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Platforma Video festival 2007, 7-12 december 2007, Athens, Greece Courtisane presenteert een programma op het Griekse Platforma Video Festival in Athene. Platforma vindt plaats van 7 t.e.m. 12 december 2007. The encounter in a Leipzig appartment between a Stasi officer and a civilian informant is the chosen setting for Zimmer, Gespräche (‘Rooms, Conversations’).The Stasi was the all-powerful East-German police until 1989. However, neither the Stasi nor the city of Leipzig are ever mentioned explicitly. The video is thus set in an undetermined time and space, only discernible through the accent of the actors and the clothes they wear. Constructing a realist scene is not Dora García’s intention, and Rooms, Conversations is neither a documentary nor adocumentary fiction. What García seeks is to use the parameters of a given historical situation in order to communicate abstract notions such as fear, control,authority, submissiveness, obedience, absurdity, power or surveillance. All notions which are closely connected to issues of secrecy, archiving, the community or thecodes of human behaviour: recurring themes in the work of the Spanish artist. Futur Antérieur (a.k.a. Disciples of the Heinous Path - Part 1: The Pain of Everyone) Clocking in just under twenty minutes, Herman Asselberghs' Futur Antérieur is, for the most part, a decidedly 'anti-retinal' affair: it consists of fifteen minutes of utter, stifling blackness filled with quasi-intolerable noise and an occasional glimmer of distant, shimmering twilight. Nothing points to anything, and there are no signs of meaning to be gleaned from its abysmal eventlessness in any way -- until the lo-fi barrage of sound (authored by Brussels-based avant noise quartet SPASM) subsides and the clouds part, even if only proverbially, to reveal an image of a four-year old kid in a Ferris wheel, beaming in the sunlight of his own smile. The boy's own voice-over, in words too mature for his age, thus speaks of death and the vacuity of being, but also of their tangle in the future anterior or "this would have been" tense of life. Thus transcribing into language what we have just experienced in strictly sonic terms, both sound and image enacting the darkness, not light, that lurks at the end of the tunnel, both asserting the inescapable immediacy of all being: there is no time. Presto – Perfect Sound "I find it fascinating to watch the face of someone who is reading, playing music or thinking, because these are often moments when people seem to forget their ‘social face’, being so concentrated on an interior activity; moments in which a mental space is reflected on the face — this surface between inside and outside." Manon de Boer's film Presto — Perfect Sound depicts composer and violinist, George Van Dam, performing the fourth movement of a Bartok violin sonata. In order to achieve the ‘perfect’ soundtrack, de Boer edited together the audio track from the five different recordings with the performer and then edited the film to this soundtrack. In allowing the audio sequence to dictate the image on screen, de Boer inverts the traditional dominance of image over sound in cinema. The film is a meditation on the relationship between sound and image and offers an intense reflection on a moment of creative concentration, when the subject is fully absorbed, almost as if out of sync with the world around him. A Broken Rule Six characters light up the night in an African city. Each of them is carrying a word. Once correctly assembled together these words produce a sentence indistinctly poetical and yet political at the same time. Similarly to other projects by Vincent Meesen, A Broken Rule is drawn from a public intervention distorted by the artist’s filmic mise en récit, shuffling traditional codes and conventions. Document of an experience, this video stands in the crossroad between performance, fiction, experimental music and documentary filmmaking, resulting in what can be read as a call and invitation to an “irregular becoming”. First Elections Goma (eastern Congo), April 2005. A group of children acts out the elections that are to take place a couple of weeks later – the first democratic elections since the independence. The ‘election game’ comes about naturally, without outside staging of any kind. There is a lot of violence in the election game, death truly manifesting itself. The way in which the children imitate the discourse of the various political leaders is remarkable. This election games turn into a barometer for the current political climate in the borderline between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DCR) and Rwanda. After all, children have a way of repeating out loud what they hear grown-ups whisper. The relationship between local politics and the children are embodied by Bébé Rico and Bébé Elégance, two animated babies, who are advertising baby soap. The Rico commercials have a political connotation in the collective imagination of the Congolese people. Bébé Rico is identified with president Joseph Kabila, and Bébé Elégance with vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba. |
