INTRODUCTION
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE
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INTRODUCTION This year’s Artistic Research Week is dedicated to the eight graduates of the 2019 Group who have joined the Master’s programme two years ago from all over the world. They came with the desire to rethink and rework, in and through cinema, their position, their practice and the questions that their practice raised. Now, some 22 months later, many of them found their method, and set out to use that method in concrete projects. Their research projects and interests, however different – from feminist politics via media technology to archival practices – all circle around the need to shift perspective. Turn the camera a little to the right or to the left, zoom in or zoom out, look underneath or from above: changing one’s perspective means seeing different things, or seeing the same things differently. Change your view on your working method and you realise process is more important than product. Stop taking your body for granted and you see how society has imprinted its rules on it. Step away from behind the camera – literally and in spirit - and find that that same camera can create and not just record intimacy. Rethink your position as a director and find that improvisation gives space to all. Or interrogate media’s production of meaning and truth and you allow for imagination to come to the fore again… It’s no surprise then that this year’s graduates chose the title of Shifting Perspective for their Artistic Research Week. This year it’s also 10 years ago that we started with the Master’s programme. Since then some 100 filmmakers and artists have had the desire, and the guts, to share with us their questions and their practices. In fact, Shifting Perspective is not only applicable to the research projects of the 2019 Group but also to this anniversary. After all, what we set out to do was to try and shift the perspective on filmmaking towards research in and through cinema, because of our conviction that filmmakers have developed and are still developing tools that offer a unique understanding of the world around them. In order to see if, and how, some of the central ideas and notions underpinning the course are still relevant in our alumni’s artistic practices, we’ve asked another alumnus – Stanislaw Liguziński – to interview several of them from different years. Their interesting reflections you find in the article at the back of this magazine: 10 Years a Master - alumni’s take on the notions that shaped the ‘Artistic Research in and through Cinema’ course.
