30
This Week
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 30 AUGUST 2015
The aged are all of
Ahead of the opening of their long-gestating interdisciplinary project – born out of a collaboration between Valletta 2018 and fellow capital for culture Leeuwarden – TEODOR RELJIC speaks to Dutch curators Lennard Dost and Mare van Koningsveld about ‘The Culture of Ageing’, which through a series of video interviews and an accompanying exhibition, looks into the different ways Malta and Holland treat their elderly What were your initial aims with this project, and how did they evolve over time? To some degree you can say we just wanted to create this exhibition, called The Culture of Ageing. It’s about ageing, about how societies deal with an ageing population and how elderly people are incorporated in culture. Artists that are participating are Ferhat Özgur, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Trevin Matcek, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Vince Briffa, Adrian Abela, Femke Bakker, Gilbert Calleja, Kristina Borg, Bettina Hutschek and Azahara Cerezo. We will also show the documentary series ‘UP’ by filmmaker Michael Apted as part of the exhibition. Content-wise, we wanted to create some sort of awareness about the issue of ageing, which we think is set to become one of the most crucial social issues of the coming decades. Our projects are always research-based, so we looked at the subject of ageing from various perspectives. Such as: what does ‘ageing’ actually entail? What are its consequences? How should we deal with a growing population of people older than 65 years of age? Last year, during our first visit to Malta, we did our initial round of research and then developed our project proposal. We had already decided on most of the elements within the project by that point, and not much has changed regarding goals or focus. So you could say that the whole layout, or ‘framework’ if you like, was all set.
The content, on the other hand, is what required the most hands-on work. The art works which form part of the exhibition grew out of the video interviews that we did – which will also be shown. What would you say were your biggest challenges with this project? We think the biggest challenge was actually organising this project in Malta, since we are based in Holland. How do you get in touch with the local community, and make them want to collaborate with you while you are only here for such a short period of time? In the Maltese culture, the best way to arrange something, is to meet someone about it and discuss it. That’s a bit more difficult if you live on the other side of Europe. How did you set about adapting to the Maltese environment, and what kind of ‘intermediaries’ did you employ to help you understand the Maltese milieu? For this project we’re working together with quite a few partners – Care Malta, INIA (The International Institute on Ageing, United Nations), Seniors helping Seniors, Active Ageing, Malta Today – and we’ve set up these collaborations ourselves. It’s really great to experience that quite a number of people is really willing to collaborate with us for this project. But there have also been a lot of things we’ve had help with: finding people to be interviewed
Lennard Dost for the video interviews, finding people to work with, translating, finding a place to stay for a few weeks, helping to sort out telephone problems, taking us to places for appointments, and so on. Jessica Galea, our project manager, has been doing all that and more, and we couldn’t have done this without her. Jessica, along with our cameraman Josef Florian Micallef, served as able guides for us, and offered us a way into Maltese culture that we wouldn’t have had access to as lonely foreigners. How would you describe the ‘exchange’ that took place between the Maltese and Frisian artists who formed part of this project? What kind of insights did they bring to your exploration of ageing across cultures?
Maltese artist Adrian Abela spent two weeks in Groningen (The Netherlands) in April 2015, and Dutch artist Femke Bakker spent some weeks in Valletta during August. Adrian did research at the European Research Institute On The Biology of Ageing (ERIBA), which is researching how cells age, and how they can prevent cells from ageing. While Femke is collaborating with CareMalta, and looking into how elderly people actually live in these elderly homes in Malta. We can’t really say whether
Femke and Adrian’s projects lent any particular insight into the project. But in general, I think we’ve learnt a lot from the project as a while, and we’re confident that the exhibition will reflect this. Having undergone the bulk of the process, what kind of insights did you gain about how both of the respective cultures deal with ageing? What stuck us most is how, while the ageing population in Malta traditionally stayed home with their families, as time goes
Mare van Koningsveld. Photo by Lennard Dost
The exhibition for The Culture of Ageing will be taking place in the Main Hall at St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity August 31 to September 27 as part of the Valletta International Visual Arts Festival (VIVA). The film programme comprises three screening: Young @ Heart at Camarata Building, Merchant’s Street on the September 2 at 20:00, Robot and Frank at St James Cavalier Cinema on September 4 at 20:00, and Boyhood at St James Cavalier Cinema on September 5 at 15:00. A free public lecture titled ‘The End of the World as We Know It! The Coming of Population Ageing’ is set for September 16 and will be delivered by the Director of the International Institute on Ageing, United Nations Malta, Dr Marvin Formosa, at St James Cavalier Cinema at 19:00. To reserve your place for the free film screenings and the free public lecture, please visit www.viva.org.mt. For further details contact the Valletta 2018 Foundation on info@valletta2018.org or 21242018.
31
This Week
us by more and more of them are finding themselves in old people’s homes. The situation is somewhat reversed in Holland: elderly people used to be found primarily in homes, but because of recent welfare cuts are now forced to fend for themselves, all the while relying on family, friends and neighbours for any help they may need. So, Maltese and Dutch society are in a way going into opposite directions. That’s what we find very interesting. What can we learn from each other? What is the best way of looking after the elderly? Is it best to provide institutional care, or should we cater for them at home? How willing were the elderly to participate in this project, and what kind of insights did they provide? The project isn’t only about elderly and for the elderly, but yes, we’ve organized a few things that involve seniors. During the exhibition period, on the Saturday mornings, there will be guided tours in English and Maltese by seniors through the exhibition. We’ve interviewed seniors on Malta, Gozo and Comino. And there’s an education workshop Mare developed with Yvonne Blaauw that takes place in the homes of CareMalta: seniors visualize their secrets of successful ageing on postcards which will be sent overseas to Dutch seniors (while the Dutch elderly will participate in the same workshops and will send their cards to the seniors here). So, yes we work with people of all – old! – ages. It’s not one heterogeneous group of people and of course there are individual differences as well. They’re all different people, with different stories to tell. We’ve learnt about their personal histories, their daily routines and Maltese culture and history. It’s not about arriving at some big, empirical insight – what we prize most of all is engagement and connection. If there’s one important takeaway from all this for all of us, it’s that ageing isn’t some abstract thing; seniors are our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and, in the future, also ourselves. Are you looking forward to officially unveiling the project in Malta? What kind of reaction are you expecting from the locals? Of course we are looking forward to the opening! Because we’ve worked on if for about a year and it will be great seeing everything come together now. Obviously we hope the locals will enjoy our project, but we especially hope that the exhibition and the other activities we organize will make people reflect on ageing. Art is about experiencing things. Let art overwhelm you, and then see what happens.
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 30 AUGUST 2015
Filmmaking through displacement and dispossession TEODOR RELJIC speaks to curator Iury Lech about his upcoming showcase of Palestinian short films as part of the Valletta International Visual Arts Festival, and the niche genre’s ability to comment on the difficulties Palestinians face WHEN selecting the films, did you have common factors, or an overarching thread in mind? If so, what were they? If not, what was the reason you went with these particular films? Selecting video art and audiovisual pieces is like an immersion into the unknown depths of your consciousness. What moves me to do a particular selection of videos is a drive to search for risk-taking and beautiful aesthetic hidden behind images, sounds and cinematic experimental narratives. The selection of Palestinian video art at the VIVA festival comes from a programme I curated for MADATAC, the audio-visual art festival in Madrid, Spain, which I organize and direct, which was titled ‘Unexplored Territories’ – two words which I think adequately sum up both the overall concept and the individual works that form part of it. But they’re also a poignant reminder of the injustice perpetuated in occupied Palestine – its inability to be recognized as a free country, and the sacrifice of many of its souls. The films appear to span a wide variety of genres. What do you think this says about the way Palestinian filmmakers are approaching the issue of occupation and national identity? Basically my approach was to select and show Palestinian experimental video works from all kinds of perspectives, to let the audience contemplate, enjoy and judge for themselves the kind of video art that can emerge from the particular political, social and cultural conditions that Palestinian artists have to endure. Then, in a subtle or more direct way, we can see that all of the video creations carry implicit the identity stigma of the displacement, the dispossession and the dispersal of the Palestinian people by Israel, known to them as an-Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”.
Iury Lech Unfortunately, given that short films – perhaps much in the same way as short fiction or poetry – may not be the most popular storytelling art form at the moment, do you think this becomes a problem when you want to tell a political message? Can short films have the same impact as a popular film or novel? And if not, how would you say they contribute to the (social, political, aesthetic) conversation across the field? Speaking in a general way, I doubt that art with a political message can change complex socio-political processes, more so when the ‘problem’ is religion, or at least some form of religious belief, which is the most powerful way of influencing the masses these days. Video art is, as you say, a kind of moving image poetry, and for that matter a minority art discipline… certainly when compared to the feature film industry, which is not an art form as such but a commercial spectacle with the power to manipulate crowds of people
End of September by Sama Alshaib
Sea Level by Khaled Jarrar
Space Exodus by Larissa Sansour
with terrifying efficacy. A video artist is actually the closest thing there is to a poet in this field – who instead of a writing tool grabs a camera to reveal things invisible to the human eye. He acts as though nothing exists outside that what the camera can, and wants, to register. Compared to the control and pomp of the film industry productions, video art restores back to the artist-director the connection and the control over the creative process. Thus we can say that video art retrieves the pleasure of the individual art. Video art is a tool of investigation of the unconscious that activates the flows of personal inspiration and transcends the linearity of social ataxia. Video art defies the conventions, does not pander to a logical understanding and opens the doors to irrational metaphors that reflect on its own essence, making visible the invisible, encapsulating the real into the virtual. New technologies facilitate the creative work, a factor that must be considered as something that isn’t, in fact, detrimental to the creator. The issue lies not so much in the artefact as in the ability of perception and recreation of the intangible. Contemporary audiovisual art should be first and foremost ecstatic and cathartic, and maybe this will help us to understand more clearly each other’s positions and rights and find solutions to these aberrant immobility situations and human tragedies. Do you think the films will be able to overturn the media narrative about Israel and Palestine? And unlike, perhaps, the more
‘monolithic’ storylines of feature films, do you think short films are ideally placed to do this, given that they can offer varied vignettes over ‘grand narratives’? I think that we can agree that video art should not be established as a tool of entertainment such as feature films or TV series and shows. The video art proposals have to transgress the inbreeding discourse of entertainment media, renew the language of kinetic conventional narratives, to be framed within a universalistic process in which predominates experimentation, investigation, innovation and transgression. Video-creation thrives on dystopian highways, is entropic and metaphysical, and reflects on an idealised future and as well as a present expanded to multiple permutations and interpretations. Maybe it can move human perceptions to a new and never before seen level of manifestation of collective consciousness. Are you looking forward to exhibiting the films in Malta? What kind of reaction are you expecting? I expect this showcase will serve not only as a multi-faceted and stirring impression on the never-ending Palestine-Israel conflict, but also as a new way of watching and interpreting the visual language codes, locked within new media art. Unexplored Territories: Palestinian Video Art will be exhibited at St James Cavalier (Studio A), from August 31 to September 20. The event forms part of the Valletta International Visual Arts Festival (VIVA)