1 8 | International Conference Performing Protest | May 8-10, 2014
Over the last decade, Snowdon has authored several pieces of experimental film and video that have been exhibited around the world at festivals and gallery spaces, garnering praise for his highly crafted method of interpreting collective storytelling. “The Uprising,” his first feature-length documentary, is in many ways a continuation of this exploration, but this time the footage was shot by ordinary people with mobile phones and small cameras who were in the streets and in the throes of revolution, many of them anonymous voices and presences with whom the filmmaker has never otherwise communicated. “The Uprising” won the Opus Award at its world premiere at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in October 2013 and was selected for the prestigious Museum of Modern Art‘s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media Documentary Fortnight. Peter Snowdon studied French and Philosophy at Oxford University, before moving to Paris where he worked in publishing and journalism, and as a consultant for UNESCO. He lived in Egypt from 1997 to 2000. On his return to Europe, he started making agit-prop documentary films. Over time, his work evolved beyond the political purely to engage with the experimental traditions. A number of his films were shot in the Palestinian territories, and India, where he col-laborated with the International Society for Ecology and Culture. His short films have won prizes at Toma Unica in Madrid, Malescorto International Short Film Festival, and Kansas City Film Festival, and have been screened at numerous international festivals. Currently based in Belgium, he is preparing a PhD on vernacular video and documentary practice after the Arab Spring at Media Arts Design Faculty.
We need heroes now
Het geslacht Borgia © NUNC
The following is an edited excerpt of a review from the Next Projection website. It was part of their coverage of the 2014 Museum of Modern Art‘s Documentary Fortnight, which ran from February 14th to February 28th.
May 8-10, 2014 | International Conference Performing Protest | 19
THE UPRISING owdon A film by Peter Sn
Peter Snowdon’s “The Uprising” is a powerful film consisting of almost a hundred amateur videos recorded during the Arab Spring by individuals caught up in various revolutions in the chaotic, crowded, deadly streets of Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt. Snowdon initially discovered these films as uploads on YouTube, and after a painstaking editing process, ultimately used them to frame a larger fictional narrative about the citizen uprisings.
markable array of videos Snowdon builds an audiovisual document of an imagined panArab revolution. For he does not identify the videos in terms of location or date (at least, not until the closing credits), thereby presenting a seamless series of events that transcends geographical borders. This lack of specificity echoes the film’s generic title. […] Th[e] backward temporal structure enables Snowdon (and co-writer/editor Bruno Tracq) to out-line the process of a revolution, beginning with people taking to the streets, chanting slogans, and bumping against rows of MPs. We are witness to a mosaic of individuals speaking against their rich, corrupt government leaders. […] In the absence of location markers from Snowdon, the videos sometimes contain dialogue that specifies where a given scene is taking place: a solitary woman speaks of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisia), crowds tell Bashar Al-Assad (Syria) to get out, set fire to a larger-than-life poster of Hosni Mubarak (Egypt) and a man speaks of Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in protest against what was done to him and his wares. […] People survey the riches once accumulated by their toppled government leaders; clean and repair parts of the city; shake hands with the military; tear down an infamous prison’s doors; without violence and never losing sight of why they are doing it all in the first place. A camera approaches a man who witnesses these goings-on: “There will be so many good things. Nothing bad can happen”. As the film winds its way back to the […] present time, a woman’s voiceover speaks of tomorrow as the first step towards change; what has happened is only the beginning, not the end.
Peter Snowdon, The Uprising © Peter Snowdon
Next Projection Approved For his debut feature-length documentary, British journalist and filmmaker Peter Snowdon constructs a dazzling and moving timeline of an imaginary revolution in the Middle East. But the footage that Snowdon used to imagine this revolution-that-will-be-televised is based entirely from the plethora of ama-
In 2011 Troubleyn, Jan Fabre’s company, performs Prometheus Landscapes II with the leitmotiv “We need heroes now.” “Where have all the heroes gone,” Fabre wonders. “Who can show us the way and can make us dream”? And for which unquenchable fire are they prepared to die if necessary? In their roundtable discussion, theatre makers Benjamin Van Tourhout and Ruth Mellaerts reflect on the role of heroic figures in an allegedly postheroic age. Are these figures (still) able to keep the dream alive that collective happiness can be installed and protected by people who are at the same time reflective and, strengthened by moral persuasion, actional? And how such – historical – figures are being (re-)constructed, problematized and staged in theatrical performances? Benjamin Van Tourhout is playwright and director at NUNC theatre company. He’s the author and director of Het Geslacht Borgia, Evariste, Raisonnez, Zwerfkei, IJzergordijn, etc. He’s conducting a PhD project on the theatrical imagination of historical heroes (“How to touch the untouchables?”) at LUCA – School of Arts.
teur videos uploaded to YouTube and/or Facebook during the actual revolutions that swept across Middle Eastern countries from late 2010 to 2012. These videos were shot by people who were in the eye of the storm of these revolutions — in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, specifically — and so provide a very immersive perspective of them as they transpired. From this re-
The Uprising is arguably part of this beginning. As an unidentified cameraman exclaims earlier in the film, while riot police tell him to put the camera away, “The world must see what hap-pened!” The Uprising will be screened in Museum M on Saturday from 16:00-17:45. It will be followed by a discussion with the director, Peter Snowdon.
cRISEs UP! In 2010, during the aftermath of a new economic and financial crisis, Victoria Deluxe decided to capture the ongoing street protests in picture in order to document the motives and the different kinds of actions undertaken by the demonstrators. Since then they have attended numerous rallies in order to help understand what prompts people to resist and protest. Their footage resulted in the documentary cRISEs UP! and began from the growing social struggle of the unions and other social movements in Belgium, linking them to the Indignados and different Occupy movements worldwide while also comparing and contrasting them with the more classic social movements. Based on a handful of fragments from the documentary cRISEs UP!, Professor Fred Louckx will generate a roundtable discussion on crucial topics like the interferences between protest and union movements, the tense relationship between global dynamics and local anchoring, the transfer of historic models of protesting and current modes of protesting.
Ruth Mellaerts is a dramaturge at theatre company fABULEUS. She wrote and co-directed Playground love, Ik ben geen racist, Speeldrift, etc. Currently, she’s working on the monologue Stand Up, which, on the basis of the 15-year-old activist Barnaby Raine and the texts by Stéphane Hessel, explores the affect of indignation.
Fred Louckx is a professor in Sociology of Health and Wellness at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also the coordinator of the project De Toekomstfabriek (The Future Factory), which involves eight midfield organizations from Ghent who have united themselves in order to openly discuss the needs and interests of society by means of a common project. This project is founded on a stronger politicized midfield, as it is the aim of the ‘Toekomstfabriek’ to develop sustainable perspectives on our future.
Benjamin Van Tourhout and Ruth Mellaerts will have an artist talk in LETT 08.16 on Saturday from 13:30-14:30.
Fred Louckx’s roundtable discussion will take place in Museum M on Saturday from 13:30-14:30. This conversation will be held exclusively in Dutch.
Resistance & Recuperation The Disappearance of Pleasure In his paper, “The Disappearance of Pleasure”, Christophe Van Gerrewey will try to put Roland Barthes’ 1973 work The Pleasure of the Text into practice by applying it to contemporary works of art from different disciplines, asking such questions as: What is the ‘true’ pleasure of architecture, literature, theatre, visual arts—and what threatens or even replaces this pleasure nowadays? According to Van Gerrewey, in times of political and economical crisis, the value of art seems proportional to the injustice or the wrongs the artwork criticizes. The more terrible the social disaster a work of art ‘pillories’, the better this work of art seems to become. When society is out of joint, committed critics and artists reach out to each other by means of their shared indignation. Art becomes openly—not to say hysterically—political. An aesthetic experience therefore has to coincide with sharp outcries. Look how terrible right-wing politicians are! The autonomy of art is being abolished! Isn’t it inhuman how immigrants are treated? Of course—and somewhat paradoxically—this kind of mechanism entails the end of the aesthetic experience and of the autonomy of art. It is a bitter sequence: all kinds of
phenomena in contemporary society are ‘bad’—the artist has to do something and engage himself directly—result: bad art. Put differently: in times of crisis, by means of a self-willed reaction of the ‘artistic community,’ the pleasure of the artwork (or of the text, to refer to Barthes), disappears because it is replaced by critical outrage. In his text, Barthes wrote: “le texte est (devrait être) cette personne qui montre son derrière au père politique”. [“The text is (should be) this carefree person who shows his behind to Father Politics”.] Van Gerrewey argues that our contemporary situation shows that this is only partly true. On the one hand, artistic pleasure does indeed not concern itself with politics proper. But on the other hand, without the existence of artistic pleasure, society becomes even more one-dimensional and ‘poor’ than it already was. Van Gerrewey studied architecture at Ghent University and literary science at KU Leuven. He is currently completing a PhD (FWO) on the history of contemporary architectural criticism by means of the writings of Geert Bekaert. He is the author of many articles and reviews in both academic and non-academic journals and magazines.
Critical Counter-Narratives in Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution In her paper, Jana Johanna Haeckel will discuss The Pixelated Revolution (20112012) by Rabih Mroué. In this video installation, the Lebanese artist, theatre director and actor uses footage of demonstrations and fighting taken by Syrian rebels using their mobile phones and uploaded to YouTube. Knowing that “amateur pictures of hellish events seem more authentic”, to quote Susan Sontag, Mroué deconstructs the Internet footage and demystifies the iconography associated with certain politicized images of protest, re-contextualizing them in a human, personalized manner.
Jana Johanna Haeckel is a PhD candidate and researcher for the project “Photo-filmic Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture” at the Université Catholique de Louvain and Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography (2012-2014). Her dissertation “The Portrait Between the Filmic and the Photographic Image 1990-2010” analyzes the work of contemporary artists, such as Rabih Mroué, Fiona Tan and Gillian Wearing employing strategies of photo-filmic portraiture in order to reflect on changing conceptions of subjectivity or identity in visual culture.
“Mroué begins his lecture/performance by stating that it all began with the sentence: “The Syrian protesters are recording their own deaths.” To create this performance he went to the Internet to find out more about “death in Syria today.” […] Mroué analyzes the images as fleeting testaments to unseen protesters’ deaths, and brief digital memorials. The question he poses is “How should we read these videos?” Mroué’s answer to this question is in the form of a proposal to his spectators, that they consider the videos as evidence of a new kind of aesthetic, perhaps even an aesthetic weapon. Protesters who have used the digital video recording capacity of their mobile phones to document demonstrations and conflict have become the targets of government soldiers for doing so. There are two kinds of shooting, Mroué informs us: shooting with a camera and shooting with a rifle. “One shoots for his life and one shoots for the life of his regime.” The images captured by the protesters are testaments to their life-risking attempts to prove that what they saw actually happened. The Pixelated Revolution reveals a strange paradox. Everyday recordings can suddenly become acts of resistance and treated as transgressions that have to be eliminated. Surveillance here is not constant and panoptic. The surveillance of and by both the Syrian Ba’athists and their opposition is a surreptitious pop-up surveillance. There is not one eye scanning the landscape but many eyes, all looking for and trying to capture other eyes. [...] Mroué participates in an aesthetic and analytical discourse that claims to represent the real and to tell the truth while openly acknowledging the simultaneous use of fiction to do so, in his invention of a fictional aesthetic manifesto. He straddles fiction and nonfiction, performance and documentation, and entertainment and edification in a performance in which acting, video, photographs, stage design, and text all operate together as equal partners in the creation of meaning. In our upload culture the revolution we can see and know is the revolution that is aesthetically digitized.” (Edited excerpt from “The Pixelated Revolution”, in The Drama Review, translated by Nawfal)
The panel ‘Resistance & Recuperation’ will discuss the different ways art can manifest itself in times of crisis and how it can take a stand against repression. Speakers include Christophe Van Gerrewey, Jana Johanna Haeckel, Kris Pint and Nadia Sels. Tri-li-li-lee! Long before post-structuralism or even existentialism, the Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz provided a splendid analysis of how our identity is always the fragile product of the other’s gaze and discourse with his 1937 novel “Ferdydurke”. In all of his works, we see his characters being tormented and moulded by the oppressive presence of the other, while at the same time looking for inventive ways to escape this oppression. In their lecture, “Tri-li-li-lee! Techniques of Oppression and Resistance in the Work of Witold Gombrowicz”, Kris Pint and Nadia Sels will present Gombrowicz’ work as a source of inspiration and practical toolkit for resistance. His novels offer useful concepts and micro-strategies that several of his characters develop to reclaim a certain autonomy, and to create their own version of what they consider “the good
life”. Searching for a broader context to implement Gombrowicz’ techniques, Pint and Sels will compare them to those of the Greek Cynics–a philosophic movement of resistance that also developed in what could be called ‘post-democratic’ times. Nadia Sels is a lecturer of Cultural and Architectural History at the University of Antwerp. She received her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Ghent, where she also lectured in Mythology and Latin Literature. She publishes on art, architecture, culture and literature. Kris Pint is affiliated with the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of Hasselt. His main area of research is the relationship between the scenography of the interior and subjectivity, both from a phenomenological and a semiotic perspective.
“From his very first book, a collection of short stories called Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity […], Gombrowicz raged against what he saw as the aristocratic conservatism of Polish culture, the formality of men bowing and kissing ladies’ hands in greeting, the general insistence on how Poland’s grand destiny had been sidetracked by a century of partition and occupation, and perhaps most of all the uncritical reverence for such cultural heroes as Copernicus – of questionable nationality; Mickiewicz – the national poet, actually born in Lithuania; and Chopin – half-Polish, who spent most of his life in France. […] What Gombrowicz found truly frustrating – even dangerous – is how his country’s inferiority complex, its need to remind the world time and again how Polish culture is just as great – nay, greater – than that of the West, cripples the individual, forces him to memorize verses and dates and to behave in a manner befitting the great civilization that is Poland. Or at least this is the attitude represented in the preponderance of Gombrowicz’s work, any treatment of which is obliged to bear the disclaimer that you can never fully trust an author so fond of irony and masks. Indeed, writing about Gombrowicz’s attitude toward Polish culture is kind of like writing an obituary for someone who didn’t believe in death. That said, the individual’s battle against the strictures of culture remained a lifelong obsession for Gombrowicz. In his early work in particular, this theme manifests itself as a battle between maturity – that is, the social expectation that the individual will behave according to a given code, a superego imposed from above – and “immaturity” the freedom to do as one will and, in general, not to give a damn.” (Benjamin Paloff, “Witold Gombrowicz, and to Hell with Culture”)
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Between the truth and lies there is a hair, and I am trying to cut this hair and as I do this I remember the words of the poet Al Akhtal Assaghir: ‘He cries and laughs not for sadness or joy like a lover, no he draws a circle in the air and then erases it. Rabih Mroué
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Panel G2: ‘Resistance & Recuperation’ will be presented in Museum M on Saturday from 9:00-10:30.