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Video Programme Outside Cinema: The Spirit of Portraying
In the last years, the video practice has become a tool to the service of capturing reality. The premises of democratisation inherent to the medium of video have opened the possibility of portraying every single detail that belongs to the politics of the everyday, the intimate, the margins of the social spectrum and in general the micro narratives.
Outside Cinema: The Spirit of Portraying is a video programme that departs from the concept of portray to open new lines of understanding the practices of representation. Outside Cinema facilitates a look towards some examples of video practice aimed to picture the spirit of the regular people, showing individuals, groups or generations, faces and scenes all that comes to conform the so-called “reality”.
From an historical perspective, Painting has been the traditional medium that has been firstly concerned with the spirit of portrait, this in order to communicate the construction of the universe that surrounds the subject, its personal, its social condition. Later, photography has taken over this role in representing reality, bringing the snapshot in between immediacy and mediation.
The portrait is a genre that can function as the description does in literature. Here we should look at description as the technique that can go from the little detail to the whole or vice versa. For example, we could think of the description of the qualities of a person or the depiction of the features of a face, or the details of a landscape.
At present the use of video in contemporary art functions as the useful tool to retain this essence of the portrait through the look that stops in the detail of some gestures or maybe through the intimate proximity of the conversation.
Mixing strategies of anthropological proximity, with resources such as the interview, the documentary, the journalist investigation, the sociological analysis or the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, the participant artists in this programme offer us new ways of narration where the personal floods the image.
In the end the most important thing is to let the subject/object of the narration speak by himself herself.
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About Missing Out and Project for a Revolution by Johanna Billing
“Both works depict a space that is a deflated version of the opening
scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970), in
which the protagonist walks out of a sizzling revolutionary meeting declaring
that he is prepared to die, but not of boredom. In here earlier work apathy
and indifference prevails, lending credence to what Guy Debord said about
youth being a concept that now exists only for the market. In Missing
Out the scene has a therapeutic air, but individual discontent produces
an unarticulated fissure in the entropy of the group. Here, the “we”
seems to be mute sameness; maybe conformity, maybe harmony, merely a resonance
for individual desire that is somewhat lost and introverted.” Lars
Bang Larsen
About the series Who is…? by Magnus Bärtas
“After a series of works that used the biographical format and tried
to distill stories from the Swedish daily press (where voice their disappointments
and complain about injustices committed against them), I wanted to make
a number of portraits that took as their point of departure the banal
question,“Who is…?” – a question that can also be
posed as, “What can one say about a person”. (…)
In the film, Who is Zdenko Buzek? I can see several narratives in dialogue with each other. One of them concerns the hand and the mouth- the strange shape of fingers, stuffing your whole hand in your mouth, spitting out wine, smoking, and spilling honey as you bring it to your mouth. Another is about Croatia as a nation and the war against the Serbs”. Magnus Bärtas
About Relación especial by Begoña Hernández
“An alternative, a strategy confronted to the individuality of the
artist”/ a form of looking and hearing at each other, of listening
and GAZING us/ long encounters, identified topics that appear, that we
propose, that we discuss/ common places from where to go through with
little words/ understanding, doses of intuition. A position that is not
defined a priori/ minimum consensus (or maximum) through the entire process/
evasion of traditional formulas in the hierarchical distribution of duties/
ideological crossings or thematic or formalistic or aesthetical/ points
of a common departure, a complex itinerary through different/ rehearsals,
trials with an experimental character, experiments and experiences/ a
look that aims to be unitarian but definitively unique/ but never univocal
in any case/ unexpected encounters that were never planned”. Zer@
borrador.
About Tell-Red by Sally Gutiérrez
“Tell (2000) is a series of seven short videos, in which different
inhabitants of the city of New York, who were really willing to tell something,
narrate their own personal story. Each video shows a double narrative,
while the main character is telling his/her story the camera goes through
the individual organisation of their personal belongings, stopping sometimes
in the hands of the person who is talking but never exposing his/her face.
Tell is based in the desire and the necessity of any human being to communicate,
but also in the paradox of the impossibility of establishing an intact
communication through language and within cultural contexts that in most
cases here are alien to those people. In Tell-Red a Mexican woman tells
in a simple but at the same time overwhelming manner the reasons that
made her cross illegally the Mexican border to the USA and how she lived
that experience.”
About Tras las fronteras del sueño de la inmigración (Sin
papeles) by Virginia Villaplana
“Tras las fronteras del sueño de la inmigración (Sin
papeles) (Behind the Borders of the Dream of Immigration (Without papers)
presents the processes of conforming the subjectivities of immigration.
In this sense, it is made necessary to bring attention to the “mechanisms
of interpelation” and of incorporation of the already established
and ensured hegemonic discourses, as for example the narratives that articulate
the notion of labour. (…)
This is an artistic documentary about immigration, culture and integration
that shows the current situation of injustice of those immigrants who
have no papers and their undefended status with the Spanish Immigration
Policy. This work shows the confrontation between the dream and the experiences
that arrive from different countries to the local context of the city
of Valencia. Virginia Villaplana
About Más muertas vivas que nunca de Marta de Gonzalo y Publio
Pérez
“We want to give voice to a character, a person, a woman who would
talk to us silently. Her words would be those of a dead person, a young
woman who would have participated in the collectively distribution of
the properties of landlords in Extremadura and Andalucía. This
woman would be one of the 2000 and 4000 people executed in the Plaza de
Toros of Badajoz from the 14th of August of 1936, the day that this city
was defeated by the troops of Franco. A great majority of these people
were incinerated in a big collective bomb fire in the local Graveyard.”
Marta de Gonzalo y Publio Pérez
About The Building and Two Movies by Jessie by Gitte Villesen
The Danish video artist Gitte Villesen has become famous for her intimate
portraits of the people she meets wherever she lives. All of them, may
they come from a small Danish town or Chicago have something in common:
they believe in their ideals, even if they are not considered realistic
on a rational level.
“The Building” (2001) is a video project made by Villesen in 2000, when she was living there as a resident artist. Her work shows the warehouse users. Almost all their activities have a clear ideological side which is combined with a very direct concrete reality. Villesen is interested in how people attempt to realise their ideals, dreams and desires within what is allowed by their concrete, economic, cultural, social and gender situations. She addresses issues of normativity and oddity. Is there a “normal” way of living?
Villesen’s latest work portrays Jessie, a 32 years old transsexual. Jessie lives in the Danish countryside and her otherness, perceived as odd and abnormal, provokes harsh reactions in her village. Gitte Villesen films Jessie talking about her movie and architectural projects. She thinks it is better to dream than to realise them. But she nevertheless continues to imagine new projects. While most people would think these projects are too unrealistic, Villesen has become fascinated by them. Does a project necessarily have to be realistic? Jessie has ideas for movies. They all would be about the fear of the abnormal in society.
About the films Nocturnes and Intervista-Finding the Words by Anri Sala
“This film is a moment of experience of two voices, wound together,
in a scene of meaning or non-meaning, that this two voices against each
other create. A man who sees the world through a tank where he lives with
2000 fishes (…).
And a soldier, an ex-blue helmet in a Balkan war, who lives his life through
insomnia and nightmares of the past. Their voices deliver something like
a collision of different senses of the world.” Anri Sala
“Sala belongs to the generation of young Albanian artists that received their education after the change of the system in Albania. Even though, he had already gone through the old regime experience for quite years in his early youth. It is this fact of going through the real transition period and experiencing both situations from a different point of view that has given Anri Sala the opportunity to create his artistic position and propose really interesting works. Intervista – Finding the Words addresses a personal story, but reaches the full dimensions of Albanian universe. It is the personal story of every individual.” Edi Muka
About N de Negri by Carles Guerra
“The video N de Negri was recorded last 6 June 1999 in Rome, at the
house of Toni Negri. Negri was then serving an open prison sentence which
obliged him to return to Rebibbia prison to sleep every night. He joked
that he spent the day with his wife and went off with his friends at night.
His sentence will not be completed until 2004.
The result a video lasting 2 hours 16 minutes, was organised in ABC form.
This structure was used to produce an interesting clash between analytical
notions of his work (such as constituent power or subsumption) and terms
with which he has a living relationship (prison or exile or exodus). In
the course of these two and a quarter of hours. Negri pieces together
a vision of the twentieth century and the present day which I have rarely
seen represented with such analytical solidity and, above all, with such
optimism. Anyone who has seen this video cannot help wondering how a man
like this can be kept locked up in jail.” Carles Guerra
About Numax presenta by Joaquín Jordá
“Numax presenta is the result of the initiative of the workers’
assembly from the electrical household company Numax. This company was
founded by two ex-nazis, and now is about to be moved to Brazil. The workers,
most of them women, decide to commission a film that documents their long
strike and their process of self-management. The party that closes up
the film, far from expressing a disappointment, anticipates a vision of
a society in which the factory work has no sense. The entire society has
become a factory.”