THIRD EDITION program two

☞ ☞ ☞ ✰ THE MOST SATISFYING VIDEO IN THE WORLD ✰ ☁ ☁ ☁ – Jade Wong

9:05 · USA · 2017

Through meditative recreations of classic ASMR (#iphone-destruction, #knife-cutting, #slime, #kinetic-sand, #squishies), ☞ ☞ ☞ ✰ THE MOST SATISFYING VIDEO IN THE WORLD ✰ ☁ ☁ ☁ is an experimentation in tactility and visual magic while contemplating YouTube as a site for art. How do we delineate the artistic boundaries between internet videos, video art, and film, and who is the authority on these distinctions? What content is considered mindless, therapeutic, smart, pleasureable, or artistic?

AGNUS DEI 70 – Flavio Sciolè

4:00 · Italy · 2019

An optical Jesus.

lot – Marcus Kliewer

1:30 · Canada · 2020

‘lot’ is a non-narrative stop-motion film animated by hand and shot entirely in camera.

A Very Something or Other – Anya Liftig

16:29 · USA · 2014

In this piece, I explore the potential of the face as a terrain for choreography. My initial inspiration for this work came from an impulse to work on a smaller, rather than larger scale. Since my youngest years, I have always been fascinated by the world of miniatures and practically obsessed with any cultural exploration of tiny (I wrote my senior thesis on Jonathan Swift, and my Master’s thesis dealt in part with the miniature object as facsimile.) At first I was skeptical that I would be able to create any type of “dance” using only my face, but after viewing the Charles and Ray Eames film, “Powers of Ten,” I resolved that my understanding of movement and space was only limited by my imagination and not by my physical surroundings. As in my live performance work, I set out to animate inanimate miniature objects. I birth a baby out of my mouth; a tampon erupts from my bloody nose; a pizza pie is randomly ejected; A tiny turkey takes flight. This is a full length “story dance” using my face as my choreographic material. I think that this type of work is uniquely suited for the dance for camera genre. On stage, such minute movements are unable to reach the viewer. Via the camera, the viewer is able to engage with a micro world that challenges the boundaries of proportion and most ambitiously, perception. The central question of the work is: Can the face be a compelling and complete material for choreographic exploration? What are its boundaries and what is its potential for extending a collective notion of choreographic space?

Matin Ecchymose – Emilie Peltier

7:28 · France/Canada · 2020

I am Deaf myself (oralist and hearing aided), and for this short film, I am very happy to have had the chance to create a bridge between two worlds (hearing and deaf) through the medium of poetry from a non-binary artist that I like very much.

To make the film, we held a two-day workshop with Mo Bolduc (poet) and four Deaf people (who are not artists, just enthusiastic people willing to participate in the adventure). These four participants interpreted Mo Bolduc’s texts in Quebec Sign Language. On the third day, we filmed their performances at the Maison de la litterature, an emblematic location in Quebec City.

My film shows queer poetry by non-binary poet Mo Bolduc, in French language, interpreted in Quebec Sign Language by 4 deaf people, among them, Karl who is gay and who’s got two fights. The poetry permitted for hearing and deaf people to meet around the feeling of not being included and the importance of the acceptance of oneself.

Karstic Action : I de-suffice myself in confinement – Nicole Peyrafitte

8:14 · USA · 2020

KARSTIC-Action Paintings is an open-ended series of live performance works Nicole Peyrafitte started in 2011. These works explore proprioception (sense of body position) & kinesthesia (sense of body movement), as meeting points between painting, poetry, voice & improvised music. Guided by intuition, & bypassing a range of traditional inhibitions, Peyrafitte investigates the porosity of her own conscious- and unconscious-ness with, as tangible aim & outcome, a strong desire to reveal the immanent “soul” of that moment. Most often the markings are done with the feet, either in hand-stand or head-stand, and/or with mouth-sprayed charcoals or other natural pigments — hands are rarely used to mark, except for smaller formats.

Your exoticism is my daily bread – Christ Mukenge, Lydia Schellhammer

8:29 · Congo · 2020

Abstract Power dynamics in the sector of humanitarian aid in the current “Third-World” countries create a hierarchy of interdependence between the “beneficiaries” and the “donors”. In this dynamic, it is normally the donor who has the power to decide how the humanitarian funds are used as well as the forms of the activities put in place to solve the local problems. The White Saviour Complex, which is often linked to stereotypes and excessive simplifications of the ground reality, focuses mostly on the negative aspects and reinforces the psychological hierarchy between the beneficiaries and the donors. This leaves the local “beneficiary” in a pretended powerless and victimized state. Donors often do not notice the strategies “beneficiaries” use to secretly bypass those power dynamics, through “role plays” aiming to meet the expectations of the “donor”, in which the “beneficiary” creates its own operational structure, working the way he wants, while playing with the psychology of the “donor”. This represents a power grab by the “beneficiary”, while the “donor” thinks he controls the situation.