Where is my tribe? Theory and practice of care Intervention and debate with Carolina del Olmo, after the screening of: The swedish theory of love by Erik Gandinni. November 12, 2016 Espai Calabria Barcelona. "Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Hakim Belabbes' Whispers follows a man's obsessive search for his lost childhood through the dark alleyways and desolate cemeteries of the director's Moroccan hometown, Boujad.

Theory and practice of care

"Loneliness is on the rise. "Mainstream discourse hides the fact that the ‘normal’ situation of a 40-hour working week, plus daycare, plus grandma for tricky times, does not just leave room for improvement, it is downright unacceptable.”

Carolina del Olmo, where is my tribe?

In Sweden – an extreme case of Western trends within the Protestant tradition –, over 50% of the population live alone. People also die alone, forgotten by everyone, after a lifetime of pursuing the desire for personal independence, adapting to social norms, comforts, and socialisation without physical contact. The dream of an independent life, free from community bonds and patriarchal family ties, has turned out to be a nightmare of loneliness, sadness, and existential emptiness.

We need to overcome the binary oppositions that lead us to choose between two almost equally bad options. We don’t have to go back to the old, strictly patriarchal family, but we shouldn’t have to settle for metropolitan solitude either. The idea is to create and experiment with other ways of living and loving.

"According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, female lab rats locked in cages with only their young for company started to behave in a manner very similar to 1950s American housewives, with their obsessions and their neuroses. But when observed in the wild, mothers and their offspring showed a wide range of different behaviours in all kinds of social contexts."

                                                                                                                                                             Carolina del Olmo, Where is My Tribe ?

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love , a Swedish social worker investigating the growing number of people who die abandoned, completely isolated, asks: “What does it matter if I have a million in the bank if I am not happy?” But it’s not just about achieving happiness, it’s about the immense somnambulant sadness washing over a decaying civilization, where life unfolds in the midst of the epiphany of a mountain of waste. “ Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world collapsing ,” say the Zapatistas. Individual independence is the catastrophic ideal of a world that is perfectly organised and efficient but cold as ice.

“ At the end of independence there is no happiness. At the end of independence there is the emptiness of life, the insignificance of life, and utter, unimaginable boredom.”

                                                                                                                       Zygmunt Bauman, interviewed in The Swedish Theory of Love

Dusty Egyptian songs, found and lost. Some papers flying in the wind in an alley in Tangiers, the dance of the ephemeral, the fragility of the moment. Newspapers, plastic bags, tissues, all of them destined to disappear. But contemplation collapsesthe time of the instant and opens a door to another place without measure. Here it is the eternal dance of meetings and missed meetings; now between a newspaper and a plastic bag that touch each other, caught in a swirl of dust. The page of the newspaper opens, the bag capriciously comes to rest a moment on it, and they repeat the game, over and over. Someone passes by taking no notice of the scene, invisible without the state of contemplation. And there we feel that it is life that takes us, that carries us in its arms, that makes us find each other in the loss. All of the possibles and impossibles of our stories are there, luck is their need and chance is their destiny.... Tánger. Cover Agent: Zayd ibn Dawra.

A captivating message for dark times

Music is there to be made 1

Void and music in the West

The Black Antisol - //Silence in the awakening of the worlds//

Invitation to the film-trance: Research project & Live Cinema with Vincent Moon

To interrupt the noise of the world, to be receptive, to listen, to open to the co-animation of the world.

An exploration, a week of sound encounters, with a live cinema or film trance session at the CC Convent Agustí.

Faced with the monotonous and maddening barbarism of the media and the networks that make us see without seeing, that simplify reality by reducing it to spectacular events and violence, Vincent Moon invites us to stop the machines and go out to meet each other.

To interrupt the noise of the world, not to escape from the horror of the ongoing war or from the clear perception of a civilisation advancing towards the abyss.

Vincent Moon , independent filmmaker and sound explorer, who has been travelling the world for twenty years, will spend a week travelling with us between Barcelona and the mountains of the Pyrenees, encountering known and unknown music, and an invisible art of living and resisting.

The way we show the world helps to change the way we see it, changing the way we look helps to change a world flooded with images.

Vincent Moon says: "I long to rediscover, to rework a link with ancestral tonalities and rhythms, forms of trance...". From the Dhikr (remembrance) of Sufi tariqas in Chechnya, Ethiopia or Turkey; to months in the interior of Brazil or Peru, or incursions in Jakarta, Argentina or Morocco: "A kind of experimental ethnography, trying to hybridise all these genres of trance and music in different parts of the world (...) I think we are recording to gain a certain complexity (...) To reinvent life today we have to elaborate new forms of imagery. And it's very simple. You have to go out into the encounter (...) You break down the barriers to the encounter with the body more than with knowledge. This is what travelling taught me, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. Respect is a step forward.

A poetic approach to the everyday. Exploring rhythm and tonality in the sound and visual resonance between beings and elements and things.

"Encounter is the fundamental thing. Meeting people, like the Troubadours (...) Film is an excuse to create a very special moment in the present, in the reality of now".

The Australian Aborigines used to say that "everything slumbers beneath the surface of the earth waiting to be called". - On the acoustic and visionary journey with Vincent Moon we go out to meet voices that continue to sing among the ruins, calling into existence another life, another reality, another truth.

"When I arrive at a place, I ask myself what is important to film today?" - Vincent Moon's visit is twofold: on the one hand to explore some experiences that are "important to film today"; on the other hand, a moment of encounter and projection in Barcelona, with his Live Cinema or Film-Trance - sound and visual exploration.

Vincent Moon's work connects with one of the investigations opened at the Unidentified Video Observatory : Silence in the awakening of worlds . At first, this research started from taking the visionary experience seriously and investigating the ways in which it unfolds, through the cracks of this world, from Surrealism to the current decline of naturalist secularism. In a second moment, which we have called first, during the immersion in the materials: The Mirror of the Night ("Mirrors: no one has yet described, knowing it,/ What you are in your being,/ You, like interstices of time,/ Filled only with holes of sieve. / You, still wasters of the empty room,/ At the hour of twilight, vast as forests..."); and now, at the moment of exposure and encounter: The black anti sun , which starts from taking seriously Rilke's intuition in the Sonnets to Orpheus: "Gesang ist Dasein" (To sing is to exist) .   

«"But the great black anti-sols, wells of truth in the essential weft, in the grey veil of the curved sky, come and go and suck each other in, and people call them ABSENCES" (René Daumal).  These splendours, the aim of the human being is to collect them (...). And it is precisely by fighting against the inertia of the body and the sleep of the soul, by practising techniques of awakening - physical awakening, spiritual awakening - a kind of "long, immense and thoughtful alteration of all the senses", that allows us to overcome the material and spiritual order of this world, in short, by leading a counter-life» (Jacques Lacarrière, Les gnostiques ).

To find, 20 years later, the boy with whom he was kissed for the first time, the author, now unrecognizable for him, manages to put him in front of a camera with a "professional" pretext ...

The experiences of a young Arab American, Christian woman travelling on her own in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the summer of 2002. The film is a reflection on the complexity of Palestinian existence and the disturbing "ordinariness" of living under constant curfew. Forbidden to Wander is also the journey of personal discovery for the filmmaker, the wanderer who falls in love with a Palestinian man in Gaza.

In the industrial suburbs of Beirut, three men talk about their sexual relationships: beginning, middle and end, hiding nothing. The video explores the ideal "male" that attracts them and they share with most boys his age. The cult of the body, songs and sexual language are verbal and non-verbal elements articulate their fantasies. The stories they tell us begin with the seduction, and end when they have fucked. This is the image they want to project in front of the camera, the "brave and beguiling" guy. In this context, desire is a commodity and romantic relationships always lead to failure.

« A man and a woman make love, they share their pleasure like scissors which cross ». The pair, like a pair of scissors that is sharp, dangerous and sublime. « Les ciseaux » (the scissors) is a video made using images from the Nabil Ayouch's film « Une minute de soleil en moins », censored in Morocco. »

An exploration of human sentiments, but also a questioning of the reality of these feelings once they are filtered through the media. 6th Independent Vídeo & Interactive Phenomena Show