GLOBAL OPENING with Marseille (FR)
Marseille + Milan + VisualcontainerTV
From 10th of November until the 16th of December
only on VisualcontainerTV
Artists: Gao Wenqian (Chine – France) / Obsessive Possessive Aggression (Macédonie) / Stuart Pound (GB) / Joep Vossebeld (Pays-Bas) / Fran Orallo (Ecosse) / Kessler Sisters (Allemagne) / Mateo Vargas (USA) / Alex Bodea (Roumanie / Allemagne) / Tamara Lai (Italie – Belgique) / Charles Pennequin (France) / Virginie Foloppe (France) / Isabel Pérez del Pulgar (Espagne / France) / Laura y Sira Cabrera (Espagne) / Parya Vatankhah (France – Iran)
This year, I would love to bring together, more than ever, the three horizons that have always served as benchmarks to navigate among the artworks thought and turmoil of social and political news that each year has constituted the raw material of the festival: Mad love (desiring, burning, experimenting), poetry (doing, exposing oneself, risking), revolution (imagining, transforming, emancipating oneself, no longer being afraid).
If the terms of this triad have never changed, if poetry has always been placed at the heart of the project, over time, the radical change was of having reversed the places of the first and the last terms. Mad love (desire) has become the prow of the Instants Vidéo Ship.
This is how Rimbaud’s “change life” has become the condition of Marx’s “change the world”. In the two cases, it is all about poetically inhabiting our desires and the world. (Marc Mercier)
Video Selection
The encoffiner of data (10’ – 2021) Gao Wenqian (Chine – France)
Propaganda Office ( 4’07 – 2021) / Obsessive Possessive Aggression (Macédonie)
The Angry Sleeper (2’18 – 2020) / Stuart Pound (GB)
I can only say I understand how you feel (5’03 – 2015) / Joep Vossebeld (Pays-Bas)
Death dance (1’ – 2018) / Fran Orallo (Ecosse)
Monoton Blues (3’40 – 1961) / Kessler Sisters (Allemagne)
A Separation (3’55 – 2019) / Mateo Vargas (USA)
Visual Notes in Berlin (4’55 – 2017) / Alex Bodea (Roumanie / Allemagne)
Silent Noise (5’29 – 2020) / Tamara Lai (Italie – Belgique)
Parle (3’23 – 2016) / Charles Pennequin (France)
Olympe said to me : I didn’t loose my head (4’40 – 2018) / Virginie Foloppe (France)
Durmientes (le battement de la forêt) (5’24 – 2019) / Isabel Pérez del Pulgar (Espagne / France)
Espasmos climáticos (7’59 – 2020) / Laura y Sira Cabrera (Espagne)
Bloodshed (9’16 – 2020) / Parya Vatankhah (France – Iran)
The encoffiner of data (10’ – 2021) Gao Wenqian (Chine – France)
This work explores the issue of digital heritage that has arrived. I imagined a career as a data encoffiner, using her perspective to examine the data that people have left in the world. Digital heritage carries the memories of the dead, the sorrows and joys… For the clues, we follow the path of the data grave to explore the secrets of a person’s memory.
Propaganda Office ( 4’07 – 2021) / Obsessive Possessive Aggression (Macédonie)
We, as Propaganda Office have developed a model to confront conspiracy theories. By embracing the tactics of camouflage, we produce material with potentially viral quality that could undermine conspiracy theories using their own means. Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon. They have been promising comfort, a sense of control and meaning in an increasingly complex world. We nevertheless trace conspiracy theory thinking in fear-mongering narratives that promote racism, blood libel, religious hatred, xenophobia, nationalism. Today, systematic lies, fake news and conspiracy fictions become dangerous weapons aided by widespread tools that offer quick and easy data dissemination. They have been proven extremely useful in the manipulation of political movements, while at the same time conspiracy theory followers are being heavily instrumentalized by controversial political agendas.
The Angry Sleeper (2’18 – 2020) / Stuart Pound (GB) – Video poem.
I can only say I understand how you feel (5’03 – 2015) / Joep Vossebeld (Pays-Bas) – Original Title : Ich kann nur sagen, dass ich deine Situation absolut verstehe. A reflection on human existence from the perspective of a rock.
Death dance (1’ – 2018) / Fran Orallo (Ecosse) In the video, we see how a large toxic cloud approaches a flock of starlings, the intention of this image is to reflect in a poetic way the destruction of beauty and the devastating capacity of man towards the wildlife and its ecosystems, a capacity that is leading to the disappearance of countless species of animals and plants. The work is a metaphor for our destructive capacity because man is the greatest enemy of this planet; we cut down forests, we throw tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, our plastic waste invades the oceans and global warming, product of the greenhouse effect, is showing its first consequences. We need an alternative way of life urgently, because, literally, we are destroying this planet.
Monoton Blues (3’40 – 1961) / Kessler Sisters (Allemagne) A masterpiece of television creation.
A Separation (3’55 – 2019) / Mateo Vargas (USA)
A Separation is personal mourning of the pain and trauma inflicted on Latinx migrants in the United States by the current administration’s cruel policies of family separation and detention on asylum seekers.
Visual Notes in Berlin (4’55 – 2017) / Alex Bodea (Roumanie / Allemagne)
Alex Bodea works at the crossroads of visual art, journalism and storytelling. Nourished by the desire to testify and archive, she uses a language based on drawing and text, both reduced to the essentials. She is keen to document (fact-finding) aspects of urbanity such as daily life on the street, the typology of passers-by, social dynamics and interactions.
Silent Noise (5’29 – 2020) / Tamara Lai (Italie – Belgique)
“What flavours here? What scents now …” Nostalgia for the days before … Carelessness, freedom of movement, human warmth, nature … which the Coronavirus deprives us cruelly.
Parle (3’23 – 2016) / Charles Pennequin (France) Video poem.
Olympe said to me : I didn’t loose my head (4’40 – 2018) / Virginie Foloppe (France)
My video brings together two feminists, Olympe de Gouges and Angela Davis, across borders and centuries and through my body. Olympe de Gouges’s blood did not coagulate. It flows in my veins. During his beheading on November 3, 1793, she declared: “The children of my country will avenge me”. On January 21, 2017, during the women’s march, Angela Davis made a speech of resistance to those “who proclaim the supremacy of the hetero-patriarchal white man”, calling for an “inclusive and intersecting feminism” that invites us all to join the resistance, with, among others, our art. With my body, I wanted to make the connection between these two feminists, beyond centuries and borders.
Durmientes (le battement de la forêt) (5’24 – 2019) / Isabel Pérez del Pulgar (Espagne / France)
Like a huge stranded animal traversing the history of millennia. A largely expanded lung struggling to breathe. Survivor of vandalism and looting. Turned into a photographic attraction of tourists without memory. There it remains, contracting in its stony bed. Jailer of legends, refuge of the fairies. The enchanted forest. The forest that breathes. The primary forest.
Espasmos climáticos (7’59 – 2020) / Laura y Sira Cabrera (Espagne)
They are two choppy video performances on climate change, global warming, plastics, fires … With human activities we are producing a new geological era, the Anthropocene because we destroy the climate and life on the planet. With irony, a fantastic medieval being warned us of the danger, of our insanity to separate culture and nature.
Bloodshed (9’16 – 2020) / Parya Vatankhah (France – Iran)
Bloodshed is a reaction to the violence and massacre of the Iranian people in November 2019 in several cities of the country during protests against rising fuel prices, corruption and inequality. This protest by Iranians, which began on 15 November 2019 and will extend until 16 July 2020, is known as “Bloody November.”According to the Iran Human Rights Center and Reuters, the state has killed at least 1,500 people in the streets and taken more than 7,000 into custody as they peacefully demonstrated their discontent and desire for a regime change.
This video performance represents my feeling of being drowned in the blood of this barbarity against the Iranian population far from the world’s gaze when the media does not cover these events and the international political powers do not condemn them due to lack of diplomatic interest.
Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques is a non-profit art organisation (association law 1901) that inherited from the international Festival Les Instants Vidéo founded in 1988 in Manosque (Department of Alpes de Haute Provence). Based in Marseille (since 2004), the association spread out all year long, here and there, a choice of international artworks representative of the large diversity of video and digital writings: screenings, an exhibition of installations, performances… which show the trans-disciplinarity of video art, since its invention (dance, music, poetry…).
Driven by a deep concern for new languages, new poetical audacities, we care about history (where does video art come from? Where is video art today? Where is video art going?) and at the same time about the evolution of technologies.
We try to imagine different ways of presenting the works, mingling cultures (“high brow” and “popular”, contemporaries and traditional…).
We go meeting the public and the artists who we like to name the electronic poets.