Débora Butruce
On August 7, 2020, I accompanied the 9-hour visit of the delivery of the keys of the Cinemateca Brasileira to the federal government. On that occasion, the government promised that in 15 days everything would be resolved and the Cinemateca would resume activities, with its technical staff hired. A year passed and the situation was not only unresolved, but tragically worsened, with the fire on July 29 at the Vila Leopoldina unit. Tragic, but not unexpected, given the numerous warnings of fire risk and other damage to the Cinemateca Brasileira collections that former workers and various entities, such as the Brazilian Association for Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA) made throughout this period.
Débora Butruce, audiovisual preservationist, cultural producer, curator and president of ABPA, will give her testimony about the situation at the Cinemateca Brasileira and the current dismantling of the Brazilian cultural heritage.
Andrés Felipe Uribe Cárdenas
The communication tactics of the Colombian government in the context of a chronic armed conflict have taken the social media channels to mansplaining ideology on a contemporary massive media level. Founded in 2018, this ready-made video art piece shows the rhetoric of the patriarchal discourse of the so-called “low intensity” war. Here, the army is celebrating Mother’s Day by using soldiers to make fanatical affective statements about the role of women in society using a religious heroic language very much symptomatic of a fascist regime. This cinematographic production makes direct quotations of the spectacular education of American action movies embodied by the military themselves.
The Colombian official Army is the biggest (and only legal) armed group in the country. For almost two decades, the Army has been investigated for committing systematic crimes against humanity. Journalistic findings in 2008 that the security forces had extrajudicially executed dozens of young men from Soacha, a poor neighborhood near the capital Bogotá, forced the government to deny and then to finally acknowledge that the Army may be responsible. Besides the title, subtitles and the disclaimer, neither the sound nor the video have been edited whatsoever.
Andrés Felipe Uribe Cárdenas was born in Bogotá, 1982 and currently lives and studies in Berlin. His studies include Bildhauerei Diplom and Meisterschüler in KHB, in Berlin, and a Fine Arts BA from UJTL, Colombia. His work focuses on borderline conceptualism, poetry, multimedia povera and postsituationism. He has deliberately turned off more than one hundred television screens within the international public space during his career. He’s had solo shows in Bogotá, Cali, Colombia, Los Angeles, USA, and Berlin U-Bahn Moritzplatz. Grants include the DAAD Masters Studium Grant 2019, IDARTES Publishing grant 2018, and the Ministry of Culture Creation Grant 2016.
Ifeatu Nnaobi
This talk examines the role of community filmmaking within the communities that the films are made in. Documentary films can play a critical role in building public support and engaging policymakers to advance reforms needed to increase access to justice. Additionally, the act of making films in marginalised communities can be a form of empowerment within those communities. The opportunities for filmmaking and storytelling projects to create self-affirmation in marginalised communities will be examined through various film projects featuring the queer community in Nigeria, survivors of Boko Haram in North-East Nigeria, and the migrant communities in Berlin. Documentary films are powerful empathy-building tools and useful in generating conversations around important subjects. How does filmmaking benefit the characters and subjects in the film? This talk will discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise when the attention is turned inwards on the community in question.
Ifeatu Nnaobi is a filmmaker and photographer focused on conceptual and documentary storytelling. She/They work(s) closely with communities; centering queer, feminist, and migrant narratives through an intersectional approach.
https://ifeatunnaobi.com
Michael Jenkins
Michael Jenkins uses audio visuals to reflect on the port city of Bristol and its connection to the African Diaspora. Michael Jenkins is a self-shooting, director, producer and writer of film and TV.He was recently voted among the 100 most influential people in Bristol in the BME power list 2018. An award winning filmmaker, he won Best Short film for ‘Check the Label’ at The Royal Television Society Awards 2018 and won two BBC Local Radio Gillard Awards for the Diversity and Community award categories. He recently directed his first short for CBBC called Topknot or not. Currently part of the BAFTA/BFI Network Crew 2020 as well as a TV Collective Future Breakthrough Leader. A short film he has written and directed – Pickney – funded by the BFI, is currently doing the festival circuit.
Khahliso Matela
Any township with its ‘not-so-temporary’ structural decorum of shacks radiates a claustrophobic air of poverty, contorted dreams and unsavory dilemmas of morality for our survivalist needs. The innocuous inner turmoil experienced often by those who reside here, is eventually externalized in other forms of violence and abandonment. For artists immersed in this existence, there tends to develop a personalized architecture of inner conflict, which then informs the art used to reconfigure all their creative output and responses to crisis. These video poems are a visual reclamation technique of exposing my isolation, as interpreted through creative methods my skill allows. And as with all transient experiences, this chapter of projected rage, longing, solitudes and awe, remains a testament of a productive idleness in praise of confinement and introspective isolation. I am a writer and filmmaker, who uses his creative expertise and art to interrogate and hold memories to account. Being of the conviction that art also judges history and how history is recalled, I find my craft becoming a social barometer, upon which memory is activism in an era of forgetting
Yulia Gilich
Graduate student workers at the University of California were on strike when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the state. The picket line the strikers held for over a month at the entrance to the university became unsafe and ineffective as all in-person campus operations were halted. Yet, we decided to continue the strike: remote teaching translated into remote striking; the picket line went digital; and disruptions became mediated.
However, the conditions of the pandemic and the global uprising for racial justice in Summer 2020 transformed the strike, its organizing methods, and its goals. The movement that began as a labor struggle became increasingly animated by police abolition. As the themes we organized around and the conditions of our organizing became more complex, the media we produced became more experimental. Its function went beyond its organizing utility and ventured into the realm of the arts.
Yulia Gilich is a scholar, media artist, and community organizer. They are a PhD candidate in the department of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Their work is primarily concerned with the use of settler colonization in larger imperial projects, particularly those of the United States and Israel.
Şirin Fulya Erensoy
The LGBTI+ community has been the target of Turkish government’s growing hostility. Since 2014, the Istanbul Governor’s Office has banned the Pride March. Yet, LGBTI+ individuals and their allies still gather to celebrate and demand their rights every year. As a result of the relentless hate speech and violence directed at them, LGBTI+ community members have become activists in their own right. By visually documenting the systematic brutality directed at them, LGBTI+ activists are taking radical steps to assert their existence and gain visibility in the eye of the public. This presentation will look at the videos from Pride March 2021 and assert that video activism has become a vital act for the LGBTI+ community in Turkey to counter the stigmatizing narratives that criminalize all the colours under the rainbow; raising awareness against the everyday human rights abuses the community faces; and record police brutality towards requests for peaceful assembly. Moreover, the videos will also show the self-aware acts by LGBTI+ individuals to reclaim public spaces from which they are forcefully removed, as well as how they use confrontation with the police to voice their demands as equal citizens and subjects of this country.
Şirin Fulya Erensoy will be an MSCA post-doctoral fellow at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf starting September 2021, where she will be working on the use of video as an activist tool of representation for Turkish practitioners living in Germany. Her previous academic work also concentrates on video activism as an alternative media practice, and censorship in documentary film practice in Turkey. Şirin was the host of Medyascope TV’s English news bulletin This Week in Turkey from 2019-2021 and worked as a lecturer in Film and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She also has practical work experience in documentary film production.
Merve Namlı
Since the 1960s, there has been more visibility of queer characters and themes in Turkish cinema. The last decade has especially witnessed more daring and authentic storytelling of LGBT+ narratives in contrast to the ever-rising oppression and censorship of the political and social powers.The focus of this short lecture is to outline the transforming representations in queer cinema practices in Turkey.
Merve Namlı is a Journalist (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, TAZ, Özgürüz and various international media outlets), conference interpreter, curator (Future East Festival, Dümtek), activist and radiomaker (Cashmere Radio, THF Radio). She organizes concerts and multimedia festivals with a focus on queer, BIPOC, and non-European artists.
Dana Lorenz
The video work Re-Writing Gaze shows five different portrait situations of women* who open up a sensual space in an intimate gaze relationship with the artist. In an examination of the theory of Female Gaze, the work questions conventional looking and being looked at, as well as binary identities. In a re-appropriation of the gaze, her protagonists look back self-confidently at the viewers and thus critically question the canonized image of women* in our collective pictorial memory.
Dana Lorenz works at the intersection between artistic photography, installation and video. In her conceptual works she questions the representation of women, heternormative practices of everyday actions and codified conceptualizations from a queer-feminist perspective. What defines our interaction and language with each other? From this subjectively informed gaze, she examines the entrenching narratives of history. Her artistic practice also includes long-term collaborative and curatorial projects like the independent publication platform Edizione Multicolore.
http://danalorenz.de
Mathias Gatti
In the last years a bunch of tech-companies appeared, promising to improve mobility issues in cities around the globe. Eco-friendly and community discourses are part of their strategies. DOCKLESS is a video that exposes the fallacy of these statements and defends the bicycle as a tool for autonomy. The short lecture will show some cuts of the video, introducing what is behind the business of sharing bikes without a dockstation.
Mathias is cyclist, artist and baker. Graduated in Visual Arts at UNESP in São Paulo, came to Berlin to study at the Institute of Art in Context, at UdK in Berlin.
Ainize Sarasola
A contemplation on the question: Why do I keep on making films? Ainize Sarasola, Artist-Filmaker. I am originally from Orio, a small village in the Basque Country. After studying fine arts in Bilbao I moved to Berlin. I have been here for years now doing movies and art.
Hana Yoo
The project started with inspiration from an experiment conducted on cattle at a dairy farm in Moscow, showing them a virtual image of peaceful grassland on a cow-customized VR headset. The article that describes this experiment implies the VR experiment reduces the anxiety of cows and has shown a possible increase in milk production.
The utilization of technical apparatus in the welfare of both humans and animals have different purposes, e.g. cows for milk and meat production – humans for improving their quality of life. However, the subject-object relationship in the scientific experiment has strong similarities in the dynamic between the political system and the people. The assumption that presenting utopian images will reduce anxiety connects to the sovereign control of mental health and female reproductive labor being the ultimate catalyst for capitalism.
With various purposes, the endeavor to change perspective and overcome the boundary of visual perception has been technologically achieved, for instance in VR. However, it simultaneously reveals numerous limitations that oversimplify the individual’s experience and relationship to their environment, along with not taking into account the psychological implications in their entirety. How could one embrace the complexity while detouring from the idea of ‘self’? Inspired by children’s stories and human-animal metamorphosis in mythologies, the film takes an extremely exaggerated anthropomorphic view of non-humans, which paradoxically reveal the position of humans to widen perceptions, whilst confronting limitations.
Working in film and multimedia installation, Hana Yoo collects allegories and technological appropriation of nature, reconstructs them through fantastical and documental narratives. Her works were shown at museums and festivals including the Fotomuseum (Winterthur, CH), European Media Art Festival(EMAF, DE), and Busan International Video Art Festival(Busan, KR) among others. She is currently working as an artist resident in the Vilém Flusser Archive, Berlin, and part of Goldrauschkünstlerinnen 2021.
Achim Lengerer
In 2019 Lengerer visited his friend, the Japanese filmmaker Goh Harrada, in Tokyo. Presenting sketch-footage of the trip, excerpts from Harrada’s digitial films, and excerpts of conversations between Lengerer and Harrada about socially normed conditions of labour, filmmaking as a “small form” of a resistant, amateurish practice in a highly efficient meritocracy, the contribution aims to articulate the complex transcultural negotiations of a long-standing friendship between Frankfurt, Berlin, and Tokyo.
Achim Lengerer works on political questions of speech and language that he thematizes in performances, radio plays or spatializes within installations, and publications. Lengerer co-founded different collaborative projects such as Freitagsküche in Frankfurt a. M. and voiceoverhead, with artist colleague Dani Gal. Since 2009 Lengerer runs the Berlin-based publishing and production house Scriptings. Artists, writers, filmmakers, performers as well as activists are invited – all of whom are working with the formats of script and text within their processes of production.
Miguel Mitlag
A brief description on the process of recording reality with a cheap super 8 camera in the context of digital technology.
Miguel Mitlag, 1969, Buenos Aires, Argentina Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Film studies at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires and photography courses at I.C.P. New York. Besides experimental and documentary filmmaking, Mitlag is also a Visual Artist. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Panama, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Tunisia, Spain, France, England, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
Gargantúa Guerrilla-Projection Magazine
We will explore tactics and methods artists and activists are using projectors in public space to influence and invade with art and political messages. We will take a close look at Gargantúa Guerrilla-Projection Magazine and the research archive being presented, talk about the Latin-American scene of guerrilla projections, its contents, its logics of organization, collaboration, artwork deployment strategies and, yes, guerrilla tactics for arts in the midst of social and political crisis in the region.
Gabriel Vallecillo Márquez’s work spans across many artistic disciplines. He started as a poet then moved onto video-poetry, video-jockeying, 3d projection mapping, live cinema, video installation, documentary film and video performance. He currently leads the Gargantúa Guerrilla-Projection Magazine and is working on “::.Liminal”, a documentary film based on architectual videomapping projections of dancers in public space.
https://www.gabrielvallecillo.com
Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico (UMD)
This fragmentary film essay, written in the form of a series of Theses (in the style of Luther’s 95 Theses or Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach), explores the principles of Cavern Cinema, a radical way of making and watching cinema in a (post-)pandemic world.
The Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico (UMD) is a research agency and a faceless artistic collective established in 2020. Their refusal to show their faces and to use proper names stems from a defense of clandestinity and collectivity as a tactic to confront the logic of the spectacle and the industrial-celebrity complex.
Dan Dansen
“Survivor Manifesto – A Journey Into The Unknown” is a politcal video essay on survivorhood. Based on material Dan Dansen has gathered for the feature documentary “Wandering Between Worlds” a multitude of trauma survivor voices casts a wild utopian vision of another society.
Dan Dansen identifies as non-binary, feminist and as a queer and pleasant danger. They are a filmmaker and photographer working on queer issues, utopia and analysis of society. Their recent feature “Crisis is always” premiered at Hof International Film Festival in 2020 and has been nominated for the New German Cinema Award.
More info: www.bikepunkproductons.de
Patricia Silva
Playing with elasticities and elongations of montage, this short work contemplates the visual scales of what passes for social realism in contemporary Western media. To read the news is to climb a mountain of harrowing images only to realize that the reader is really at the bottom of a funnel. This visual study questions the role of iconographies, the malleability of meaning, and the potential spaces within filmic language.
Patricia Silva (they/them) is a Lisbon-born, New York City-based artist working with available light, cameras, words, and educational modules to facilitate deeper understandings about long-term immigration, the contours of identities, and diasporic renewals of self to place(s). Patricia’s writings have been published in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography, Daylight, Queering the Collection, and in Memories Can’t Wait: Conversations on Accessing History and Archives Through Artistic Practices. Patricia’s independent short films have screened internationally in film festivals and screening series. In 2011, they curated the first Luso-Brazilian Pop-Up Arts Festival in New York City; in 2018 they organized the Vivid Glances queer films program for Feminist Film Week NYC, and they are presently faculty at The School at the International Center of Photography.
Sohrab Hura
A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fueled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.
“I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don’t stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.” Sohrab Hura is an artist and filmmaker living and working in New Delhi. While the core of his work lies in photographs, he tries to break that form regularly and extend it into film, text, and sound. Under his self-publishing imprint UGLY DOG Sohrab Hura has published five books and in 2019 he won the Aperture – Paris Photo Photobook of The Year Award for his book “The Coast”. His films have been presented internationally at film festivals. His films have won awards at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Videonale Bonn.