El Barri Xinès (work in progress) and other City films

Mass Media Archaeology: A Selection from the Prelinger Archives

Calling all Active Agents

Low Tech : Strange Weather

Each and Every One of You

Jennifer Reeder - Sadie Benning

/ CONTEXT 1994 - 2020

The Unidentified Video Observatory composed in the time by Nuria Canal, Joan Leandre and Toni Serra curated from 1996 until 1998 sixteen monthly and thematic video sessions in the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, MACBA. The OVNI video programs at MACBA, were the very first of its kind in the museum and as an essential part of this initiative the Observatory curated and proposed as well the acquisition of a selection of video titles to start the early video library of the Museum.

The OVNI sessions at MACBA were mostly but not only focused in the area of media identity and mass media criticism and they were a fine distillation of the programs OVNI was periodically organizing at the neighbor institution the CCCB Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center. The sessions introduced thanks to the work of the authors, early key concepts that were describing as much the analog media times as the future huge shock wave of the digital age to come.

The programs of these sessions were often dealing with the notion of media archeology which was and still is is one of the conceptual pillars of the Unidentified Video Observatory. That is, to look back to “ephemeral” archival footage such as educational or propaganda films, to be able to better understand the present through it. Media archeology, media digest, media interpretations and media transgressions through the deconstructive use of appropriated mass media footage were among the main structural  arguments of the project since its foundation.

One of the main Unidentified Video Observatory  goals specially in the decade of the 90s was to promote the huge communicative potentiality of video through its heterodox spectrum of possibilities. And so, in these sessions there was a wide range of authors and perspectives related to the generous and open use of the medium. Works such as the video diaries of George Kuchar and the modular and serial projects of Steve Reinke were already pointing to some sort of early “analog video blogging”, anticipating future uses and understandings of the video. Visionary initiatives like the Prelingers Archives founded by Rick Prelinger in New York and completely dedicated to the recovery and preservation of ephemeral media. Corporate mass media hacking projects like Spin in which the author Brian Springer gained access to internal and private broadcast television feeds or the first glimpses of culture jamming by Donald Goodes and Anne Marie Léger were included in this sessions. Following the tradition of scratch video based in the use of found footage, some authors such as Dara Birnbaum, Klaus von Bruch, Nam June Paik, Mathïas Muller, Craig Baldwin, Rafael Montáñez Ortiz, Herbert Distel, Peter Guyer and others were mainly having a strong "digestive" attitude towards media, recycling or deconstruction and so redirecting meanings from the media flow. In this mood the precursor and essential work of Bruce Conner was shown for the first time in Barcelona in the last program of the MACBA sessions.

The balance of this video program sessions was found in one hand in the authors whose main concern was to use media and video as a contemporary tool of human insight and positioning, for instance the love-hate relation “identity vs media” in which the works of Peggy Ahwesh, Sadie Benning and Jennifer Reeder could be included, all of them often oscillating between gender identity and the mass media inertia, between the camera as an artifact and the human being in front and behind it. In the other hand balance was found in what  apparently seems to be the antipodes of the mostly media related conceptual approach in the MACBA sessions, through classic names such as Bill Viola and Gary Hill, already known names in Europe such as Francisco Ruiz Infante, foreign authors living in Barcelona and centering their work in the realities of the transformation of the city such as Adam Cohen and a special double program dedicated to the writer William Burroughs.

The MACBA sessions were an essential step for the maturity and consolidation of the Unidentified Video Observatory it was an effort to find the essence of the project future continuity. They were developed with the help of Gloria Picazzo and Anna Guarro, both of them part of the MACBA staff. Some content of the sessions would have been impossible without the inspiration found in the work of Eugeni Bonet, Andy Davies and Rick Prelinger.

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.

Motherhood on Trial looks at public reaction to the case of Susan Smith/ the young mother who confessed to drowning her two sons in a South Carolina lake after claiming they were abducted by a black man. The documentary combines multiple layers of audio and video to create a complex tapestry of sound and image that emphasizes the complexity of the issues and explores how the background/ experiences and agenda of each character influences his or her telling of the story.

Sampat Pal is the leader of the Gubai Gang, a group of women vigilantes from Northern India who wear bright pink saris as a distinctive sign that stands out, like cry in the multitude, to denounce and fight the treatment of women a slaves by a very sexist and classicist society.

Plan Rosebud 1 is focused on the recent social debate around the so-called Historic Memory Act in Spain, and the current relation between the sites of memory and the politics of memory, and the cultural industries, studied in detail, in our case, trough the war tourism and commemorative tourism (that forms the main part of the four scenarios that this first film contains).

Practical information

           A presentation of Kurdish films by the Rojava Kurdistan Film Commune (Northern Syria)

OVNI has collaborated with the Rojava Film Commune in a project aimed at researching, screening, and promoting their work in Spain, Italy, and France. A process of investigation through videos, texts, and meetings, in order to listen to their voices and understand their struggle together. We have created a website that you can visit link.

Komîna fîlm a Rojava (Rojava Film Commune) is a collective of filmmakers founded in 2015, based in the autonomous Rojava region in the Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria. The Commune is actively working in the region to rebuild and reorganise filmmaking and film education infrastructures.

The Rojava Film Commune was established to promote local film culture by organising film screenings, facilitating discussions on the role of film within society, producing new films, and setting up a Film Academy. Following the 1960 fire in Rojava’s only cinema in the city of Amude—which saw the death of 298 children trapped inside—the Commune aims to reclaim film as a central space for reimagining society, by democratising and revolutionising the imagination itself.

The Commune has educated a new generation of Rojava filmmakers, organized screenings in cities and villages, and produced new films. It seeks to represent the values and ideals of the Rojava Revolution, but also to mediate and depict the daily struggles in the Syrian civil war and Rojava’s collective attempt to build a new society.

The Rojava Film Academy provides education for aspiring filmmakers in Northern Syria. Founded in 2015, it offers one-year programmes, with courses on international film history, Kurdish film history, film theory, photography, cinematography, script writing, editing, and sound design, taught by local and international film professionals.

The Academy is self-organized and non-hierarchical, encouraging students to participate in every aspect of its organization. Exchange networks have also been set up with other academic, media, and news platforms, and with civil society organizations, in order to engage in broad discussions and create screening possibilities. Considering the influx of foreign filmmakers and journalists to Rojava, it is important for the Commune to reclaim the representation and imagination of the revolution.

After decades of oppression of Kurdish language and culture, the Rojava Film Academy aims to revitalize local film culture, reclaiming the power to narrate and imagine one’s dreams and realities. After the Syrian Civil War started, the predominantly Kurdish northern region declared the Autonomy Administration, creating structures based on grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and cultural diversity.

The Academy bases its methodology on ‘revolutionary realism’, i.e. a realism that does not merely reveal the current reality in a new way, but also restructures the reality of the possible . As well as finding forms to express things as-they-are, it creates the opportunity to imagine the not-yet-present, the ‘eternal becoming’ that is the revolution itself.

https://rewend.desorg.org/

https://rewend.desorg.org/