Framed Existences Event

SYMPOSIUM
Organized by The Golden Pixel Cooperative

4:00 pm: Jana Seehusen
5:00 pm: Nika Autor
6:30 pm Sílvia das Fadas
7:30 pm Angela Anderson

Framed Existences addresses various artistic strategies of depicting the world and its social, political, and ecological systems. Their specific approaches to ‘framing’ humans and non-humans contribute significantly to our perception of the subject involved. As a result, they produce social, political, and cultural valuations and effects. In her lecture, artist and writer Jana Seehusen addresses history and memory in film and explores how memory becomes visible, or ‘actualized,’ through the act of framing in Lola Arias’ Teatro de Guerra (2018). Artist Nika Autor presents her work with the “Newsreel Front” (“Obzorniška Fronta”) collective, which understands the newsreel as an emancipatory and engaged practice. Filmmaker Sílvia das Fadas provides insight into her current film project by talking about “Auguries for a Non-Hierarchical Framing and Flourishing,” and looking at the ruins of a commune in Alentejo, Portugal. Film artist Angela Anderson presents her audio-visual research project Three (or more) Ecologies, which juxtaposes the Dakotas (US) and Rojava (northern Syria) by focusing on the local women’s resistance against ecologically harmful machines of the capitalist military-industrial complex.

JANA SEEHUSEN

framing with/out frames

The act of remembering is an interpersonal process that oscillates between historicity and subjectivity.[1] framing with/out frames addresses the stages on which memory is performed. Referencing Lola Arias’ use of stage, (camera) gaze and (un-)scripted dialogue in her film TEATRO DE GUERRA (2018)[2], this talk combines questions on the transmission of (traumatic) memories with filmic and discursive techniques of cutting together and apart. In TEATRO DE GUERRA, six veterans of the Falklands War meet after 35 years to confront their memories of the past – either in pairs or in conversation with the camera. While they are reconstructing the events and emotions, Arias places them in a “no man’s land of memory” – an invisible surface for memory to take place upon: a white film studio, a swimming pool, a clinic, an empty bar. They are stages that allow flashforwards to play out, where history and memory become actualized through the act of framing. These temporal entanglements ultimately reveal how memory and film are (re-)constructed as a function of their framing, and how the intersubjective process of remembering carries within itself a potential flashforward.

Jana Seehusen’s practice as an artist and writer focuses on modes of language and action in relation to concepts of inbetweenness, otherness, and transitionings. Her work in the field of art theory, aesthetic theory in film, and cultural studies relates to questions of in/visibility, subject and gender theory, and identity politics. Her most recent publications are: Performing Documentary. Birgit Kohler im Gespräch mit Jana Seehusen (2014), Echo: Lauter widerständige Entwürfe. Künstlerische Praktiken von Korrespondenz und Transfer (2015), How To Perform Entangled Memories: Vom Sehen im Nichtsehen (2016), Imagine Another Topology! Zu ‘Time to Sync or Swim’ von Katrin Mayer & Eske Schlüters (2016), Visualität und Abstraktion. Eine Aktualisierung des Figur-Grund-Verhältnisses, with Hanne Loreck (ed.) (2017). In June 2018, she curated the D’EST screening chapter The Suspension and Excess of Time together with Kathrin Becker.

SÍLVIA DAS FADAS

Auguries for a Non-Hierarchical Framing and Flourishing

Stubbornly looking at the ruins of a commune I search for auguries. For instance: “Fair weather for drifters.” I wander by foot across times, erratically shooting images and recording sounds through the kaleidoscopic spatiality of Alentejo, a Portuguese region named after a river, beyond a river. As walking offers unexpected encounters and co-presences, missives are sent to and from the margins. For instance: “growing organs for the alternative.” My senses are partial, precarious, and fragmentary, but not my orientation: There is an everyday struggle being fought for the fulgor and I want to be in it. Against a firmament of dispossession of land, bodies and social bonds, we are getting ready. For instance: “On the level!” The fulgor is mobile, the prefigured community dispersed and diverse. Through dissent and associations of affinity, autonomy and re-enchantment, the cinema can offer to let us flourish on non-hierarchical frames.

Sílvia das Fadas is a filmmaker, a researcher, a teacher, a wanderer. Born in Portugal in 1983, she studied cinema and aesthetics in Lisbon and Rome. Driven by a militant nostalgia, she moved to Los Angeles to craft her personal films in 16mm at the California Institute of the Arts. She worked as a visual history researcher for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and collaborated with Los Angeles Filmforum until her visa expired and she moved to Vienna in search of a lively film culture. She is currently a participant in the PhD in Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is interested in the politics intrinsic to cinematic practices and in cinema as a way of being together in restlessness and brokenness.

NIKA AUTOR

Aesthetics in Politically Engaged and Committed Artistic Practice

The intention of the presentation is to provide insight into the methodology and various forms of representation employed in the work of the Newsreel Front collective. We will examine the filmic devices and montage techniques used to convey the experience of silenced and invisible historical narratives, as well as to address questions regarding migration policies and the politics of memory, with an emphasis on the post-Yugoslav region. Being engaged in the field of various struggles and understanding those struggles in the field of image production served to define the two projects The News Belongs to Us and The News is Ours, by choosing, using and understanding the newsreel format as a form of emancipatory and engaged practice in a time of urgency and conflict.

Nika Autor studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana (BA and MA) before completing the PhD in Practice program at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her practice is primarily based on experimental videos and documentary films, film essays, newsreels, and spatial video and film installations. In her work, she focuses on researching invisibilities/inaudibilities concerning concealed topics of the forgotten past and the silenced present, while examining asylum and migration policies, workers rights, and the politics of memory. She is part of the collective Newsreel Front (Obzorniška Fronta), an informal collective whose members work in the field of film theory and art practice.

ANGELA ANDERSON

Three (or more) Ecologies: A Feminist Articulation of Eco-Intersectionality

For the past several years, Angela Anderson has been working on research-based multi-channel video installation projects that intervene in fields of dense political discourse. Anderson will discuss her current project within the trajectory of her previous work, sharing research imagery and excepts of her work. Taking Felix Guattari’s text The Three Ecologies as a starting point, her new audio-visual research project brings together two seemingly disparate locations – the Dakotas in the US and Rojava in Northern Syria – where women are actively struggling against the patriarchal and earth-devouring machines of the capitalist military-industrial complex, and powerfully articulating the urgent need to recognize a register (or registers) of value different to the one currently offered by capitalism. This project represents the most recent iteration of her ongoing research into the seemingly perpetual conflict between ‘labor’ and ‘nature’ in the context of industrial development.

Angela Anderson is an artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of the fields of philosophy, ecology, economics, migration, media, as well as feminist and queer theory. Central to her work is an awareness of the intimate connection between media production, memory and apprehension, and audio-visual media’s potential to introduce new alignments. Since 2013 she has been collaborating with Angela Melitopoulos on the audio-visual research projects Unearthing Disaster (2013-2015), The Refrain (2015), and Crossings (2017), which was shown at documenta 14. Recent exhibitions include CAAC (Sevilla - 2018), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco - 2017), Framer Framed (Amsterdam - 2016), Holbaek Images (2016) and the Thessaloniki Biennale (2015). Originally from Wisconsin, USA, she lives and works in Berlin.