INVIDEO 2004
INVIDEO 2004
14th YEAR
LIQUID STATES
10-14 NOVEMBER
Stuttgat, Kommunales Kino
9 November 2004
Milano, Spazio Oberdan
10 - 14 November 2004
‘Liquid States’: the title for Invideo 2004 expresses a condition of fluidity and constant movement, reflecting our awareness that this year’s works are flowing with forms, bodies or liquefied images. Videos that seem made from water, or else take the aquatic element as their subject; underwater videos; works in which the images undergo metamorphoses that are either ‘natural’ effects, obtained using water in all its forms, or else simulated and recreated electronically. As always content and language, inspired by the fluidity of water in all its configurations (from the waves above to the depths of the ocean below, from transparency to current, from floating to immersion...), become metaphors of the audiovisual scene and its rapport with the world: every year the process of selecting videos from the hundreds of entries from all over the world allows us to identify trends that are gradually taking shape in an ongoing audiovisual ‘discourse’, trends that we then attempt to encapsulate in the annual title – even with all the constraints that a single phrase imposes. In this case the chosen metaphor is the liquid, uncertain state of a world that is changing and elusive (‘flexible’, we might almost say, to borrow a disquieting buzzword of economists and politicians). Perhaps there is something here of unease over the difficulty of delineating pictures of a world whose confines are uncertain, shifting, unreliable, pictures which reflect like mirrors but can also hide dangerous hidden currents... What’s more, the affinities between water and the electronic image have long been noted by artists, theorists and critics. We speak of electric “current”, after all, as of the fluidity of a video picture, and we need hardly remind readers of the major contribution made by the Fluxus movement to the story of video art...
Dance, too, fluctuates and defies gravity, in a way easily related to water, though Philippe Saire’s project Cartographies, which we present this year, also takes on the challenge of a complex relationship with urban spaces, architecture and public places. Many of this year’s dance videos are bodies of water, but so, too, are the cities described in metropolitan portraits; we could continue the list with books of water, marine and submarine videos, rainy videos, videos in which water becomes a metaphor of memory and the uncertainty of recollection, the monsoon ‘moods’ of Wong Kar-Wai…
In more general terms, this year’s show features a rising ‘tide’ of works inspired by love for the natural world as an alter ego to the hard, ‘solid’ earth, with its wars, death and destruction. The travel videos we present are examples of this kind of vision ‘in transit’: this year attention is focused on the dual gaze (literary and audiovisual) of Giuseppe Baresi and Giuseppe Cederna on their wanderings round India and the rest of the planet, whether literal or metaphorical. The European preview night, to be held in Stuttgart this year, will allow the German public to see Mediterraneo, the atmospheric work by Studio Azzurro on gestures and crafts around the Mediterranean rim, plus a one-woman show of the work of Monica Petracci, with videos that blend poetry, painting and the theatre.
Video art and cinema beyond are also creative voices to remind us – in an original and creative way – of parts of the world scarred by violence, both now – Israel, the USA post-9/11, Bosnia; and in the past – the coup d’état in Chile led by Pinochet, the Russell tribunal on war crimes in Vietnam. We also have ‘Poetronics’, now firmly established as a traditional sidebar of Invideo: with its compilation of independent directors, the section never fails to look at the disastrous conditions of our planet with a watchful, but never unduly reverent eye...
The world and its history are also under scrutiny in the documentary on the protracted and indefatigable experience of ‘Living Theatre’, while the focus of the very recent work to be premiered by Gene Youngblood, a guest at Invideo this year, is entirely topical: the U.S. director of the now legendary Expanded Cinema (1970), a manifesto of ‘cinema beyond’ and of video as an extrapolation of poly-sensorial, multi-screen, visionary, Utopian film, presents a joyfully militant artistic use of the new technologies, opening up glimmers of hope and optimism in a sector that all too often seems uniform and homogenized. His fellow guest at this year’s exhibition is Michel Chion: musician, director, videomaker and internationally acknowledged theorist of the relationship between sound and music. His authoritative presence is an index of the emphasis placed by Invideo on the role of sound and music in contemporary audiovisual research. And indeed, alongside their most obvious combination, the music video (with a one-artist retrospective dedicated this year to Floria Sigismondi), we have works of high sound-and-visual experimentation inspired by Schoenberg and Varèse, plus the latest research from young and very young artists.
The thinking behind this year’s special tribute to a youthful, but well-established and successful director like Francisco Ruiz de Infante, continuing our programme of monograph sections, was to allow the festival public to see the ongoing developments in the career of an artist who uses music, single-channel videos and installations to treat a maze of existential themes linked to the process of growing up and the changes it brings. Another videomaker who has made a name for himself in his home country, Germany, but is still relatively unknown here is Bjorn Melhus, with his surreal digressions on identity, the media and the transformations of the individual in today’s world. Lastly, a birthday tribute goes to Gianni Toti at eighty years young – the Italian pioneer of video art and cosmic poetronicist, who goes on creating and recreating his ‘expanded’ and ‘exploded’ forms and languages, while never forgetting literature, painting, poetry, music and the cinema.
Classic, avant-garde cinema, the cinema of yesterday, cinema today, cinema ‘beyond’? What kind of cinema do these videos show to us, and what kind of cinema is emerging from the new digital forms into which film is converting, or which film itself is adopting? Some of the answers to these questions will come from the works being shown and their directors, while others may well be provided by this year’s competition, on the theme “Film and the Ego”.
Jump in – the water’s lovely!
|
|
SELECTED AUTHORS
Anderson David / Galili Itzic. Sense of Gravity, 7' 32", 2003, UK
Askill Daniel. We Have Decided Not to Die, 10', 2003, Australia
Baldwin Lucy. Freeze, 2004, UK, 7’
Beschi Vincenzo. Di tutti i colori, 14', 2003, Italia
Bottega Bologna. Accado da capo, 8' 44", 2004, Italia
Cane CapoVolto. Impero/In God We Trust, 31', 2004, Italia
Carlisle Susanna. Timepiece, 4' 35", 2004, USA
Chabert Philippe. Partitura per suono e ombre, 10', 2004, Italia
Cornejo Cecilia. I wonder what you will remember of September, 26', 2004, Cile/USA
De Bemels Antonin. Il s'agit, 3', 2003, Belgio
De Geetere Patrick. Fado, 26' 19", 2003, Francia
De Manincor Anna. Roccu, 4', 2003, Italia
Djian Loïc. Omar Khayyam, Five Variations, 13', 2004, Francia
Dusollier Hendrick. Obras, 12', 2004, Francia
Fluk Ido. What I Want, 2' 50", 2004, USA
Gonsalves Tina. Surfacing, 2' 23", 2004, Australia
Guedes Tito. from Park to Park, 4', 2003, Portugal
Hallis Delphine. I like to Think (right now, please!), 8', 2004, Francia
Hammel Johannes. system of Transitions, 9' 30", 2003, Austria
Hansen Inger Lise. Adrift, 10', 2003, Norvegia
Henricks Nelson. Satellite, 5' 30", 2004, Canada
Hersonsky Yael / Gal-Raday Koby. Border Project, 43', 2003, Israele
Horn Paul / Hund Harald. Tomatoheads, 5' 40", 2003, Austria
Ippolito Carlo. Un'altra città, 10' 24", 2004, Svizzera
Julien Isaac. Paradise Omeros, 20’, 2002, UK
Kalin Tom. Behold Goliath or The Boy With the Filthy Laugh, 8' 30", 2003, USA
Lamm Staffan. Russelltribunalen, 10', 2003, Svezia
Lehman William. Where The Sea-Lions Live, 4' 10", 2004, USA
Lloyd Sargent Paul. White Blight Manifesto, 6', 2003, USA
Lock Edouard. Amelia, 58', 2003, Canada
Macheiner Stefan. Erase and Rewind, 4', 2003, Austria
Maxwell Stephanie / Costanza Matt/ Hall Randall. Reflecting Pool, 9', 2004, USA
Mikkonen Marja. 99 Years of My Life, 33', 2003, Finlandia
Morero Andrea. BiH, 19' 30", 2003, Italia
NomIg. Pdx_01, 7' 33", 2003, Canada
Paval Conen Boris. Shelter, 8', 2003, Olanda
Petracci Monica / Fabbri Mirko. été, 2004, 4’, Italia
People like us (Vicky Bennett). The Remote Controller, 9', 2003, UK
Prati Claudio. Les Buffers, 15', 2004, Italia/Svizzera
Procopio Enzo / Scarzella Luca. Codice aperto, 18', 2004, Italia
Salinger Emmanuel / Levy Marion. I (Marion Solo), 9' 38", 2003, Francia
Santini Mauro. Da qui sopra il mare, 10', 2004, Italia
Schreiner Volker. Counter, 6', 2004, Germania
Simmons John. The Book of Water, 4', 2003, Australia
Simon Kia. The Dive, 4' 45", 2003, USA
Smith John. Worst Case Scenario, 18', 2003, UK
Sturani Loïc. Vegetable Thriller, 2', 2003, Italia
Von Greve Christina. Desde la memoria, 7' 30", 2003, Germania/Spagna
Vouardoux Anthony. Dance Alone, Svizzera, 2004, 2’
White - Sobieski Tim. On the Wing, 12', 2003, USA
|
|
INVIDEO is an AIACE's project supported by: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale Cinema; Regione Lombardia, Direzione Generale Culture, Identità e Autonomie della Lombardia; Provincia di Milano, Settore Cultura; Comune di Milano, Cultura e Musei, Spettacolo e della Commissione Europea, Programma MEDIA plus.
INVIDEO cooperates with: AICEM, British Council, Centre culturel français de Milan, CCS-Centro Cilturale Svizzero, Forum Austriaco di Cultura, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Goethe-Inctitut Mailand, Instituto Cervantes - Milan, IULM, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccarda, Medien - und Filmgesellschaft Filmforderung Baden - Wurttemberg, Kommunales Kino Stuttgart, Medialogo, Ondavideo e Centro Culturale Amici di INVIDEO.