ANGELA MELITOPOULOS + MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
Assemblages
By Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato
Videoinstallation
Duration: 62mins [10mins excerpt will be screened due to time constraints]
Year: 2010
French with English subtitles
Summary
Assemblages is an audiovisual research project about Félix Guattari and his revolutionary psychiatric practice, his political activism as well as his ideas concerning ecosophy and his interest in animism especially in the Brazilian and Japanese context. The installation presents excerpts from documentaries, essay-films, radio interviews, conversations with friends and colleagues of Guattari, and material on the clinic La Borde in France and institutional psychotherapy including films by Fernand Deligny, Renaud Victor, François Pain and others, as well as new material produced in Brazil in the course of the research. Originally presented as a triptych of differently sized screens, the installation refers to ideas of movement and gravity eminent in the cartographies of animistic art as well as to concepts of the immaterial in Asiatic art. Each screen intensifies a modality of the senses: seeing, hearing, reading. The montage of the archival material is conceived as a mirror to Guattari‘s concept of the ‘assemblage’, which is also a main topic throughout the installation. This screening will be on single not multiple screens.
The Language of Things
By Angela Melitopoulos
Duration: 33mins [10mins excerpt will be screened due to time constraints]
Year: 2008
German with English/Italian subtitles
Summary
'No occurrence or thing', wrote Walter Benjamin in 1916, 'fails to take part in some way in language; for it is essential to each to convey its meaningful content'. Angela Melitopoulos’s video essay The Language of Things is subtitled at critical moments with quotations from Benjamin’s On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. Silently spoken, they appear over images of a sequence of precisely calibrated machinery – carousels, wave pools, and other machines offering the thrills of acceleration – from Tokyo’s artificial worlds and high-tech amusement parks. Things, Benjamin tells us, have a dumb and inchoate form of speech, yet they communicate by means of a 'material commonality' with each other. This commonality is immediate and magical. Only through the mediation of things can the world be grasped as a whole.
Bios
Angela Melitopoulos, artist in the time-based arts, realizes video-essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces and curates exhibitions and seminars. Her work focuses on duration and mnemonic micro-processes in documentation. Her work was awarded and shown on many international festivals, exhibitions and museums (including the Antonin Tapies Foundation Barcelona, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Manifesta 7, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, and the Whitney Museum New York). She is collaborating in political networks in Europe and Turkey and publishes theoretical articles on her artwork and on mnemopolitics. http://Liminalzones.kein.org, http://www.videophilosophy.de/, http://translate.eipcp.net/
Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher who lives and works in Paris. He is one of the founders of the Multitudes revue and member of its editorial board. Among his recent publications are: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivita (1997); Videofilosofia. Percezione e lavoro nel postfordismo (1997); Tute Bianche. Disoccupazione di massa et reddito di cittadinanza (1999); Post-face à Monadologie et sociologie (1999); Puissance de l'invention. La psychologie economique de Gabriel Tarde contre l'economie politique (2002); Les Revolutions du capitalisme (2004).
CHEN HANGFENG
You Can Get Them / 会有的
By Chen Hangfeng
Performance + Video / 行为+录象
Duration: 3mins 25sec
DVD
Year: 2009
Chinese and English titles
Summary
There are 16 arms behind me holding some random toys, tools and food items, all made in China. I bought them from a supermarket in Luxembourg, where I paid almost ten times the price of what they would cost in China. (This performance piece was made during the Art Workshop at Casino Luxembourg.)
在我的后面有16条手臂，分别拿者玩具，工具和食物等物品，都产自于中国。我在卢森堡的某个超市内购得，所付的价格是中国的10倍。(此行为作品在Casino Luxembourg的艺术家工作营期间所做)
The Last Supper: Fast food / 最后的晚餐: 快餐
By Chen Hangfeng
Performance + Video / 行为+录象
Duration: 5mins 14sec
DVD
Year: 2008
Chinese and English titles
Summary
There were almost 30 chickens in the Braziers International Artist Workshop (Braziers Park, UK); they were suppose to be slaughtered the next day to feed the artists. I fed them a "last supper" of rice by drawing the head of Colonel Sanders on the ground using grains of rice...
在英国伦敦郊区的Braziers国际艺术家工作坊内散养着大约30头鸡，第二天它们即将被宰杀并成为驻场艺术家的盘中餐，我用大米在地上画了个山德士上校的肖像，以此作为它们最后的晚餐...
Santa's Little Helper / 圣诞老人的小助手
By Chen Hangfeng
Video + installation/ 录象 + 装置
Duration: 9mins 02sec
DVD
Year: 2007
Chinese and English titles
Summary
The video is shot in a small village in Zhejiang Province, (China) where 50% of the world's Christmas decorations are made by hand. The family workshops were doing the ornaments all year along and the landscape had been littered with garbage. (Originally, the video has been edited into a 9-minute video and screened it inside a small wooden box wrapped like a Christmas present, people only can see the secret from a small peep whole on the box.)
这部录象拍摄于一个浙江省的小村子，全世界50%的圣诞装饰用品都来自与此，手工作坊里的工人一年到头都在手工加工这些圣诞饰品，同时这里的环境变得越来越差。(录象被编辑成一部9分钟的短片并放入一个如圣诞礼盒般的装置内播放，观众只能从圣诞礼盒的小孔中观看。)
Bio
Chen Hangfeng
Shanghai based artist use paper-cut, drawing, photo, video, performance and multimedia installation to explore the issue of commercialization, environmentalism, globalization and cultural transmutation. 'Being an artist in Shanghai / China is very lucky, I can experience the speedy change of the society, weird new things happen all the time, and all sorts of information you can get, this is extremely inspirational. But I feel the loss of identity and the struggle for finding myself makes it hard to keep the balance'. http://www.chenhangfeng.com, http://www.icandydesign.cn/
陈航峰
上海本地艺术家，运用剪纸，绘画，照片，行为和多媒体装置等媒介来探讨商业化，环境，全球化和文化错位的问题。-“作为一个在中国上海的艺术家我感到十分幸运，可以亲身体验到社会的飞速变迁，新奇的事物每天都在发生，并接收到各种各样的信息，这让人极易产生创作灵感。但同时身份的迷失和寻找自身的纠结也让我感到难以保持平衡。”
DAVID TEH presents NITIPONG THINTHUPTHAI
Chai Wan Ni (Now Showing)
By Nitipong Thinthupthai
Duration: 21mins
DVD
Year: 2009
Thailand (no subtitles, but a largely visual film)
Summary
'For many villages in Thailand's far northeast, the cinema is still mobile. At its fringes, the networks of the Spectacle are yet to displace the rhythms of the Festival. Nitipong's Chai Wan Ni offers a sentimental glimpse of the rich and enduring traditions onto which the moving image has been grafted in Southeast Asia'. David Teh
Bios
Nitipong Thinthupthai (นิติพงศ์ ถิ่นทัพไทย, b. 1979) is an emerging filmmaker from Surin Province in Thailand's northeast. He came to Bangkok when he was in Grade 6. After graduating from vocational school, he began working as prop assistant on commercials and films, including Ong-Bak and Tropical Malady. His own films have been screened widely in Thailand and abroad, including at the World Film Festival, Bangkok and the International Film Festival, Rotterdam. Apart from directing his own films, Nitipong has worked on (and acted in) the productions of many of Thailand's leading independent filmmakers, and also runs a fabulous T-shirt shop, FILMSOVER, at Bangkok's Chatuchak Weekend Market (Section 22, Soi 3!).
David Teh is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. With a PhD in critical theory from the University of Sydney (2005), he was based in Bangkok until 2009. He recently curated 'Unreal Asia', a thematic program for the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany, 2009). He was a co-founder of the Fibreculture forum for internet culture, and is a director of Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney. http://www.halfdozen.org/, http://bangkokok.typepad.com/platform/
VENZHA CHRIST
The Darling Sisters
By Venzha Christ
Duration: 12mins
DVD
Year: 2010
Producer: HONF Lab / The Fibers, http://www.natural-fiber.com
Indonesian and Javanese with English subtitles
Summary
Every single day, an estimated number of 200,000 young, productive, and mostly female Indonesian citizens leave the country to work in various overseas companies and factories as full-time contract workers. And this is the tip of the iceberg. Sources state that the number excludes migrant workers departing from other international airports in other regions all over Indonesia. It also excludes illegal migrant workers, especially those crossing the borders by other means of transportation. Word has it the number of illegal migrant workers nearly matches the legal ones. These very numbers also contribute a significant amount to the state’s hard currency reserves, which have in fact become the Indonesian government’s second largest source of income after oil and gas exports. With such fantastic figures, it could hardly be denied that the government have been greatly helped by and have even grown to depend on the earnings from our migrant workers. Fight on, the Nation’s Breadwinner!
Bio
Vincensius 'Venzha' Christiawa is a new media artist and cultural research director at the House of Natural Fiber New Media Labs, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. http://www.natural-fiber.com/
MAURICIO CORBALAN
Staging Cities: An Assembly of Humans and Not Humans at the Matanzas-Riachuelo River Basin, 2008
By m7red (Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja)
Duration: 14mins
DVD, http://vimeo.com/4311775
Year: 2009
Spanish with English subtitles
Summary
Staging Cities experiments with new ways of staging public issues. How cities are populated? Entities, things, infrastructures, people, machines,groups, institutions, characters... How they live together? Which are the conflicts that gather and separate them? Staging Cities/Ciudades en escena takes the problem of staging the city, its systems, beings, entities and their conflictive coexistence. To stage this diversity is a political bet in itself. Parliaments are the usual stage where sometimes cities and citizens can look at themselves. But parliaments are just one way of many to stage public issues. The challenge at Buenos Aires is to set up a new assembly device to give voice to emergent characters in order to expand political imagination. Staging Cities set up the challenge of consider a collective building technique of characters and scenarios as a new political scenic device.
Bio
Mauricio Corbalan studied architecture and urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires from 1986 to1993. He co-founded (with Pio Torroja) m7red in 2005. Originally based in Buenos Aires, m7red is a urban resources network which holds archives, laboratories and consulting offices. It collaborates with a wide range of experts and non-experts to analyze, discuss, research and make proposals on the most pressing political and urban topics. http://www.ensamblea.net/
MANUELA ZECHNER + ANJA KANNGIESER
Future Archive: The Articulation of Resistance - Activism and Activist Speech Practices
By Manuela Zechner and Anja Kanngieser
Duration: 15mins
DVD, http://futurearchive.org/static/p_activismandactivistspeech.html
Year: 2007
English
Summary
How do some of the different modes of rhetoric, apparent in contemporary political artist and activist circles, translate into action? How do different political artists, activists and collectives utilize speech and language in the construction of their identity and belief systems? In this extract of a larger archive of research documentation - the future archive - these questions are addressed through a methodology in which discursive techniques are used in order to extend divergent 'activist' discourses into a future by constructing 'fictive' conversations, whereby people come to inhabit self-imagined spaces of futurity. Conducted during the counter-G8 protests of Heiligendamm 2007, these extracts of conversations act as starting points for various modes of enquiry into the use of artistic and activist vocabularies, and are offered for viewing, development and discussion via the online archival platform futurearchive.org.
Bios
Anja Kanngieser is a cultural geographer and co-researcher on the Transit Labour project, where she is interested in self-organisation and practices of refusal. She collaborates on the Future Archive, Vocabulaboratories project, and Dissident Island Radio.
Manuela Zechner is an artist and researcher based in London, currently doing a PhD on intersections between caring and creative labour at Queen Mary University London. She coordinates the Future Archive and Vocabulaboratories projects and is involved in the Micropolitics research group.
