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Work session in Ljubljana (July 26-30, 2004) |
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Participants: |
During our work session in Ljubljana we were particularly interested in learning more about the history of Slovene media and art, the impact of the war on Slovenia and other former Yugoslav republics, and recent political events since Slovenia became a member of the European Union in May 2004. Each day our meetings took place at the Institute for Graduate Studies in the Humanities (ISH) [www.ish.si] where we had a seminar room. We are very thankful to ISH director, Dada Bac, who helped us with everything from hotel reservations to media equipment rentals. During the first part of the week Ursula, Angela and Lisa provided updates about their respective research projects. Ursula and Angela used two-screen projections to show video material from last year as well as new footage they shot since our last meeting in Istanbul Ursula presented rough cuts of The Black Sea Files, using the right frame to integrate text-based historical or factual details about the oil politics of the Caspian basin and the construction of the oil pipeline. She has developed a file system that mimics the way state institutions manage information and is still thinking through the final form and how to position herself as an embedded artist/cultural researcher This frees the narration from having to report on geopolitics to make critical reflections about the politics of representation and artistic strategies. New material from her shoot in Turkey last March was integrated, thus completing the course of the pipeline until the terminal on the Mediterranean. This segment changed the perspective of the whole piece, linking it to NATO and European interests and also connecting it more firmly with Angela’s Timescape project. Angela presented rough cuts of Corridor X, focusing on segments shot between Cologne and Belgrade.
She used the second frame to integrate material from the Timescapes database and to create filmic dialogues , to establishes a relation between segments shot in different locations by different people. A double screen video projection and a sound-mix allowing filmic dialogues for the public screening displays the kernel element of non linear editing. It permits that film dialogues between the different authors and subject matters of the Timescapes group can be engaged. Putting post-production back into the film theatre is an effort to liberate the moving image from its’ stereotyped significations engaged by a referenced use of sequencing images by mass media.and questions politics of representation. As we watched Angela's footage along the Highwayof Brotherhood and Unity, the second frame took us to various situations elsewhere including an EU meeting in Greece, a gravel pit in Turkey, an abandoned Kurdish village among many other places. Lisa presented newresearch she has gathered to construct the material conditions within the footprints that her essay, Postwar Footprints, will map and analyze. Her research included information about the financial investments made by European states in Slovenia and Croatia in recent years, the privatization of major state institutions, the increasing internationalization of cable and satellite television lineups in Slovenia and Croatia, the various satellites used by states of former Yugoslavia to beam national TV signals to diasporas in different parts of the world, and statistics about the international migration of Yugoslavs from the 19th century to the present. She has begun to conceptualize the overall structure of the project, and further work consists of gathering more visual material and thinking through the project’s political implications. Recurring discussions brought to light the difficulties in integrating historically and politically sensitive issues without reducing them to documentary information but to convey how they materialize through the scenes and places we are able to capture in a particular moment in time. We need to question our own constructions about the continuity of former kolkhoz farmers, airforce officers, prostitutes and other disrupted or reoriented courses of lives in the post-socialist era. We recognized the need to problematize the categories evaluating the terms. This brought us back to the theory-practice problem which hasn’t been resolved in this project. What role should theory and theorists play in this constellation? Should it be a superimposed analysis, a philosophical reflection or specific, field-related theoretical inputs? In this stage, at least, we opted for the latter.
In addition to presenting our own research, we met with Slovenes working in the media and in politics. Alja Brglez, who directs the Institute for Culture and Civilization [www.ick.si] in Ljubljana and was a candidate in the EU parliament elections, spoke to us about the structure of parliamentary democracy in Slovenia and evaluated the "transition" process, arguing two areas have not changed very much in the midst of the country's ten-year transition period˜the media and education. She and her colleague, Mitja Cepic, presented the findings of a recent media monitoring study conducted after the EU parliament elections in May 2004, which revealed a lack of substantive television coverage about the political issues related to the election, especially by the public service broadcaster RTVSLO, which tended to cover the election in the late night news broadcast and under-reported the week before the election. These findings were quite significant given that voter turnout was very low at 28%.
Another guest speaker was Slovene media artist and director, Miha Vipotnik, who was a key player in the formation of video art projects and collectives in Slovenia in the 1970s and 80s. He discussed the challenges of producing experimental media art in the belly of state-controlled broadcast institutions, the formation of an international video festival called International Video Biennale headquartered in Ljubljana during the 1980s, and then he showed clips of his works including, "Videogram 4," "8," "Journey to the End of the Ends," [vi.potnik.siol.com] and "Mercury Falling" .
Finally, Melita Zajc, research director at RTV Slovenia [www.rtvslo.si], spoke to us about the way digitization is changing the production possibilities within Slovenia, and stressed that ordinary people should be encouraged to experiment and create new content for television. She also discussed her involvement in a UNESCO project called the World Information Award Summit. Zajc was selected to serve on an international jury that gave awards to the best websites from countries all over the world and she highlighted some of them for us.
On the final evening of the workshop we held a public screening of Ursula's video Remote Sensing and Angela's Passing Drama and then had a discussion with those who attended. The following day Angela and Ursula rented a car and went to the Slovene-Austrian border where Angela's needed to re-shoot the labor camp and memorial there. Throughout the week we also discussed our project website, possible exhibition venues and formats, the publication of a book and DVDs, and plans for our next meeting, which will take place in Feb or March 2005 in Zurich. Session attendees and speakers Dada Bac, Director, Institute Studiorum Humanitatis Text by Lisa Parks |
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