Curated by Marc Mercier
from the 12th of November to the 16th of December 2020
Artists: Pierre Carrelet (France) – Heidi Hörsturz (Allemagne – Pays-Bas) – Neno Bechev (Bulgarie) – Matthias Fitz (Allemagne) – Katie Colosimo (USA) – Tania Haberland (Allemagne / Ile Maurice / Afrique du Sud) – Pelagia Gadallah (Egypte) – Marcos Bonisson & Khalil Charif (Brésil)
Death, life is stalking you!
Video art presents an overflowing, a passionate gesture that decides what happens to your own body. Only passion is able to defy death and stupidity that lies in the eyes, obscene, of the others when looking at our bodies. What gives each of us a sense of freedom? Forgetting that we are being watched. Only then can we overcome the limitations the society built around us or even the clothes which hide the most private parts of our body. La peau-ésie. La peau-hérésie. Our body likes the freedom guiding us to a tomorrow that will not be a disenchantment anymore. (Marc Mercier)
Video selection:
Somewhere Eternity (5’36 – 2011) / Pierre Carrelet (France)
…What will I become in my shattered strength
My black strength at the end of my mountains
To see you forever I cast my gaze away
I listen to the sirens…
Do you like me? (6’ – 2020) / Heidi Hörsturz (Allemagne – Pays-Bas)
Heidi Hörsturz deals with the various facets of the moving image and sound. She works in a wide range of computer animations, audiovisual performances and multimedia installations. Her works examine the influence of new technologies and the social questions that have arisen as a result of digital development.
“Do you like me?” investigates contemporary digital aesthetics and its influence on the perception of the human body. With the approach of art as a medium for exploring social coexistence and as a means of ending the structural suppression of people, fantasies and visions, this work takes the media overload of stimuli to the absurd.
Delete Treat Me As a Coyote! (2’20 – 2018) / Neno Bechev (Bulgarie)
Being video-documentation of a pseudo-hooligan’s act, the video reflects the nowadays world migrant crisis. Moreover, the footage was filmed in front of the fence of LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), which is considered a very important border-crossing point in USA.
A beautiful thing (8’41 – 2019) / Matthias Fitz (Allemagne)
A beautiful thing puts the incumbent President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, in a contemplative setting between self-doubt and zest for action. Always on the move, he finds himself in a dialogue with excerpts from writings by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who died in 1926. Side by side with Rilke, Trump struggles against isolation, for spirituality and the achievement of the fleeting utopia of a pure existence.
Realize Your Dreams (3’02 – 2019) / Katie Colosimo (USA)
A personal and political retrospection of rural and suburban Midwest values. This film explores how the values of where you grow up shape you, the power of an oversimplified emotional message, the irony in what our leaders say, and how we often fall victim to manipulation by them. It also focuses on feelings of isolation, exclusion and emptiness to portray a specific feeling from a specific time.
A Will (5’26 – 2020) / Tania Haberland (Allemagne / Ile Maurice / Afrique du Sud)
A ‘poetry in music’ Video
words & voice: Tania Haberland
music & editing: Riccardo Barbera
photos. Fabrizio Dalle Piane
A home project collaboration created with home technologies during the coronavirus quarantine.
A Will Santa Caterina’s head and one finger are preserved in Siena and the remainder of her body in Rome. Tightly packed and, in my imagination, squashed to fit the beliefs and customs and desires of so many others. Sedimented below centuries of stone-cold rubble, petrified within a cast made to resemble what those in power wished her to be. Buried in two churches of brick and duty, martyrdom and mortar.
Partially Detached (8’41 – 2019) / Pelagia Gadallah (Egypte)
Trying to piece together scattered fragments of memory loss due to depersonalization – a coping mechanism that subconsciously suppresses memories and divorces oneself from a reality that is too unpleasant for the mind to entertain – I could only find few photos of my entire childhood. Using the camera as a metaphor for that condition, and building on the relationship between memory and image, the film takes a journey through these images in an attempt to break the dream-like state and the experience of life as a mere detached observer. Exploring how our relationship with our surroundings, the space we’re allowed to take up in the world, and even the physical restraints or freedom of movements allow us to view the whole or only parts of the truth and how much, in turn, that informs our sense of identity and concept of self. Raising the question, which is costlier: the pain of facing reality or the loss of turning away from it?
Kopacabana (13’33 – 2019) / Marcos Bonisson & Khalil Charif (Brésil)
Experimental film made through a collage of current and archive images in Super 8 and digital, set in a Copacabana as an epicentre of intercultural, social and sensory experiences. Narrated by the significant speech of the poet Fausto Fawcett, and sonorized by the musician Arnaldo Brandão.
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 art works representative of the large diversity of video and digital writings: screenings, 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 comes 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 traditionals…).
We go meeting the publics and the artists who we like to name the electronic poets.