Videograms Days

September 19th 3 PM - 8 PM

Kaunas Artists’ House and online

Artist talks, discussions and video screenings

15:00 Introduction

15:10 Olivier Marboeuf and Louis Henderson (The Living and The Dead Ensemble) 

The Haitian revolution was a test case for the ideals of the French Revolution: What does the promise that all men are brothers who enjoy the same inviolable rights even mean as long as colonies and slavery exist? Nothing, according to the enslaved inhabitants of Haiti, who rebelled against the owners of the sugar cane plantations in 1791. In 1961, Antillean writer Édouard Glissant dedicated his play "Monsieur Toussaint" to their leader Toussaint Louverture, which in turn serves as the basis for the film Ouvertures. Louis Henderson, Olivier Marboeuf and the theatre group The Living and The Dead Ensemble film themselves rehearsing the play in Port-au-Prince. The result is an experiment in three parts: a study retracing Louverture’s steps, an analysis of shared authorship and collective filmmaking and finally the outburst of a magical reality in which the spirits of the dead are alive.

Olivier Marboeuf is an author, performer, and curator. He founded the independent art center Espace Khiasma, where he has developed a program addressing minority representation through exhibitions, screenings, debates, performances, and collaborative projects across the northeast of Paris. Since 2017 Khiasma has merged into an experimental platform, exploring ways of creating a place collectively and developing the webradio R22 Tout-Monde. With an interest in the different modalities of transmission of knowledge, Marboeuf’s proposals broadly inscribe themselves in practices of conversation and speculative narratives, in an attempt to create ephemeral situations of culture. He currently produces films at Spectre Productions, based in Rennes.

Louis Henderson’s films can be categorised as documentary-fictions that engage with subjects such as post-colonialism, history, politics and anthropology. His cinema reflects on society’s cultural and material remains and as such his films are essentially archaeological; focusing on the signatures of the archaic in the contemporary. His latest films are produced by Spectre and distributed by Phantom (FR) and LUX (UK). Henderson has shown his work at places such as Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Doc Lisboa, CPH:DOX, New York Film Festival, The Contour Biennial, The Kiev Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, SAVVY Contemporary, The Gene Siskell Film Centre, Gasworks and Tate Britain.

16:00 Kevin B Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné - Bottled Songs

Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens. The first phase of the project consists of four short films, each taking the form of a desktop epistolary composed by one researcher addressed to the other.

Films screened during the talk:

Bottled Songs 1: The Observer

Chloé, a media researcher based in France, composes an email to Kevin, a fellow researcher based in Germany. She relates her recent encounter with a disturbing phone video filmed by an ISIS militant in 2014 and broadcasted on a major French news channel that specializes in “citizen journalism.” Shocked to find such content on a mainstream channel, she investigates both the video and the platform to find the border between media terrorism and news reporting. But the border gets blurrier through her search.

Bottled Songs 2: Looking Into the Flames

Responding to Chloé’s experience with the ISIS phone video in “The Observer”, Kevin shares his own fascination with what has been called “the first feature film produced by ISIS”, Flames of War, also dating from 2014. After reading various news reports comparing the film to Hollywood blockbusters and Nazi propaganda, Kevin finds the film on a torrent platform. Having never watched ISIS videos, he fears what he will see. He comes up with a new viewing strategy to deconstruct the movie while watching it.

Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a French researcher and filmmaker. She is currently preparing a research-creation PhD at the Ecole normale supérieure de Paris (SACRe – PSL University), and regularly teaches theory classes and artistic workshops about film and media, recently at the Université Paris 8 (FR), the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL), the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (DE), the Lucerne School of Art and Design (CH) and the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart (DE). Her work takes different forms (texts, films, video installations and live performances) and explores the intersections between cinema and online media. She is particularly interested in questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation and mediated memory.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival.

17:00 Shourideh C. Molavi - Assembled Practices: Documenting Slow and Fast Violence

Forensic Architecture is an interdisciplinary research group that undertakes spatial and media investigations into cases of state and corporate violence, human rights violations and environmental destruction. Working with and at the invitation of communities affected by and resisting state oppression and neo-colonial violence, Forensic Architecture gathers publicly available media data from a distance and places it in critical conversation with material we collect in the field. Presenting Triple Chaser, this talk points to the methods of two of our investigations, outlining the diagram of relations that make up their content and direction, which include the communities that experience violence, solidarity and human rights groups, and practitioners proximate and remote. Together, these assembled techniques and diffused networks of relations shape our political, intellectual, and artistic practice.

Shourideh C. Molavi is the dedicated Israel-Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, linking their investigations to the work and research of civil society groups and organizers in the field. She is a scholar in political science specialising in critical international relations and political theory and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. For over 15 years, Shourideh has worked in the Middle East, mainly in Israel-Palestine on the topics of human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power.

18:00 Noncitizen, a film and cultural project 

Noncitizen is a nomadic film and cultural project founded in Sweden in 2015. The project's aim is to highlight issues of oppression in our time, in particular around borders, freedom of movement, and the right to have rights. Noncitizen consists of a collective that organizes film screenings, seminars, meetings, and discussions. A basic idea behind these events is that documentary films can be the starting point for dialogues about issues that are bigger than individual stories of the films. More recently, the collective has also initiated the projects Noncitizen Archive and Noncitizen Camera. While the former facilitates filmmaking recourses for precarious migrants and refugees, the latter is a digital archive for storing already existing images of "noncitizen" experiences.

Noncitizen will present ideas both behind Noncitizen Archive and Noncitizen Camera. Noncitizen Archive is a non-profit digital archive for storing images from migrant experiences. It is an independent platform for the secure digital storage of personal and observational footage. Noncitizen believes that videos, photos, and audio material captured by migrants and people living in “noncitizenship” are crucial documents of our time, but that they often get lost. Footage is deleted and mobile phones go missing. Through Noncitizen Archive, Noncitizen wants to save this material for the future, whether its for personal use, research and/ or cultural projects.

Noncitizen Camera was an 18-month filmmaking mentorship programme for asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Once per month they met in a large group to learn about a different element of filmmaking and to share and discuss their work.

With Christian Rossipal, Elin Lilleman Eriksson, Marta Dauliute and Noncitizen Camera filmmakers.

19:15 I Am Dublin

A feature film by Anna Persson, Ahmed Abdullahi, David Aronowitsch and Sharmarke Binyusuf

at Kaunas Artists' House

A documentary beginning in a fictional story from a harsh reality. The film portrays Ahmed playing a character whose life mirrors his own. Ahmed is a Dublin-case like Daoud, the character he plays in the 30-minute fiction film “Dublin”. Ahmed has been in Europe for six years, living in hiding in Sweden three years. When he arrived by boat to the Italian island Lampedusa, he was forced to leave his fingerprints. At that moment he became a Dublin-case. Italy was the first country in Europe and the Dublin Regulation stipulates that he can only apply for asylum there – it is called the principle of “first country of asylum.” Through the Dublin Regulation the EU has created a large group of young people drifting around Europe. The so-called Dublin-cases are deprived of all rights and thrown out from country to country in Europe.

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During the second day on September 26th Videograms Days will take place together with:

Artists Metahaven

Artists Broersen and Lukács

Researcher Karolis Žukas

Artist and filmmaker Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaitė