INTRODUCTION / 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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