COLOFON

Humans are perfect surveillance devices. If you use artistic/cinematic codes, you can have them analyze your work and research intuitively.

— Bogomir Doringer

need to recognize what your material is. This is where the concepts may help, they can aid the process of developing an understanding of the material. I like to build a “cosmology” of my practice. I give things names in order to push it forward, to create new openings and facilitate communication. For example, I refrain from calling people who engage in my experiences participants but address them as players. This differentiation has a serious impact since it frames their engagement - they’re not only participating by choosing from a given set of options but actively co-directing the outcome and overall course of game. Be that as it may, conceptualization always comes after the experience itself as an act of articulation. I name things that are already there. If you get entangled in too many concepts, you become their hostage. Concepts are not the only way in which knowledge and experience are articulated. The things that are said, seen, felt, and expressed in the games, leave a footprint, and inherently inform future games. Hence, the same way as the concepts are being refined over time, here the knowledge is being accumulated within the experience itself. Eliane: The awareness of what I’m working on and the possibility to verbalize it is essential to me. It gives me the opportunity to share not only the work itself with the public but also all the findings and discoveries that were made in the process. That knowledge of the methods, challenges, and structures of my research feeds back into my work as an educator.

Bogomir: At some point, when I came up with and started using the term Dance of Urgency, someone asked me where I took it from. I looked around and realized it was coined within my practice. In that notion, I managed to capture something about dance and its relation to the state of political urgency, art, expression and club culture that wasn’t given a name before. The dance of urgency is a dance that arises from the emotions that occur in times of personal and collective crises. Such a dance empowers individuals and collectives, uniting them and enabling to perform as political bodies when necessary. Taking the interdisciplinary approach, I was able to extract expertise from dance culture and it suddenly started to look not only like an original

I want to provide the audience with some sort of metaphysical synthesis - bringing things that lie below and above us into the temporal and spatial scale of humans.

— Maria Molina Peiró

contribution to the field of knowledge production but one that is backed by 15 years of practice and subsequent reflection on that practice. That gave me the confidence to dare to create new definitions.

Question It is a widespread conviction that researchers are after objective truths and artists follow subjective impressions. How do you retain and express your subjectivity in the artistic research practice?

Maria: I’m currently working on a documentary film that falls at the intersection of many fields. It deals with Rio Tinto - a mining area in Spain with some of the oldest mines on earth dating back to 3000 BC that is also considered by NASA to be the most similar in its chemical composition to the planet of Mars. They are currently testing remote robots and other space equipment there. With that area being close to where I was born, it becomes a story that combines my personal memory, a memory of the earth reflected in geology and the seeds of our possible future as space colonizers. Moreover, the story has multiple symbolic layers because Rio Tinto was also a departure point for Columbus’ journey to America, a site of the first ecological protest in history and the birthplace of one of the oldest branches of flamenco - Fandango - that originated among the workers lamenting their living conditions. Working through cinema and narrative I can synthesize all these different elements that don’t belong in the same field. It won’t be a sociological, political study alone but instead, it’s aimed at providing the audience with some sort of a metaphysical synthesis - bringing things that lie below and above us into the temporal and spatial scale of humans.

Agnese: I want my working process to be transparent. It’s a more fair position towards the audience to reveal where you stand as a maker. Transparency is the biggest affirmation of subjectivity, it flashes out the particular. I always try to find a way to show how I approached the subject, and how far I am from it. It’s not strictly about saying where you’re coming from but highlighting those elements of your background that influence the way you deal with your topic. I try to make my personal entanglements visible.

Emilio: There’s this sentence by Kierkegaard where he says something along the lines of subjectivity being the subjective truth, but one that cannot be mediated through reason. Subjective truth needs to come from a leap of faith. Without being certain of your method or an idea, you invest it with belief, trust your guts and see what it brings. Of course, if you analyze the notion of subjectivity it has a lot to do with where you come from and how you relate to your environment as well. I don’t believe in this romantic idea about all people being essentially different from each other and art coming exclusively from the inside. At the same time, I think that you need to affirm being a fool to a certain degree. Trying to do something no one else has done, or plenty have done but not in the same way, without any certainty, is a part of subjectivity. That is what I’d like to teach in my course. It’s about finding ways to discover your own mode of working. All film professionals should have their own personal relationship with notions related to filmmaking. Framing should mean something different to you than it does to me because as a filmmaker I offer you my way of looking at the world by framing it for you.

Julia: I’ve been thinking about subjectivity a lot because I’m very active in the art world. I considered how practices of the industry influence our work and condition its meaning and how the works feed back into the industry. Among the

I see my practice as research because it facilitates responsibility - the ability to respond to the world around us.

— Áron Birtalan

scariest, least useful and degrading notions in this context is one of the “individualist star artist”. It should perish. Intuitively when you hear “subjectivity” in the art context you associate it with this idea of a genius who is about to show you the reality, since he/she has a special way of looking at things. This approach creates an unhealthy competition where artists speaking about the same subject are pitched against each other so that one can win. I hate it since it goes against everything that we’re doing as people, artists, and thinkers.

My idea of subjectivity is very much connected to the notion of community. There’s a reason why I stand where I am - at the intersection of different disciplines, interpretations, and bodies of knowledge. I’m practicing now in the Netherlands which is the country of consensus, influenced by very particular design ideas, and distinct social and moral politics. We’re also in the middle of the refugee crisis and a very weird moment for information and propaganda when the media landscape and the concept of the image itself are shifting. Given all that, I can’t pretend to be doing my own little thing without knowing it and being influenced by it. You need to be aware that by creating images in these conditions you get involved in the network of communication. You need to know where you’re speaking from, what channels and media you’re working through and who you’re talking to. What I work on and how I work comes from certain traditions, circumstances, and decisions that altogether create the subjectivity. I’m gonna use the example of my group at the Master. Although we were very different from each other, I think we all come from the same subjectivity. Subjectivity in this sense is something that we create together as a group, that is being born out of shared experience and communication. It’s different from intersubjectivity that I perceive to be a function of the process. Subjectivity is embedded in the outcome, in the work.

Interviews were conducted and compiled by Stanisław Liguziński.

The Master of Film would like to acknowledge all the alumni as well as current and former students who contributed and still contribute to the development of our programme and the field through their continuous engagement in the artistic research as makers, researchers, teachers, and propagators:

Researchers 2011 Bart Juttmann, Bogomir Doringer, Kasper Verkaik, Kay Schuttel, Lisette Olsthoorn, Reinier Noordzij, Taatske Pieterson

Researchers 2012 Alice Spitz da Rocha, Janneke van Heesch, Joep Kuijper, John Treffer, Julia Kaiser, Sam Yazdanpanah Ardekani

Researchers 2013 Channa Boon, Claire van der Poel, Edwin, Ginta Tinte Vasermane, Jovana Tokic, Pedro Collantes de Teran, Reinilde Jonkhout, Ruben van Leer, Yael Assaf, Yassine el Idrissi

Researchers 2014 Agnese Cornelio, Anca Oproiu, Jack Faber, Jelena Rosic, Luiza Fagá Ribeiro do Valle, Margot Schaap, Maria Ångerman, Noël Loozen, Sonja Wyss

Researchers 2015

Bálint Túri, Bram Loogman, Ellenoor Bakker, Momchil Alexiev, Namfon Udomlertlak, Nina Jan, Olivier Delebecque, Pablo Núñez Palma, Rosanne Pel, Signe Tørå Karsrud, Vladimir Simić

Researchers 2016

Anastasija Pirozenko, Dawood Hilmandi, Dorian de Rijk, Eliane Esther Bots, Fedor Limperg, Gwendolyn Nieuwenhuize, Julia Sokolnicka, Mariia Ponomarova, Matteo Canetta, Mikko Keskiivari, Stanisław Liguziński

Researchers 2017 Alex Perry, Daniel de Oliveira Donato, Emilio Reyes-Bassail, Gustavo Lorgia, Jad Youssef, Kristina Daurova, Lisa-Marie Vlietstra, Louis Liu, Maria Molina Peiró, Sophie Dixon, Wietske de Klerk

Researchers 2018 Ana Bravo-Pérez, Áron Birtalan, David Wasch, Deniz Ozman, Diego Arias Asch, Francesco Ragazzi, Sabina Mikelić, Sam Ashby, Stephen Graves

Researchers 2019 Albert Kuhn, Bora Lee-Kil, Giorgia Piffaretti, Peter Hammer, Robin Coops, Stefan Pavlović, Jan-Timo Geschwill, Yafit Taranto

Researchers 2020 Alberto Delgado de Ita, Federico Sande Novo, Juan Palacios, Magdalena Szymków, Marleine van der Werf, Mira Adoumier, Misho Antadze, Omar Breeveld, Sarah Fernandez, Sophie Wright, Victorine van Alphen

Artistic Research Week | Shifting Perspective (Master of Film Graduation Show)

is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 28 June– 7 July 2019 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, Wineke van Muiswinkel, Eyal Sivan

Curators

Eliane Bots, Mirka Duijn

Design Dog and Pony

©Nederlandse Filmacademie, Amsterdam 2019

Markenplein 1, 1011 MV Amsterdam +31(0)20 52 773 33 filmacademie@ahk.nl www.filmacademie.nl www.masteroffilm.nl Jazz, fine arts, film, 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 filmmakers to develop their talents, create new opportunities and above all, to achieve their creative goals.

www.keepaneye.nl

10 YEARS MASTER STER OF FILMFILM

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH CINEMA

Many thanks to