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

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.

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

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

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

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

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