INTRODUCTION / SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

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.

A multi-disciplinary artist working mainly in opera and audio-visual concerts, Robin Coops (the Netherlands) has always been interested in issues of control. How are we controlled by the political, technological and social systems that we live in, and what ways can we find to question and mitigate that control? In his research, Jazzing Frames, he asks these very same questions but then in relation to his own role, as director. How as a director to find the balance between having and losing control? Using the metaphor of jazz he proposes to opens up the space for improvisation – for himself, his team and ultimately the spectator. The work in progress film TOUCH serves as a frame and test case for a different way of working.

Jan-Timo Geschwill (Germany) used his time at the programme to research the complexity of forces that traverse and make up his subjectivity, in order to critically reflect on the relations between identity, society, technology and media. Given that it is in technology and media - and particularly VR - that his artistic interests lie, he criticises the idea of VR as an empathy machine and experiments with creating the experience of a self portrait in VR, The Puppeteer.

Trained as an investigative journalist, then stretching the limits of the Danish TV-field by synthesising fiction and journalism, Peter Hammer (Denmark) now proposes the need to go even further. Under the heading of Forensics of Imagination he pleads for a more exploratory cinematic practice that seeks to subvert master and dominant narratives while interrogating the production of meaning and truth. Deep Gaps is a project exemplifying that interrogation by giving space to the unexpected, the seemingly irrelevant, the coincidental, the contradictory... It’s also a project that in a playful manner allows for addressing what one may call ‘a crisis of imagination’.

Bora Lee-Kil is a South Korean filmmaker and writer who attributes her storytelling interests to the fact that she grew up with deaf parents. Moving between two language worlds – the world of signs and silence and the world of spoken and written words - her work aims to give voice to what and who is not heard within the socio-political context of South Korea. Her research (Re)writing history through gesture and body movement takes this interest a step further, by analysing the body as a ‘silent’ carrier of history and memory. Pledge of Allegiance, Black Paper and Our Bodies all reveal different facets of the body as a political medium.

Albert Kuhn is a documentary filmmaker from Barcelona whose work and research focuses on the relation between the personal and the political. Within the broader context of his research, under the heading of Future Nostalgias, his film proposal Dreams For A Better Past uses (the editing of) his father’s home movie material to discuss the perception of time – his grandfather’s, his father’s and his own – and the need to open up a space for a different perspective on history (and on May 68 in particular).

Growing up with four languages and then losing them all to his stuttering, Stefan Pavlovic´’s (the Netherlands) attention is drawn to different ways of communicating and creating proximity –through poetry and through filmmaking. How to connect through the camera? How to film intimately (rather than filming intimacy)? And is it possible to use the camera to build a relation not dictated by power? Looking for Horses – an encounter between Stefan and Zdravko, at a lake between Bosnia and Montenegro - is the project that allows Stefan to work on all of these questions.

Giorgia Piffaretti is a Swiss audio-visual artist interested in questioning our familiar way of looking at what surrounds us by creating circumstances to make the familiar appear no longer familiar. The process of ‘defamiliarisation’ of the everyday allows us not only to establish a new, more conscious relation to it, but also works to help us question our own subjective perceptions of the world. Using her own work and her personal (research) archive as her material, she has found in a newsstand near the border between Switzerland and Italy a perfect device – literally and metaphorically - to share her practice of shifting perspective in order to investigate the hidden side of the visible.

After 16 years working at night as VJ, with material ripped from personal archives, television and film, Yafit Taranto (Israel / the Netherlands) swapped night for day and embarked on a research journey focusing on revisiting her working method and her long term-interest in the theme of death. Discovering the value of process and collaboration, her research in and through cinema, brought her out of cinema into performance, while she understood her interest in death to be in fact an interest in life. Hence her project Fun Fatales, which revolves around modes of female freedom. Through the Eye of the Needle is a performance that weaves together, like a VJ, images, stories, perspectives and sounds into a quilt of untold female histories.

Mieke Bernink Head of the Master’s department / Head of Research Netherlands Film Academy