for the Best Regional Film 2014, Etnofilm Rovinj / Award for the Special Contribution to Ethnographic film 2013). Sabina won a prize for the best pitch in the Balkan Documentary Center workshop in Prizren, Kosovo during the Dokufest 2015. From 2015—2017 Sabina worked as a professor of Video, Animation and Visual Communications in the School for Art, Design, Graphics and Fashion Design, Zabok, Croatia.
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My relation to the world has always been governed by the desire to know the world and enjoy it. At the same time my desire was intertwined with a fear of the unfamiliar. At one point in my artistic practice I discovered that I can meet the world through the camera and that the camera can become a mediator between me and the world. I always had an interest in people, in my immediate surroundings, in connecting, creating bonds and communicating. Through filming I was trying to establish intimacy and trust. I believe that because of the camera and the act of filming I can access subjects and themes in a way that wouldn’t be possible without the excuse of making a film. Or more simply: the camera gave me a new authority; it became a tool of empowerment and enabled a new space to emerge where I could meet the other.
The importance of my research and project lies in gaining authority over my process, gaining trust in the world and revealing the simplicity, awkwardness, tenderness and beauty of human interaction as mediated by the camera. ¹ I like to wonder about and reach the other, be it a
stranger from the train, a new-found neighbor in the Netherlands, or a male choir from my island Rab in Croatia. Using the excuse of filmmaking I have a chance to peek into their worlds and see if something magical can happen. I investigate whether we can create a cinematic space where we can exist together and share a moment. I guess I really need to see beauty in the world, or make it happen. Through my research I wonder if I can achieve a sense of togetherness and capture in a fixed shot, while not knowing what will happen and while both me and my protagonists come as we are: imperfect, doubtful, vulnerable and embarrassed.
At this point in time my research deals with the act of filming and how, through the act and the device of filming (the camera) I can question trust and relations with my subjects, while at the same time all the complexities of the relation between director and subject become visible.¹
House Number 376, 2010, video still
MASTER OF FILM 2018
My research is not only about the creation of a relationship with the subject but also about the construction of my own aesthetics, my own signature — made up of fixed shots and very formal and cold compositions, almost like in classical painting. It is in the dichotomy of the formal ‘cold’ set-up of the fixed shot (as a frame, as a painting) and the often emotional content, that a specific dynamic is created. The choice of format, image ratio and framing plays an important role in my research and allows me to come to my own realisations and understanding of what lies behind my aesthetic choices. By staging or creating a simple mise-en-scène, in which my subjects can perform themselves, I am questioning how cinematic space can become the space for the appearance of a new meaning. I realised that the intrusiveness of the camera can only be surpassed by, at the same time, acknowledging and questioning the device and performing before it.
One, 2010, video still
Ode to Joy, 2017, video still
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SABINA MIKELIĆ
Beyond the Choir Through my research project Beyond the Choir I pose questions about how it’s possible, through the act of filming, to go beyond stereotypes and that which I already know, to go beyond the context of my island and its locations and people. Can research into peoples’ intimate relationship with a place, be at the same time a lab to look deeper into the act of filming and the role of the camera in social interaction? And can it thus be a way for me, as a maker, to solve the question of my own belonging? How can I use the camera and the act of filming to share a moment with the other? How do we relate to and trust each other? 2 Beyond the Choir, in its present state, consists of 7 sequences in which each of the 7 members of the Krijanca traditional male choir, take me to a place on the island that is important to them. Part of this method, which I call ‘Take me somewhere’, is that they do not reveal beforehand where they’ll take me, just like I do not reveal why I ask them. By visiting these locations my intention was to get an insight into my protagonists’ intimate relation with that specific location or landscape and to get the chance to see the location through their eyes and emotions.
Director Sabina Mikelić Cinematographer Sabina Mikelić, Bojan Mrđenović Sound operator Hrvoje Radnić Producer Tibor Keser Editing Sabina Mikelić, Maida Srabović, Albert Elings Sound editing Ivan Mihoci Runner Marin Pahljina Protagonists Joško Staničić, Sebastian Debelić, Marko Štokić, Nereo Krunić, Antonio Gabrić, Sanjin Debelić, Siniša Mikelić, Sabina Mikelić, Island of Rab
MASTER OF FILM 2018
The moment of the act of filming however brings to the surface our relationship and exposes the process of filming itself; my protagonists perform themselves and I perform the director. The 8th sequence is a sequence of their gathering where they perform their group identity. They sing.
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My brother sings in a male choir. They sing traditional songs. They are men. I am a filmmaker interested in them. To get to know them I made an excuse in form of a project.
Beyond the choir, 2018, video still (as well on the previous page)
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Francesco Ragazzi
FRANCESCO RAGAZZI
FILMMAKING AS A RESEARCH ‘METHOD’
Francesco Ragazzi co-directed his first documentary in the same year he started his doctoral studies in 2003. Trained in social science in Sciences Po Paris (B.A, 2002 and M.A. 2003), he holds a PhD in Politics from Sciences Po (Paris) and Northwestern University (Chicago, 2010). Since 2010, he is lecturer in International Relations at Leiden University (the Netherlands). His writing and his films deal with identity, migration, citizenship and violence.
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From the early days, my take was considered as “too academic”. A way to distinctively signify that it wasn’t that of an ‘artist’ or an ‘artistic researcher’. While I was told to “feel free” – which I thought I was doing – I was more often than not receiving polite and embarrassed feedback to my work. I was “thinking logically, not emotionally”, I was told. I wanted to “privilege text over image”. I seemed to be missing the point. None of my attempts worked. I was doing things wrong. Fair enough, I thought. I wasn’t an artist per my credentials. Yet wasn’t this precisely the point, I thought, to experiment? Why was I consistently told, albeit implicitly, that I was doing things “wrong”? As it appears clearly now, even though I had directed and produced some documentary films in the past, the problem, in fact, is that I had been directing them as an academic. My alleged advantage was the problem. I had been refusing to see two important differences between social science and artistic research. RESEARCH IN CONDITIONS OF SPECTATORSHIP: THE ‘MAKING OF’ Over the course of these two years, I understood that I hadn’t been thinking through film but on top of film. I had been putting images and sounds to the service of words, I hadn’t let myself be guided by the material, I had been using film as illustration for an academic discourse that could exist by itself. I thus had to ‘un-learn’ this approach in order to give way to the emergence of a practice centred on working from the material itself – and my own subjective relation to it. At the centre of this was a simple fact that I had been ignoring: there is a fundamental difference between the experience of readership and that of spectatorship: film works because it is an invitation to the viewer to co-create meaning through the interpretation of signs and symbols. It is, in simple words, ‘showing, not telling’. It took a long and unexpected way, only to fall back into one of the first lessons of filmmaking. It implied however being ready to operate a certain number of shifts and translations. Most of all it implied acknowledging what the true nature of the problem had been so far. I hadn’t been making ‘bad films’. I hadn’t been making films, in this sense, at all. This element allowed me to reframe my research, namely, how can knowledge be produced and presented in the specific conditions of spectatorship? The film I am presenting here explores one possible solution to this question, through the notion of the ‘making of’. While it is certainly not an original device in the history of essay and documentary film, the ‘making of’ stages both the research and the object of research, allowing to present to the viewer an analysis on filmmaking as part of the plot itself. This idea emerged organically from the process of filming itself. I initially intended to shoot this film as a family home movie – a quick and naïve scenario as an excuse to record
good moments together. While the film I intended to shoot was more or less coming on as I expected, the dual audio system set-up was capturing all the conversations we were having between the shots. I realised I had recorded material that could be telling another story than the very confidential film I had initially planned. Doors opened. REFRAMING RESEARCH THROUGH A PERSONAL PRACTICE Working through film wasn’t however the only challenge I had to overcome. The second, and perhaps more important one, is that I had been refusing to let go of the safe distance that social scientists traditionally place between them and their object of study. I was refusing (or had been unable) to put my own subjectivity — that intellectual and emotional filter through which we all perceive the world in our own specific ways — at the centre of the research. This aspect required a much more important shift that has only been possible through a painful process of critique and self-doubt in dialogue with other fellow filmmakers. The social and institutional pressures, which ended up generating feelings of frustration, humiliation, rejection, but also motivation, valorisation and ultimately acceptance have been, like in no other educational experience, part of the constitution of a new perspective and therefore fundamental to the evolution of my practice. If what distinguishes the arts from the sciences is the engagement with the realm of emotions, feelings and perceptions, the processes resulting from the social rejection/ inclusion into the group cannot be swept under the rug as if it was a negligible by-product of art education. This social process of initiation, which reveals itself in moments of desperation, feeling lost, feeling useless, but also feeling supported, praised and accepted, are part and parcel of a pedagogic/initiatory process which requires the researcher to start focusing on how they put their individual subjectivity to the service of the production of artistic research.
MASTER OF FILM 2018
STARTING POINT: DOING THINGS WRONG What does it mean to use filmmaking as a method in artistic research? Coming from an academic perspective, I initially thought I would research the use of artistic approaches and techniques – more specifically film approaches and techniques – as methods to pursue, through a different perspective, the interests as I had been chasing over the fifteen years as a social scientist. ‘Filmmaking as method’ I thought. I also very naïvely thought that coming from academia was giving me an advantage to understand artistic research. Nothing of the sort.
Working through one’s subjectivity does not necessarily mean working on a personal or intimate subject matter – but for anyone starting from the same position from which I started, I don’t think there could have been a better path. For the simple reason that it is a route in which it is impossible to maintain a comfortable, distant and neutral position; one is forced to engage in a complex and awkward introspection of oneself and one’s relation to others. The project I am presenting here reflects this uneasy approach. I started the research looking for the ways in which film could be used as a ‘method’. I ended realizing that ‘thinking through film’ cannot be accomplished without incorporating, embodying, practicing the filming gaze and approach. Making this film has thus been the way for me to mature these ideas from the making itself and from the making with others. From a research question centred on the narrow question of method, my research has been reframed once again, this time as the question of how to embody a cinematographic subjectivity with the purpose of research. It has reframed my perspective how to choose a subject, how to approach it and how to make sense of it.
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FRANCESCO RAGAZZI
13 Attempts To Shoot My Father (Working Title) The short documentary essay film deals with the director’s relation to his father as much as his relation to filmmaking. Based on the genre of the “making of” or the ‘backstage’, the film explores the father-son relation through a metaphorical questioning of the traditional roles of cinema practice: the actor, the director and the audience.
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MASTER OF FILM 2018
Director Francesco Ragazzi Camera Francesco Ragazzi, Franco Ragazzi Editing Albert Elings Sound design Sergio Gónzalez Cuervo With Franco Ragazzi, Marie-Emmanuelle Ragazzi, Gianni Ragazzi Special thanks Laurent van Lancker, Begüm Şarakman, Eugenie Jansen, Eyal Sivan, Alessandro Ragazzi
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DAVID WASCH
David Wasch
INSIDE NATURE, OUTSIDE THE SQUARE David Wasch (Amsterdam, 1987) graduated in 2013 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy as a multi-disciplinary artist, investigating the position and meaning of painting in relation to the technical and intrinsic aspects of collage. Because of his graduation work he was nominated for the Young Blood Award 2013. A year later his interest shifted to the material borders of the moving image in relation to his experience of the physical reality outside the frame. His installation shown at the Artistic Research Week, Inside nature, outside the square, is a get-together of experiments revolving around the question: When does our position change reality and when does reality change our position? www.visitoroffthescreen.xyz email: waschmiddel@gmail.com
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MASTER OF FILM 2018
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DAVID WASCH
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MASTER OF FILM 2018
Artistic Research Week | In Process Master of Film Graduation Show is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 22 – 29 June 2018 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 Sander Blom, Laurent Van Lancker, Vesna Petresin, Rada Šešić, Eyal Sivan, Julia Willms Curators Eliane Bots, Mirka Duijn
Jazz, fi ne arts, fi lm, photography, design, fashion… We are keeping an eye on talented young artists. By providing grants and awards we are assisting the brightest musicians, artists, designers and fi lmmakers to develop their talents, create new opportunities and above all, to achieve their creative goals. www.keepaneye.nl
KEEP AN EYE
Design Dog and Pony
2018
Many thanks to
© Nederlandse Filmacademie, Amsterdam 2018 Markenplein 1, 1011 MV Amsterdam +31(0)20 52 773 33 fi lmacademie@ahk.nl www.fi lmacademie.nl www.masteroffi lm.nl
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