In een historische uiteenzetting komen natuurlijk de mythes voorbij die de eerste kolonialisten in Brazilië creëerden en hoe deze verankerd zijn in onze tijd. Zoals de Duitser Hans Staden, die in de zestiende eeuw een kannibalenstam ontvluchtte en er een boek over schreef dat later de blauwdruk vormde voor obscure cultcinema-klassiekers als ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. Ook wordt bekeken hoe Theodor Roosevelt de piranha tot een beruchte vis maakte, en waarom Brazilië vooral gezien wordt als het land van zon, carnaval en tanga’s.

De manieren waarop Brazilianen de mythes zelf zijn gaan hergebruiken in een zoektocht naar nationale identiteit komen ook aan bod. In het invloedrijke boek ‘Macunaíma’ van Mario de Andrade (1928) dient menseneterij, antropofagia, als positieve metafoor voor het vermengen van culturen. Via de Braziliaanse versie van Frankenstein genaamd ‘Zé do Caixão’, gaat het programma verder terug in de tijd naar de negentiende-eeuwse boeken ‘Iracema’ en ‘O Guarani’ van José de Alencar, en worden de duistere kanten van het carnaval en het dagelijks leven blootgelegd door de ogen van schrijver Nelson Rodrigues. Verder zal een korte film van Werner Herzog over indianen in de Amazone worden vertoond. Na een pauze met Braziliaanse snacks en een toepasselijke BBQ, zullen we de verfilming zien van Macunaíma (1969).

Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2011, video, 70:00 min

Feature Film

US born Swiss video artist Elodie Pong is known for her subtle, analytic works often built as cycles or in series, which focus on human relationships, cultural codes and their impact on contemporary society.

Contemporary tellingly captures the mood of the times. Do we still have any shared values and goals, or is our post-everything era dominated by insecurity and a lack of orientation? What do people dream about today? And do we still have personal heroes that we look up to? The characters in the film tell their stories and discuss such issues as the significance of political movements and utopias, the role of art, or the current status of emancipation. In addition to philosophical and political concerns, they also talk about ordinary things like favorite colors and birds and, in doing so, they are seen both as actors in staged scenes and as ‘real’ characters. Vignettes and snatches of dialogue soon reveal that role-playing is an essential feature of this film, its ultimate question being: who are we, or rather who do we pretend to be?

Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2010, video, 79:00 min.

Feature film

You Are Here is a Borgesian fantasy composed of multiple worlds, circling and weaving around each other in always unexpected ways. At the centre of this narrative labyrinth is a reclusive woman (Tracy Wright) who searches for meaning in the mysterious documents that keep appearing to her. Her investigation begins when she finds a tape recording of a man giving a bizarre lecture: calming and sinister at the same time, he instructshow to “get where you need to go”. Is this a random find, or a message to her? Another strange document presents itself, and another… Swiftly her home becomes an archive brimming with enigmatic texts, images and sounds. She forms deep connections with the people contained in these documents — the Lecturer, a Prisoner, an Inventor — each of them, like her, struggling with the unknowable laws of their own worlds. But the organized becomes the organizer when her meticulous system turns on her; the archive is a trickster threatening to pull her mind apart. As realities collapse and intersect around her, she must make a final choice: is she a free agent, or just a tool of the archive? More information at: www.you-are-here-movie.com 

Daniel Cockburn plays at the intersection of avant-garde and narrative cinema. Bringing together innovative storytelling strategies with structuralist experimentation, he breaks open day-to-day reality to reveal the strange codes beneath. Self-reflexive to the point of neurosis, Cockburn is fascinated with how moving images can illuminate the structures and rhythms of our lives; he is forever looking for hidden meaning in randomness and patterns in chaos.

His films and videos are propositions for alternate dimensions: What if time ran backwards? What if everything in the world doubled in size overnight? What if banal thoughts recurred to us at quantifiable intervals? Cockburn playfully puts language under the microscope: not only the many spoken and written words that wind their way through his work, but the vocabulary of cinema itself.

The films screened in this program were:

Rocket Man,  Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2001, video, 5:00 min

Metronome, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2002, video, 11:00 min

WEAKEND, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2003, video, 7:00 min

The Impostor (hello goodbye), Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2003, video, 9:00 min

Nocturnal Doubling, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2004, video, 4:00 min

Stupid Coalescing Becomers, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2003, video, 3:00 min

The Bad Idea Reunion, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2011, video, 5:00 min

Material, Daniel Cockburn, Canada, 2011, video, 11:00 min

More information about the program and the films can be found here.

ABOUT JOHN BUTLER
To make a living Butler knocks out tabloid newspaper adverts and computer animations. As an artist, he prefers to use his techincal skills to make provoking alternatives/variants to his assignment work, that are often misinterpreted. He shows these short animations on the internet and at international media festivals.

WORKSHOP: SYNTHETIC INFORMATION
John Butler also gave a three day workshop called Synthetic Information, on Tuesday 28, Wednesday 29 February and Thursday 1 March. He guided the participants into making their own graphic clip of ironic propaganda. The results was broadcasted on Urban Screens in Amsterdam, The Hague and Eindhoven.

To what extent are interferences in the urban environment able to influence human behavior? This question has been topical ever since urban planning & development issues have come into being. The matter becomes even more pressing when urban planning is used to solve specific political dilemmas, or rather: when architecture is at the root of such dilemmas. How can urban planning foster political inequality, and to what extent can algorithms or even concrete play a role in moral issues?

Next to physical architecture, there is a – possibly – even more complex territory to explore. Indeed, our social and professional behavior increasingly takes place in virtual environments. Behind our computer screen lies a world of predetermined constructions, restrictions, prerogatives and fantasy. How abstract is this world?

Architectures of Exclusion investigates the interrelationship between politics, morality, urban and virtual interference.

Impakt invited three guest speakers to shed light on this subject from various angles.

Gideon Boie studied architecture and philosophy in Ghent and Rotterdam and is co-founder of BAVO, an independent research and cultural activism institute engaged in the political dimensions of art, architecture and urban planning.

Architecture theorist Edwin Gardner currently works as a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His research centers on the correspondence between cognition in relation to design processes, our ways of interacting with the city and the modes of computer functioning.

Juha van ‘t Zelfde is an independent researcher, publicist, musician and curator. He is co-founder of VURB, a European network for policy and design research issues in relation to urban and digital environments.

To what extent are interferences in the urban environment able to influence human behavior? This question has been topical ever since urban planning & development issues have come into being. The matter becomes even more pressing when urban planning is used to solve specific political dilemmas, or rather: when architecture is at the root of such dilemmas. How can urban planning foster political inequality, and to what extent can algorithms or even concrete play a role in moral issues?

Next to physical architecture, there is a – possibly – even more complex territory to explore. Indeed, our social and professional behavior increasingly takes place in virtual environments. Behind our computer screen lies a world of predetermined constructions, restrictions, prerogatives and fantasy. How abstract is this world?

Architectures of Exclusion investigates the interrelationship between politics, morality, urban and virtual interference.

Impakt invited three guest speakers to shed light on this subject from various angles.

Gideon Boie studied architecture and philosophy in Ghent and Rotterdam and is co-founder of BAVO, an independent research and cultural activism institute engaged in the political dimensions of art, architecture and urban planning.

Architecture theorist Edwin Gardner currently works as a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His research centers on the correspondence between cognition in relation to design processes, our ways of interacting with the city and the modes of computer functioning.

Juha van ‘t Zelfde is an independent researcher, publicist, musician and curator. He is co-founder of VURB, a European network for policy and design research issues in relation to urban and digital environments.

To what extent are interferences in the urban environment able to influence human behavior? This question has been topical ever since urban planning & development issues have come into being. The matter becomes even more pressing when urban planning is used to solve specific political dilemmas, or rather: when architecture is at the root of such dilemmas. How can urban planning foster political inequality, and to what extent can algorithms or even concrete play a role in moral issues?

Next to physical architecture, there is a – possibly – even more complex territory to explore. Indeed, our social and professional behavior increasingly takes place in virtual environments. Behind our computer screen lies a world of predetermined constructions, restrictions, prerogatives and fantasy. How abstract is this world?

Architectures of Exclusion investigates the interrelationship between politics, morality, urban and virtual interference.

Impakt invited three guest speakers to shed light on this subject from various angles.

Gideon Boie studied architecture and philosophy in Ghent and Rotterdam and is co-founder of BAVO, an independent research and cultural activism institute engaged in the political dimensions of art, architecture and urban planning.

Architecture theorist Edwin Gardner currently works as a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His research centers on the correspondence between cognition in relation to design processes, our ways of interacting with the city and the modes of computer functioning.

Juha van ‘t Zelfde is an independent researcher, publicist, musician and curator. He is co-founder of VURB, a European network for policy and design research issues in relation to urban and digital environments.

Please note: this event will be in Dutch!

The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience. The Canadian filmmaker Daniel Cockburn gladly turned this tradition around. In his anti-artist talk, entitled “All The Mistakes I’ve Made”, he explained his oeuvre in terms of the aesthetic and ideological missteps that he’s made. Building from these mistakes, he examined to what extent his inability to properly judge is representative of a negative trend in contemporary art and cinema.
He supported his argument with excerpts from his own work, as well as relevant examples from the work of artists like Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton.

During his residency, aside from this anti-artist talk, Cockburn hosted the workshop ‘Scriptwriting and Performance for Film/Video/Urban Screens’ from 29 November until 1 December. He also gave a performance and has made a video work for Impakt’s Urban Screen program DEUS.

Since 1999, writer, filmdirector and video-artists Daniel Cockburn has worked at the intersection between art, avant-garde cinema and narrative film. Impakt first screened his work at the 2004 festival. His first feature length film You Are Here won the Top Prize at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück this year and was screened at Impakt Festival 2011.

Cholo writing can be traced back to the 1950s, long before the New York graffiti boom of the late 1970s.

He also investigated the inimitable Pixação letter style of the “pixadores”, grafitti writers from the favelas of Sao Paulo who took the city into their own hands. Their work becomes a political statement, wherein graffiti writers undertake dangerous or life-threatening actions in order to become visible. Recently, Chastanet completed extensive research into the phenomenon of water-based calligraphy made with giant brushes on the streets of China. Chastanet has published several books on Pixação including: São Paulo Signature and Cholo Writing in Los Angeles.

This workshop, that took place on 12 November 2011, explored new ideas and innovative ways to take public spaces into our own hands. Elements from the São Paulo’s pixadores’ mentality about architectural space was combined with the Chinese practice of placing of impermanent marks in the public sphere with water-based calligraphy. In this way, there could be colored within the lines of the law.

Read the (Dutch) blog report about the workshop here.