June 2023 – Sound Image Culture

Collective session IV — 19 > 23 June 2023

with Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner

Monday 19 / 6 / – Friday 23 / 6 / 2023

19 & 20 / 6 / 2023 : 10:00 – 18:00 : PIANOFABRIEK :

Presentations & Discussion of the projects of the participants SIC 2023

19 / 6 / 2023 : 19:30 : CINÉMA AVENTURE :

A DEMONSTRATION & CONSTANT by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner

Screening followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

A DEMONSTRATION is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. A DEMONSTRATION picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form. TRAILER

CONSTANT is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. CONSTANT asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions. TRAILER

TICKETS

21 / 6 / 2023 : 10:00 – 17:00 : Château Duden / NARAFI

THE WALKING TRAIL

master class with Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner

‘Working collaboratively in moving image, installation, and text, since 2018, our practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world. Our ongoing interest in the social and political histories of Western science is driven by a series of open-ended questions about how the world has been organized historically and, crucially, how it could be otherwise. Moving image allows us to interrogate existing models for perceiving and organizing the world and to create new expressions of creative unfolding via experiments in form, movement, sound, rhythm, light, and storytelling. By exploring the cinematic form in its broadest expression, we blend social and political narratives with immersive and playful sensory experiences in image and sound.

We think about the essay film form as a path to be explored through multiple registers of meaning and feeling. At its best, every point along the path provides a space to dwell in and ask questions about the many components that together make up our perception of the world and our positions within it. On that path there are smells, sounds, the feeling of sunlight touching the back of your neck. Sometimes, a guide accompanies you on the path, sometimes, you explore the path alone, letting your senses guide you on tangents. All of these modes are in play at any given time. None of them are more accurate or authoritative than the others. The essay film in this way represents a radical openness to the production and reception of meaning as multiplicity. During the masterclass we will explore this approach to making and encountering a film as a walking trail. ‘

22 / 6 / 2023 : 14:00 – 17:00 : PIANOFABRIEK :

HOUSEWARMING by Effi & Amir

Screening & Case Study with SIC coaches Effi & Amir

In a two-dimensional dystopian landscape of deserted half-built houses in Albania, a new mythology is in the making. The filmmakers, perhaps a contemporary incarnation of Goldilocks from the tale of the Three Bears, invade the houses and occupy their empty, liminal space and its missing furniture. The local community comments in song and speech about the new arrivals and their enterprise of an immigration in an opposite direction, from the full to the empty, from excess to lack. EXCERPT

22 / 6 / 2023 : 19:30 : CINÉMA AVENTURE :

Recent work by Anouk De Clercq : ONE, OK, WE’LL FIND YOU WHEN THE SUN GOES BLACK, BIRDSONG

Screening & Case Study with Anouk De Clercq

Anouk De Clercq is an artist and filmmaker based in Brussels and Berlin. In her work, she explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. In Cinéma Aventure, SIC proposes a case study around the practice of Anouk De Clercq, her collaboration with Helga Davis and Vessel, and the Belgian premiere of BIRDSONG:

ONE is a film, a performance, a 21st century protest song, a call to action, a pledge, a commitment, a solemn undertaking, a summoning of consciousness, an instruction, a stand against mindlessness and distraction, an art of limits, an active silence, a difficult love. And an invitation. To drink in the vibrancy of life at all scales. To embrace complexity and attend to our world with a befitting vibrancy of feeling.

OK : In the Summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in her country, Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair and also her hopes for the future. After collaborating on HELGA HUMMING (2019) and ONE (2020), the text became the starting point for a new film and a first work co-signed by Helga Davis and Anouk De Clercq. OK scrutinises the relations between Black and White while searching for the essence of collaboration and caring about the other.

WE’LL FIND YOU WHEN THE SUN GOES BLACK : Inspired by the Terella, a small magnetised model ball representing the Earth, used by scientists to investigate the aurora until the late 20th century. And by a Bertolt Brecht poem, written in exile in the 1930s: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.”

BIRDSONG : Two birds in a weightless world. They summon the sun with a song until an eclipse brings out the stars. BIRDSONG is an attempt to see the beginning in the end, a meditation on a world without us, a postlapsarian paradise, a kind of love at last sight.

TICKETS

23 / 6 / 2023 : 10:00 – 12:00 : VAF

ON TALENT DEVELOPMENT & FUNDING

workshop with Koen Baeyens

Koen Baeyens ( VAF ) will give an introduction on the different funding possibilities for audiovisual works and the programs for Talent development that VAF is offering. All your questions are welcome.

23 / 6 / 2023 : 14:30 – 16:30 : STUK

ARTEFACT 2023: The Ecstatic Being. Between Knowing and Understanding

visit with an introduction by curator Karen Verschooren

In the West, accounts of ecstatic experiences are usually associated with and limited to the context of religion, sex or drugs. However, The Ecstatic Being takes a much broader scope, looking at ecstasy as a self-chosen state of metamorphosis, a transformation. Sometimes described as a loss of self or ego, it is perhaps better understood as a heightened form of subjectivity; a super-clear awareness of one’s own mind and body stripped of dominant cognitive filters. It is primarily an ’embodied experience’, a bodily experience that is felt rather than thought-through.

An ecstatic experience temporarily overrules the dominant frameworks of knowledge that help determine how we view ourselves and the world. In the West, our knowledge system is mainly characterised by a cognitive, linear way of thinking and reasoning. It broadly involves a rational understanding expressed mainly through language. An ecstatic experience allows us to understand in a different way what lies beyond this dominant framework of knowledge. The ecstatic experience provides access, as it were, to another form of knowing and understanding.

This exhibition aims to look at these mind-bending practices and altered states of consciousness with an open mind, without judgment, but with an attentiveness to the conditions that make us crave them and the complex and multi-layered ways in which they are present within our society. In The Ecstatic Being, it is the artworks that give insight into what might exist outside of what we think we know. And perhaps this changes the way we give meaning to all that is inside and outside of us.

With work by Julius Bockelt, Fia Cielen, Laurie Dall’Ava, Nan Goldin, Tom Hannes, Hanne Lippard, Henri Michaux, Warre Mulder, Matt Mullican, Laure Prouvost, Ben Russell, Selkie, Jeanne Susplugas, Emma Talbot, Myrthe Van der Mark and Sophie Whettnall.