Il est impossible, au moment où je vous écris, de ne pas avoir le cœur lourd. Je pense à une phrase de Romain Rolland (rendue célèbre par Gramsci, qu’on a abondamment cité ces derniers jours) :

Il faut lier le pessimisme de l’intelligence à l’optimisme de la volonté.

Posons-nous donc les bonnes questions pour essayer de trouver les réponses justes et continuons, aujourd’hui et toujours, à réfléchir – et à agir – ensemble.

Teresa Castro

L’article Dernier billet est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Omer Fast – 5,000 Feet is the Best [“Le mieux, c’est 5 000 pieds”], 2011. Vidéo numérique, couleur, son, 30 min © Omer Fast

Je n’oserai pas m’avancer dans le domaine de la science politique, mais je sais que la guerre est aussi une question de droit (droit de la guerre et droit dans la guerre) et un problème d’éthique. Il suffit de s’intéresser moyennement à l’actualité internationale pour comprendre que depuis plusieurs années déjà la transformation des conflits militaires bouleverse radicalement l’éthique de la guerre et embarrasse ce qu’on appelle le « droit des conflits armés ». La légalité des frappes françaises en Syrie, par exemple, ne va pas de soi, comme le rappelle ce texte dans The Guardian, d’autant plus que l’ennemi (Daech) n’est pas un état. D’un point de vue juridique, la situation s’avère, elle aussi, très complexe.

Quand on s’intéresse à la question des drones, en particulier militaires, les questions d’éthique de la guerre sont inévitables. Utilisés notamment pour mener des frappes contre des cibles situées dans des pays (le Pakistan, le Yémen) avec lesquels la nation commanditaire (les États-Unis) n’est pas en guerre, les drones militaires (au moins l’utilisation qui en est faite) mettent à mal notre conception classique de la guerre. D’ailleurs, et encore une fois, devrait-on parler de « guerre », ou plutôt comme le suggère Grégoire Chamayou, de « chasse à l’homme » ? Actuellement exposé au Jeu de Paume, l’artiste Omer Fast interroge, dans un film essentiel – 5000 Feet is the Best (2011)-, une autre dimension de ce problème éthique : les conséquences (psychologiques, morales) sur les « pilotes » à distance de ces machines de mort. Fast s’appuie sur une série d’entretiens réalisés avec l’opérateur d’un Predator et son montage subtil et complexe de plusieurs récits est, lui-même, un exercice d’éthique – sur le quoi et comment montrer, sur le quoi et comment raconter – extrêmement réussi.

L’article Éthique de la guerre, éthique des images – à propos d’Omer Fast est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Marie Voignier, Western DDR, Video DV 10 min.

Avec le Silo, nous avions montré Western DDR (2004), le film que Marie Voignier a consacré à un centre de vacances converti en parc d’attraction en Allemagne. Mélancolique, comme si la faillite du parc avait déteint sur l’entreprise même d’en faire le récit, le film était surtout, par l’oblique, une tentative féminine de réaliser un western.

On the Silo we showed Marie Voignier’s film about a holiday centre that had been converted into a theme park in Germany, Western DDR (2004). Melancholy, as if the park’s bankruptcy had coloured the very enterprise of recounting it, the film was above all, if obliquely, a woman’s attempt to make a Western. Clara Schulmann

Read in English

1. Dans son autobiographie, Kim Gordon reproduit un texte écrit par elle dans les années 1980 sur une tournée de Sonic Youth et sa place dans le groupe: « I like being in a weak position and making it strong », dit-elle. Comment parleriez-vous de votre position d’auteur et de cinéaste ?

MV L’avantage pour une cinéaste, c’est qu’elle est d’emblée en position de force. Elle est chef de bande sur son tournage, sur son montage.

2. En général, on écrit seule et on fait un film à plusieurs. Est-ce que cette différence est importante ?

MV Je fais souvent des films seule. La notion de collectif au cinéma est rare : on est plusieurs, mais ce n’est pas vraiment collectif. Les décisions importantes ne sont prises que pas une personne (ou deux), on se sent souvent très seule. La chaîne de production d’un film est fortement hiérarchisée, ce qui ne relève pas tout à fait de ma définition du « collectif ». Il existe des films collectifs, c’est un geste politique fort, il n’y en a pas beaucoup.

3. Dans un entretien, la poète Lisa Robertson dit : « … as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Comment pour vous s’est opérée cette découverte?

MV Le féminisme et l’engagement politique ont largement précédé ma découverte du cinéma et de l’art. Ça ne s’est pas fait par des lectures au début, mais plutôt dans des groupes, dans des collectifs, dans des lieux. Ce qui m’a ensuite amené à lire, à photographier, à aller au cinéma, à m’inscrire dans une école d’art.

4. Cette question concerne les liens entre votre activité artistique et la gymnastique. Quels types d’exercices faites-vous pour écrire ou pour faire un film ?

MV Je lis et je vais au cinéma. Je bouge le moins possible.

5. Quel est l’arbre généalogique qui raconterait vos sources, ressources, références dans les deux domaines ?

MV Dans le désordre complet : Gide, Beauvoir, Cervantes, Balzac, Duras, Musil, Guillaumin (Colette), Delphy, Mbembé, Labou Tansi, Godard, Wearing (Gillian), Simon (Claire), Kramer, Jelinek, Rohmer, Bernhard (Thomas), Murnau, Haraway, …

6. Entre film et écriture, quelle place tient la lecture ?

MV Impossible de répondre, la lecture, c’est un peu tout le temps, ça me donne des forces.

7. Est-ce que la cigarette ou d’autres formes d’addiction accompagnent spécifiquement l’écriture ou votre rapport aux images en mouvement ?

MV Quand je suis stressée à ma table de travail et que ça n’avance pas, je nettoie toutes les touches de mon clavier, une par une. Mais de là à parler d’addiction…

8. L’écriture comme le cinéma convoque ou ranime les fantômes. Qui ou qu’est-ce qui vous hante?

MV Le prochain film.

English version

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

MV The advantage for a filmmaker is that she is immediately in a position of strength. She is the leader of the gang on her shoot, on her edit.


2. In general, writing is a lonely experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

MV I often make films on my own. The notion of the collective is rare in cinema: there are several of you, but it’s not really collective. The important decisions are taken only by one person (or two), you often feel very alone. The production line on a film is strongly hierarchical, which is not how I would define “collective.” Collective films do exist, it’s a powerful political gesture, but there aren’t many.

3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” How did this discovery happen for you?

MV Feminism and political engagement came well before my discovery of cinema and art. In the beginning it didn’t come to me from readings, but more in groups, in collectives, in places. And later that motivated me to read, to take photographs, to go to the cinema, to enrol at art school.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you do in order to write or to make a film?

MV I read and I go to the cinema. I move as little as possible.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

MV Here goes, completely at random: Gide, Beauvoir, Cervantes, Balzac, Duras, Musil, Guillaumin (Colette), Delphy, Mbembé, Labou Tansi, Godard, Wearing (Gillian), Simon (Claire), Kramer, Jelinek, Rohmer, Bernhard (Thomas), Murnau, Haraway …

6. Between film and writing, what is the role of reading?

MV Impossible to say, it’s sort of all the time. It gives me to strength.

7. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

MV When I’m stressed at my worktable, and not getting anywhere, I clean all the keys on my keyboard, one by one. But as for addiction…

8. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

MV My next film.

Marie Voignier

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #17: Marie Voignier [FR/EN] est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions
(Semiotext(e)) by Rebekah Rutkoff

Rebekah Rutkoff specialises in experimental cinema. She has written on Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos. She is also an artist and writes fiction. She has just published The Irresponsible Magician. Essays and Fictions with Sémiotext(e).
Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?


Rebekah Rutkoff I like forcing myself to locate clear forms in a vague and undifferentiated field.


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

RR The moving image work I’ve done has been solitary as well so the distinction doesn’t apply. For me the experience of loneliness depends more on the kind of writing I’m doing.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: « …as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure. » Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

RR In the late 90s I randomly discovered a book walking through the stacks at the New York Public Library: Women Analyze Women. This became very important for me – not only in offering examples of forms of authority grounded in deep psychic and bodily experience but in making clear that there was a constellation of women doing very important work for the rest of us: guardian angels of a sort. But Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was just as important. I’ve almost come to see them as companion volumes!

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?
RR I can’t think of any I reliably need.


5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?
RR It’s always shifting but some ongoing names are: Lee Krasner – Robert Beavers – H.D. – Marlon Fuentes – Marie Menken – Blaise Pascal – Renata Adler – DW Winnicott – Ludwig Wittgenstein – R.W. Emerson.


6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?
RR No.

7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

RR Rural Ohio.

COMING SOON: MARIE VOIGNIER

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #16: Rebekah Rutkoff est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

The Story of Milk and Honey, a video project by Basma Alsharif, 2011

I am indebted to Anaïs Farine for my encounter with Basma Alsharif. She had come to present her film The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) at INHA, in a programme that Anaïs had punningly dubbed “Contes à rebours au Proche Orient” (Backwards tales/countdowns in the Near East). The narrator tries to recount a love story with images and sounds, but the project is constantly failing. Here she answers my questions, particularly regarding her relation to feminism. Clara Schulmann

– In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

Basma Alsharif I like this question best, because I often have difficulty answering questions that are directed at me specifically as “a woman.”

My experience of being female was one of latent discovery. I never doubted my biological make-up or had any confusion about it but quickly became aware of discord between how I understood myself and what others saw – which is a rather common experience and not just a gendered one.

I feel as though I have been part of some kind of “art world” since an early age. It is clear to me, whether or not I knew it then, that this is the direction I was heading in: I wanted to make things. And for years and years, I didn’t realize that the majority of the artists and artworks that I was being shown, that were influencing me, that I was taught to respect, were made by men, curated by men, in institutions largely run by men. And not just any men: white, straight ones. Without getting into all the frustrations of what it is to simply be a woman in today’s world, let alone the working world, or specifically the working art world, I can simply say that it was disheartening initially to realize that I was going to have to work harder to seek out female influences but that actually, as soon as I did, there were plenty of (female) artists everywhere, making incredible work. The sadness comes in actually having to identity myself as a gender to begin with, which above all feels exhausting since I am constantly reminded that I am female anyway.

Maybe, without intentionally meaning to, I sort of rejected the idea that I should have to do this, since it seems much more important that white, straight, men acknowledge their genders and make an effort to not dominate as easily as they are allowed to dominate. I would, as with my national and cultural identity (the real place where I can’t find a point of recognition), allow for that line to be blurred, allow for my gender and my influences and the kind of work I make to not be defined so easily along gender lines, because aren’t we already far past the moment where we have to be either male OR female? I like to pretend that we are past that limited perspective and to act accordingly until the rest of the world, which hasn’t figured this out yet, catches up.

My will to keep making work comes from the fact that I am excited by other work and excited to contribute to it. It is not only based on other people making work but about all the other kinds of work that is out there in the world and largely unrepresented. I’d like for us to get to a place where we have a width swathe of arts of all kinds of genders and races, a place where, if you end up being influenced by white, straight men, it would really be because of a preference for a particular artist(s).

Basma Alsharif

COMING SOON: REBEKAH RUTTKOF

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #15: Basma Alsharif est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Stephanie Wuertz and Sasha Janerus, Calgon (film still), 2014.

I met Stephanie Wuertz very recently in New York. We walked around the Met together. She showed me one of the museum’s recent acquisitions, a huge fresco by Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, a portrait of the United States in the 1920s. Clara Schulmann

– In general, writing is a lonely experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

Stephanie Wuertz There are two strains of collaboration in experimental film. One is a kind of communalized, dehierarchalized sight of production. Filmmakers like Jack Smith or Andy Warhol who undo the rigid divisions of labour. The second type is where it comes closer to poetry or painting. The way Stan Brakhage filmed his children. The use of natural light, landscape or street films. In this sense, loneliness is another word for autonomy or a certain type of autonomy.

I tend more towards the poetic approach, which partly means the films tend to emphasize post-production, privileging the filmic over the pro-filmic. The tendency towards poetry or painting is an assertion of authorship that is something I need. To be able to assert a strong sense of presence and control in the world. That finds thematic expression in the sole female figures in works like Calgon or Serpentine. But in both films the figures split and multiply. That refraction of the self opens up to the multiplicity of collaboration. The self as multiple and unstable.

Stephanie Wuertz

COMING SOON: BASMA ALSHARIF

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #14: Stephanie Wuertz est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Gabriel Cornelius von Max (1840-1915), Singes en juges de l’art, 1889. Neue Pinakothek, Munich / Domaine public.

Je n’ai pas pu visiter l’exposition Ape Culture qui s’est déroulée jusqu’à juillet dernier à la Haus der Kulturen der Welt à Berlin et dont Anselm Franke et Hilda Peleg étaient les commissaires. J’apprécie beaucoup le travail de Franke, dont les travaux autour de l’animisme (2012) et des géographies de la coopération depuis 1945 (2013) m’ont énormément intéressée pour des raisons différentes. En guise de consolation, je me suis procurée le catalogue de l’exposition, paru chez Spector Books ; voici donc quelques notes éparses à son propos. Teresa Castro

L’exposition s’intéressait à la figure des simiens ainsi qu’à un ensemble de récits populaires et scientifiques autour des primates pour interroger le partage entre nature et culture et repenser in fine les notions de « social » et de « société ». L’hypothèse de Franke – détaillée dans son texte «  Mirrors at Frontiers » – consiste à prendre le simien comme une sorte de Kippbild, c’est-à-dire une figure ambiguë et réversible capable de révéler ce que nous croyons séparer l’humain de l’animal. Autrement dit, le simien nous permet de comprendre (et ainsi de contourner) les stratégies de ce que Giorgio Agamben nomme la « machine anthropologique » de la pensée et de l’humanisme occidentaux : la fabrication idéologique de cette partition entre l’humain et l’animal que l’on veut irrévocable, mais qui s’avère, en réalité, particulièrement délicate quand il s’agit de séparer l’homme du singe – dont le mimétisme et la sociabilité frappent le plus cartésien des primatologues. Franke s’appuie non seulement sur le travail du philosophe italien, mais aussi sur l’apport d’un ensemble d’anthropologues contemporains – comme Tim Ingold, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ou Eduardo Kohn – dont les recherches en soi très différentes, inspirées tantôt de la phénoménologie tantôt de la sémiotique, se retrouvent, néanmoins, autour d’un même questionnement des frontières entre l’humain et le non-humain.

Dans le contexte que je viens rapidement d’esquisser, la primatologie surgit comme un phénomène discursif important, une sorte de « mythologie » scientifique à laquelle le catalogue (à l’instar de l’exposition) consacre une attention particulière (il inclut, entre autres, un entretien avec le primatologue franco-suisse Christophe Boesch). Il s’agit, d’une part, d’examiner les récits autour des simiens, ainsi que de l’évolution et des origines de l’Homme ; mais aussi d’exposer la façon dont les ressemblances et les différences entre les uns et les autres ont toujours été négociées, aboutissant à la répression systématique de l’animalité et de ce qui lui est associé (le mimétisme, le geste). D’autre part, la primatologie s’avère elle-même un terrain symptomatique, dans la mesure où sa reconnaissance plus ou moins précoce de l’importance de la sociabilité (y compris entre « sujets observateurs » humains et « sujets observés » simiens) semble annoncer la façon dont les rapports entre humains et non-humains sont aujourd’hui en train d’être repensés. En ce sens, l’enquête de Franke et Peleg s’inscrit dans la continuité du travail entamé par Donna Haraway dans son ouvrage Primate Visions : Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) – Haraway étant rappelée et commentée à plusieurs reprises.

En lisant ce catalogue fort stimulant, je peux difficilement juger de l’efficacité ou non du dispositif expositif qui séparait un ensemble de travaux contemporains (Lene Berg, Marcus Coates, Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, Ines Doujak, Coco Fusco, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Pierre Huyghe, Louise Lawler, Damián Ortega, Nagisa Oshima, Erik Steinbrecher, Rosemarie Trockel, Klaus Weber et Frederick Wiseman) d’une section documentaire, pensée comme une « bibliographie annotée » à l’intention du visiteur (et portant notamment sur les récits populaires et scientifiques autour des primates déjà évoqués). J’avoue, néanmoins, être moins intéressée par la façon dont la proposition de Franke et Peleg interroge le modèle classique de l’exposition que par la portée de leur hypothèse. Selon les deux commissaires, si aujourd’hui les rapports entre humains et non-humains sont devenus centraux, entrainant un changement de point de vue à la fois sur ce qu’est l’humain et sur la centralité ancestrale de l’Homme dans le monde (l’humanisme traditionnel), c’est parce que nous évoluons désormais dans un milieu technologique particulier, fondé sur l’interaction constante entre acteurs humains et non-humains et mettant à mal les frontières classiques entre sujet et objet. Autrement dit, selon la thèse de Franke et Peleg, les deux chantiers de recherche que j’ai vaguement exposé dans ce blog – les drones (et leur « subjectivité machinique ») et l’animisme (dans ce qu’il implique en termes de repositionnement de l’humain au sein d’un monde vivant plus vaste) – ne seraient peut-être que deux aspects d’un même tournant général.

L’article Ape Culture est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Quinn Latimer & Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City, 2014. [Video_Still]

I got in touch with Quinn Latimer (1978) in July 2014, when the CRAC in Alsace was putting on one of her performances, “O Labor, Sister Continent,” in collaboration with Megan Rooney. The text took as its starting point Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film Poto et Cabengo (1979), and I was intrigued by the way the two artists interpreted this story of sisters and a shared, secret language. The theme is similar here: “Two Aunts,” the Thomas James poem evoked by Quinn, is a homage to his “dusky girls”: two drug-addict sisters on the prairies of North Dakota. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Quinn Latimer I was recently visiting a friend on an island, and she had Gordon’s autobiography, which I read under the palm trees for a few days. I was really struck by how clearly compelled Gordon was/is by men, and particularly by men performing in groups or constellations with each other — men in bands, mostly. She studies them, she seems to feel less than, always exterior or singular, etc. What is the title of her book? Girl in a Band? It’s obvious that she considers the female position a weak one to inhabit — and it’s understandable, but it’s not my own. Anyway, I was interested in her fascination with guys as I read her book because although I love men, and I live with one, and occasionally make films with him, I am most interested in women. They’re who I think about as a writer and artist — they’re my subject, in the way that men appear to be Gordon’s. They’re also who I write for, who I make work for — it’s always a female reader or viewer that I imagine receiving what I make. Which is to say, as well, that I don’t think of the female position as weak. I would describe it as dissident, perhaps. It’s certainly not hegemonic. But I don’t like to be in a weak position and to consider it my job to make it a strong one — that’s exhausting. It’s really just the old exhausting story of being a woman in society, a story I’d rather not inhabit as an artist. I just don’t find it interesting. As a writer, I’d rather my position not be a relative one. If I were to use Gordon’s hierarchal equation, though, I’d say that I like to engage with one medium as though it were another. The films I’ve made, I’ve approached as a writer; and in my writing, I often think cinematically, as though I were the film crew orchestrating the text or directing the performance. I think it can be helpful to adopt forms — to swap and tangle them — outside of your specific medium. It interrupts the kind of conservatism and professionalization inherent to specific art forms that carry certain expectations (both from the audience and from yourself as maker or author).


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

QL Yes. Although I don’t think of writing as lonely, per se — it can be much lonelier to come up against another’s person’s expectations, needs, and opacities in the course of a collaboration, and to not be able to understand them or meet them. I’ve only made a few moving-image works, and they were all with my partner — and they were all made with an eye toward live performance or an exhibition — so the communal aspect of the work was implicit from the beginning. Whereas writing is a conversation with yourself, with your past and future work, and perhaps with the writers who you are under the spell of at that moment in time.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

QL My mother was a bit militant about both literature and feminism — and my father and stepfather were at ease in that militancy — so I was raised on feminist thinking and writing, our house was full of it, was made of it. I don’t remember a time when I was ever outside of it or in search of it. That said, as I grew up and moved to New York, and then to Switzerland­, which has a kind of unquestioned masculinist culture that I had never experienced before, and I began to make work in these places, I found myself in a very different kind of world, one where the voices of men and their work — whether literature or philosophy or art or activism or anything, really — were clearly dominant. Then, like Robertson, feminist thinking and writing gave me a place of respite, of home. It gave me not just the will to move forward, but a model of the kind of life I might pursue. And there was and is so much pleasure in that model. This work, then, became the world I chose to surround myself with — probably much like my mother had in the book – filled apartments of my childhood. Robertson’s writing, along with the work of writers and thinkers and artists like Audre Lorde, Hannah Arendt, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman, Rosemarie Trockel, Moyra Davey, Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Elena Ferrante, Gayatri Spivak, Nina Simone, Bhanu Kapil, Ai, Françoise Vergès, Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, and so many others, has been really instrumental to my own practice, whether literary, moving-image, or performance, both for its pleasure and its criticality.

4. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

QL I don’t smoke, unfortunately, but I think the memory of drugs and drinking and friends — addictions, all — or even just the idea of them accompany my work at times. Certainly the fluorescent haze and palette of the images in my writing and films have a druggy air. But I also grew up seeing how addiction can overcome your ambition, can overrun it, and I’ve tried to steer clear of that ever being a possibility. Still, addictions — or at least their consideration, as metaphors for desire or hunger — can make the most pressing, embodied art. I always think of this poem by Thomas James about his two great aunts, opiate addicts on the American prairie:

Two Aunts
by Thomas James

When I feel the old hunger coming on,
I think of my two great-aunts,
A farmer’s daughters,
Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.
I imagine the dark baron
Riding out of their mouths,
Thick-skinned and girded
Against disaster, swathed
In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.
My hunger was theirs
Too long ago. It swims in my blood,
Groping for a foothold.
It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,
The wine and the delicate symphony
That makes my head tick so exquisitely
Tonight. My ladies,
My dusky girls, I see you
With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,
Your needlepoint rose garden,
Your George Eliot coiffures,
Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.
You both took heroin.
Your father never noticed.
You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,
Embroidered doilies with it,
Ate it like a last supper
At midnight. I know what you meant.
There was always the hunger,
The death of small things
Somewhere in your body,
The children that would never
Take place in either of you.
You were a garden of lost letters.
A lust inhabited your veins.
My addicts,
The village spoke of you.
Under your parasols, two rose windows,
The world swam with color.
Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,
You escaped the indecisions
Your blood has handed down
To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses
As if they might have ferried you
Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.
I see you ride the black hills of my mind,
Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,
Galloping
In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware
Of something I inherited,
The doubt,
The fear,
The needle point of speech,
The hunger you passed down that I
Possess.

5. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

QL My mother.

Quinn Latimer

COMING SOON: STEPHANIE WUERTZ

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #13: Quinn Latimer est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Adelita Husni Bey, Postcards from the Desert Island, 2011, 22’23 » SD video transferred to DVD

I discovered the work of Adelita Husni-Bey (1985) thanks to Vdrome, which showed her film Postcards from the Desert Island (2011). I was greatly impressed by the film. It was shot in Paris, at the École Vitruve, which offers children an experimental form of pedagogy. That was where the artist led a workshop inspired by the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies. The film describes the way in which children reinvent and debate their freedom, on a desert island, with adhesive tape and bits of wood. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong,” she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Adelita Husni-Bey I am interested in peeling away another layer and getting closer to the core: What is seen as constituting “weak” and why? If the “weaker” sex is a way of attributing fragility to women, of placing and oppressing them, then let’s ask: why did Kim Gordon feel she was in a “weak” position and had to make it “strong”? What does it say about patriarchy? About the music industry and the notion of the frontman?
I suppose the foundation of what I do as an author rests on trying to find ways to interpel/ interpellate, which derives from the Latin “to drive in between”. ‘Inter’- in-between, and ‘pellere’ – to drive. I like the way it has acquired, in its contemporary version, the quality of being able to interrupt, and how it is used in politics as a formal way to question a minister. Identifying myself as a woman and using this word, I would probably say: “I like being in a position from which I can ‘break through.’”


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

AHB Neoliberalism makes vacuums of our affections, (repeat darkly: “there is no such thing as society, there are men and women…”); whether you are working on a film or watering your plants, your ability to concentrate purely on your own shitty existence and be anxious about it has probably quintupled in the past twenty years. If you submit to the digital working routine, I feel, life tends to become thin, transparent; so “collaborations” don’t tend to make for a less lonely experience of life in general. It’s a systemic loneliness, which I feel non-working in the company of others can assuage. Meandering conversations, sex, touching others; that’s got to be humankind’s natural therapist. So I am teaching myself to do that as much as possible.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

AHB I’d like to think you “discover” feminist thinking only when you uncover your predetermined condition. You uncover what has been purposefully buried, discounted, neglected, pulverized, done away with. Women writers, artists, filmmakers, politicians, ironmongers: women, but also queers, migrants, people with different degrees of mobility. You discover this in E.1027, Eileen Gray’s house, defaced and then attributed to Le Corbusier, in Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s (until recently) unsung contributions to Dada, in the countless expressions of patriarchy from work to language, from shame to guilt production in the souls of others. It doesn’t take long to see that our metanarrative is being woven in the image of white affluent men and uncovering this fact can be a horrifying experience but also a pedagogical one. Uncovering my condition, seeing the varying detractions of privilege take their toll on our so called “freedoms,” is a journey on a razor-fast spaceship; when you look out of the window everything is far and formally silent but you know it’s a shit storm back on the ground. Most of my trip was mobilized by my peers’ talk and touch and the kind of love that makes your brain go quiet. Did it give me the “will to write”? It’s made me locate myself as an “ally” of certain struggles and feel I’m in the eye of the storm in others.
There’s a little wooden boat floating a few feet away from me right now, you couldn’t go very far with it but you could ride it across the bay.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?

AHB I do some weightlifting, or lifting my own body-weight which is practically the only form of physical exercise I enjoy. I suppose it would translate into trying to prepare as deeply as I possibly can for each project, trying to read around my perceived topic as much as I can. Trying to think of its problematics, its paradoxes, its face-palms, but all this does not necessarily constitute a “good” practice. I realized recently that it’s a pretty academic form of “knowing” and it’s fraught with being an impossible task. So I am learning to lift less and feel/listen more.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?
AHB Sonic Youth is in there, for sure. Being constantly uprooted, first because of my family moving around and now because of my work (the flying, precarious artist), which is a way of saying that my points of reference are too many to mention and probably tinged with misunderstandings. I suppose roots could be firmly planted in radical pedagogy; different ways to think about “learning” that do away with a prescribed master – student relationship, from Freire, to Kropotkin, Bell Hooks and the Radical Education Forum. A nymph might be care, care–taking, systems of solidarity and cooperation, such as the Movimento de Trabalhatores Sem Terra (MST, Landless Agricultural Worker Movement) in Brazil, and recent articles on “Calling- in” (Ngọc Loan Trần). My teens and early twenties were spent in and out of occupied and squatted spaces which I still, to this day, find the most deeply radical, fun and incredible examples of struggles for co-existence. I suppose branching out into urbanism and sociology is directly related to these nurturing spaces. The subsequent demonizing and criminalizing of squatting, alongside the effects of mega projects, stemming from regeneration issues, or “accumulation via dispossession,” as David Harvey writes, have made quite an impact on me.

6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?

AHB I suffer from a sort of expanded performance anxiety which makes me get obsessively distracted lately. The anxiety is probably partly due to a feeling of inadequacy, vulnerability or not being “good enough,” not being “deserving,” which is precisely how this S&M relationship to professional environments works. So I smoke things to cope. What do you do?


7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

AHB The ghost of being able to survive doing what I love, the ghost of privilege, the ghost of take the money and run, the ghost of “how the fuck do people still expect you to work for free??” the ghost of DARPA, the ghost of I’ve been looking at this screen too long, the ghost of imaging Chris Kraus writing at a desk, the ghost of not having well-read enough, the ghost of there will not be enough time to read more, the ghost of how is it possible that I have language, that I can write to you and that you will interpret, that we are both “alive” on this “planet” now – I suppose that is the ultimate ghost haunting us all, and what would our experience be like without a common ghost?

COMING SOON: QUINN LATIMER

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #12: Adelita Husni-Bey est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.

Rosa Barba, A Private Tableaux, 2010. Film still
16mm, optical sound, 7min © Rosa Barba

Here Rosa Barba (1972) talks about one of her films, A Private Tableaux (2010), which we projected with the Silo a few years ago. The film was shot in the tunnel across the Mersey in Liverpool. On the gallery ceilings, the artist films white drawings that engineers have been making over the last hundred years as a way of observing the cracks made by the pressure from the cars. Ancestral drawings, grottoes – mysterious narrative. Clara Schulmann

1. In her autobiography, Kim Gordon reproduces a text that she wrote in the 1980s about a Sonic Youth tour and her place in the band. “I like being in a weak position and making it strong”, she said. How would you describe your position as an author and as a filmmaker or as an artist making films?

Rosa Barba I see myself as conducting coherent performative entities – as a result of a process in which I tell my actors about the way of envisioning the narrative and the film. They are invited to (re-en)act based on who they are, what they represent to me and how they feel the narrative should be represented in the film. I invite people to come together and to perform their memories (through facts, documents) as a kind of collective performance; this determines and creates the fictional part of the films.


2. In general, writing is a solitary experience and making films is a collective experience. Is this difference important to you?

RB Yes, it is important to move between those different experiences in order to complete the piece with those different rhythms.


3. In an interview, the poet Lisa Robertson writes: “…as a very young reader, in the 80s, I constantly felt affronted that I could not find a point of recognition in the extreme masculinist philosophy and literature I was reading. To discover feminist thinking and writing was a recognition that gave me the will to write. That was a very relevant kind of pleasure.” Do you share her position? How did you discover feminist thinking and what difference did it make to you?

RB Yes, I do share her position. Looking through the camera as I grew up gave me the freedom to position myself outside of the given standards and to realize my feminist approach.

4. This question concerns the link between your artistic activity and gymnastics. What kind of exercises do you need to do in order to write or to make a film?

RB Riding my bike through the city and stretching whenever I can.

5. Can you describe the family tree showing your sources, resources and references in both fields?

RB It is the possible explanation of a certain image. In my work A Private Tableaux (2010) I walked underneath the Mersey River recording the subterranean city pumping air through these tunnels. On the ceiling of these tunnels there are these handmade white drawings the engineers make to examine the pressure cracks made by cars overhead. They are like wall paintings or cave drawings. It is nearly impossible to imagine them as functional. They seem to follow a logic or make some shape or other. I wrote a narrative about these images and cut the film with this text, of these possible explanations. There is a sort of dialogue. A question and an answer.
I think we already carry inside ourselves what we are interested in and when you get to a place, you look for this specific thing, to see if you could find it there.

6. Are cigarettes or other kinds of addiction part of your creative process with writing or moving images?
RB Espresso…


7. Writing, like cinema, summons or awakens ghosts. Who or what haunts you?

RB Yes, there is always a certain concern that I feel a lot of people are sharing and often it is manifested in the landscape first, but it’s still not really super-clear, I like the fact that the landscape responds first, before it’s totally conscious what’s going on and that’s the moment when I feel very inspired to make a piece, so… and then trying to offer, not really solutions, because I can’t really offer a solution, but just different perspectives, and by suspending it, putting the concern upside down, I feel there is still a possibility that may be, at least in one’s thoughts.

Rosa Barba
“Back Door Exposure” at Jeu de Paume

COMING SOON: ADELITA HUSNI-BEY

L’article Emotional Technologies <br>Q&A #11: Rosa Barba est apparu en premier sur Drones d’idées.