Salon Vidéo de Printemps

INSTALLATION - SCREENING - PERFORMANCE - BUFFET
Les Salons Vidéos : a proposition in 4 acts on the medium of video organized by 68 Septante asbl and Troisième Étage.

with the video by Loïc Connanski, Güldem Durmaz-Ergün Elelci-Zeki Gürarslan-Umar Jibirin- Mustafa Mahaman-Masoumeh Mousazedeh-Bénédicte Liénard-Valérie Vanhoutvinck, Nelson Sullivan, Laura Waddington, Lucia Wainberg
installations by Loïc Connanski, Marianne Pistone
and a video performance by Tilò Lagalla

Through video making, authors involve themselves intimately and express their feelings about the present world. This third event shows how artists use the video tool to speak out, to offer a voice to those who are deprived of one and to support the emergence of speech.

INSTALLATIONS saturday and sunday

  Tout bas (Softly) by Marianne Pistone - 2002

This evening, Mr. and Mrs. are having dinner face to face, they don’t speak ; between them the table stretches ever more interminable. It’s been the same for twenty-five years. They don’t speak. But, no doubt, they are thinking just as much.
Softly, we can hear what they are really thinking..

  Boucles by Loïc connanski - 1998

Interactivity means that the customer is king.
With these loops, I am the puppet of the user ("clicker"). If he wants, I can keep making the same movement for hours, tireless, better than a robot.

Boucles was designed for an interactive CD-Rom.
Here, we present video sequences that were used for the CD-Rom.

 A Loïc connanski video compilation - 1991/2006

A streak of furious eccentricity blows through the videos of Loïc Connanski.
It’s caustic, impertinent and terribly funny.
In terms of design and form, his videos are apparently simple, but they are less so in their critique of the media and especially of television.
In turn farcical and provocative, polymorphic and even performing, incarnating the average, slightly simple person, Connanski’s trompe-l’oeil universe escapes all classification.
With a sort of hysteria and exceptional imagination and creativity, he uses the codes of television language and expressive video editing techniques to show how manipulation and rerouting of images and sounds create messages, fabricate information and transform the meaning.
Like an illusionist who deliberately refuses to use sleight of hand, the set is always upside-down in Connanski’s videos. It’s a magnifying mirror which reveals the tricks of the medium.
Without being didactic, his work could nevertheless be used to support an “image” education.Refreshing and funny counter-propaganda against the media dictatorship.

Saturday’s SCREENING

 6 ;30pm : Screening #1
Pour vivre j’ai laissé - 30’ - 2004 by Ergün Elelci, Zeki Gürarslan, Umar Jibirin, Mustafa Mahaman and Masoumeh Mousazedeh, with the support of Bénédicte Liénard, Güldem Durmaz and Valérie Vanhoutvinck

In September 2004, filmmakers meet a group of asylum seekers. The latter take up a camera and shoot their daily lives.
Their intuition, accounts, lyricism and humor transform the "workshop" exercise into an expressive and poetic act of creation..

 7.30pm : Soup and toast (organic) - €3

 8.30pm : Screening #2 Focus Laura Waddington
Cargo - 29’ - 2001 - ov en st fr
Cargo is the story of a journey, I made on a container ship with a group of Rumanian and Filipino sailors, who were delivering cargo to the Middle East.
I stayed on the ship six weeks. The sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke and telling me stories in a small TV room. In Syria, the ports were military zones.
I hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below : a man stealing wood,
a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, I made a narrative, that falls between reality and fiction. It was a way of showing the limbo these men were living in.

Border - 27’ - 2004 - ov en st fr
In 2002, Laura Waddington spent months in the fields around Sangatte Red Cross camp, France with Afghan and Iraqi refugees, who were trying to cross the channel tunnel to England.
Filmed at night with a small video camera, the figures lit only by the distant car headlights on the motorways, Border is a personal account of the refugees’ plight and the police violence that followed the camp’s closure.

 10pm : Screening #3
Carcel Libertad by Lucia Wainberg - 31’ - 2006 - ov en st fr

"Carcel Libertad" is a personal road movie. Lucia, a 26 years old franco-uruguaian girl enquires on the dictatorship in Uruguay.
To understand what happened, she has conversations with main protagonists of this uruguayan story.
The main character takes the opportunity of this trip to ask questions about history denies, fears and memory holes. This movie was recorded in 3 weeks.

sunday’s SCREENING

 7pm : Mais … pourquoi pars-tu ? - J’ai un monochrome à finir.
Video-performance by Tilò Lagalla

"A succession of video sequences in Nice French translated into English, zone out at home and in the neighborhood.
These little talkative stories are about competition, luck, "Gòbi", creation, potatoes, and the return to immanence and company.
A happy fast one on accepted language, behavior and attitudes of our society of spectacle." D. Coliopoulos

 8pm : Buffet - €5 - vegetarian organic meal

 9pm : Screening #1
La petite vidéo rouge du sur commandant Connanski by Loïc Connanski
14’30’’ - 1998 - ov fr
Television object : camcording treatise for the young television viewer.

 10pm : Screening #2 Focus Nelson Sullivan
Nelson Sullivan, who died in New York in 1989, was constantly filming the people and events around him. He did no editing but simply held his camera in hand, a wide-angle lens pointed back towards himself as he wandered through events, commenting on them all the time. He often turns the camera towards what he has decided to show us. Nelson mastered his art to such an extent that he takes the spectator on a detailed courtesy visit of his part of town, of some cafés, of the Chelsea Hotel and other New York hotspots.
Nelson was gay. He introduces us to his friends, most of whom are transvestites, and speaks to them via his camera. Instead of turning to face Nelson, they reply to the lens, graciously and respectfully, aware that his identity has been subsumed into his camera.

Gay Day Parade - 26’ - 1989 - ov en st fr
Nelson’s friends come together for a more militant outing : the annual parade for New York homosexuals.
A walk to the peer, the last day - 29’ - 1989 - ov en st fr
Nelson goes for a walk with his friend Bill and his dog along the old docks, where he often used to go during the 1970s.
The small group is troubling because it is premonitory. Full of nostalgia and regrets, Nelson’s remarks seem to hint at an impending but unexpected death, which was indeed to take place the following night.

Salon Vidéo de Printemps has received the support of the French speaking Community of Belgium (Visual Arts Department), the French Embassy and Ateliers Mommen asbl.
Thanks to all the participants and to IFasbl and La pose longue asbl