The Unseen Festival 2018: Lake Club. Saturday, September 15, 7:30pm
T H E U N S E E N F E S T I V A L 2018
Lake Club
Join us on Saturday, September 15, 7:30pm, for night 15 of the Unseen Festival, Lake Club. We will screen work by Bin Li (in person, with Rebecca Zinner playing clarinet), Emmanuelle Nègre, Pedro Lacerda, Magali Dougoud (in person), Evelin Stermitz, Dan Browne, Rita Mahfouz, and Hiroya Sakurai. Preceding the screening with be readings by Hanna Rose Shell and Laynie Browne.
i am also here “FDF” – Bin Li – China/USA – 2018 – 4 min
This road leads to a non-place where “I” only exists in sounds.
Bin Li (b. Fuzhou, China) is a composer and artist based in New York City. His recent work explores the immateriality of sound and its derivatives. More information: www.bindavidli.com
Seaside – Emmanuelle Nègre – France – 2018 – 4 min
Seaside is an experimental found footage film. People are playing and having fun at the beach. Removing the emulsion on people’s silhouettes erase identity and what the film was made for, fixing people’s image throughout time and memory.
Emmanuelle Nègre is born in France in 1986 and studied at the Villa Arson School of fine Art. She got the DNSEP (Diplôme National Superieur d’Expression Plastique) in 2010. Emmanuelle has participated in local and international exhibitions and in 2011 she became a co-director of Catalyst Arts, Belfast. She was a resident of La Station, Nice from 2013 to 2017. She is showing her work locally and internationally as part of exhibitions and screening. In 2017 she started to program screenings under the name Fovéa.
A Day at the River – Pedro Lacerda – Chile/Brazil – 2018 – 7 min
A Day at the River depicts a plastic and oneiric interpretation of nature. It is a tribute to intimate relationships with the natural world, as well as an attempt at reframing consciousness to develop a new frame of mind. The film merges two narratives: on one side, the inexorable course of a river and, on the other, the birth of life within its depths. The first narrative of water and tropical images brings us the colour palette and its possibilities once blended. The second narrative, together with the sound design and the music of Giacinto Scelsi, Rodolfo Caesar, and Marcos Lacerda, introduces a reinterpretation of nature’s enigmatic tempo. Immersing the viewer into a subaquatic ecosystem, A Day at the River is a tribute to nature’s rhythms and an exploration of the mystery of its beauty.
Pedro Lacerda (1988) is a Chilean-Brazilian filmmaker and video artist. He studied media & communications at the UNIACC University (Santiago de Chile), and has a Master degree in digital narratives at the Internationale Filmschule Ko?ln (Cologne). His works have been screened at the FILE Festival (Sa?o Paulo), Santiago International Film Festival (Santiago), Images Festival (Toronto), WRO Media Art Biennale (Wroclaw), NYC Indie Film Festival (New York) and at the Museum of Visual Arts MAVI (Santiago), among others. In 2013, he was invited to attend the Locarno Summer Academy at the 66th Locarno Film Festival. Since 2016, he has been developing his first video-installation Five Places to Remember, which maps musical representation under the urban landscapes of the cities of Prague, Berlin, Bogota?, Paraty and Brussels.
Lac Club – Magali Dougoud – Russia/Switzerland – 2018 – 15 min
Lac Club brings the spectator to the Lake Baïkal (in Russia) in a mythological attempt to find the original place of humanity. Meeting with the oldest lake in the world feels like a poetic conquest in a space that has become abstract. The Lake Baikal is investigated by the artist to see if it physically takes on its symbolic power. The explorer figure addresses cultural appropriation, the appropriation of reproductive bodies as well as the historical stories of those who are concerned. How could humans think as a collective specie working for the acknowledgement of one another?
Magali Dougoud is a visual artist born in Switzerland. She studied visual art in the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Geneva (CH) and in the Haute Ecole des Arts de Berne (CH). Her practice relies on installation and video and her work has been shown in several places in Switzerland, Germany, France, Chile… She invests herself in different art fields and collectives, as the Collettivo UP – which is linked to the art space that she founded six year ago in Switzerland called Urgent Paradise. In 2015 she starts to work on two Episodes of the same series Fleur du pays, Pegman oder der zeitgenössische Cowboy and Pueblo, Pegman oder der europäissche Traum in duo with a swiss artist Nicolas Raufaste. These two videos were shown in several places in Switzerland and in France – Centre PasquArt à Bienne (CH), 29ème festival les Instants vidéo à Marseille (F), Blackslash Festival à Zürich (CH) – and the first was part of the visual art collection of the canton of Berne. Her last videos Nadia C and Lac Club was exhibited as part of the exhibition There is No I in Team in Standard/deluxe in Lausanne which also showcased an installation created by the artist.
Black Blue Abstract – Evelin Stermitz – Austria – 2014 – 8 min
In an abstract form, black and blue are visualizing a color surface for the screen. The color movements are vanishing and reappearing in a constant flow. The abstract surface for the screen describes endless possibilities of contingency.
Evelin Stermitz, M.A., M.Phil., studied Media and New Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and holds the degree in Philosophy from Media Studies. Her works in the field of media and new media art focus on post-structuralist feminist art practices. In 2008 she founded ArtFem.TV – Art and Feminism ITV (http://www.artfem.tv) and received a Special Mention for the project at the IX Festival Internacional de la Imagen, VI Muestra Monográfica de Media Art, University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, in 2010. Her works have been exhibited and screened at various venues such as the MMoMA Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia / Vetlanda Museum, Sweden / Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City / Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina / PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli / CAM Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Naples, Italy / Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia / Fundació Joan Miró and CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain / Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, USA / MAC/VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France / Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA / International Museum of Women, San Francisco, USA. www.evelinstermitz.net
Taylor Creek – Dan Browne – Canada – 2017 – 2 min
Notes towards a compost-based vision.
Dan Browne (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns and nature through dense and kinetic forms. His films and videos have been presented at over one hundred festivals and venues internationally, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Diagonal Film Archive, Centre Georges Pompidou, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival and Early Monthly Segments. His multimedia work memento mori (2012) received the Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, First Prize at Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Deluxe Cinematic Award at Images Festival. Most recently, Poem (2015) was released on Graphical Recording’s Variations, and received the Trinity Square Video Award at Images. Dan’s media practices also encompass live performances in collaboration with musicians, and video installations that have received public commissions in Toronto and Vancouver.
On Familiar Waters – Rita Mahfouz – Lebanon – 2018 – 8 min
Originally extracted from film scenes revolving around a ship or the sea, the sentences—now an assembled voice-over—portray a city, drowned. Buildings, cars, motorcycles, people, dirt, cigarette butts, concrete, all overlap on one surface, that of water … that of the screen. The video is part of a larger set of works (comprising writing and photography) that explores and constructs spaces that are neither strictly flat nor deep, an intermediate dimension where the distinction between background and foreground disappears.
Rita Mahfouz was born in 1985. She received an MA in Visual Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Alba), University of Balamand, in 2018; a BA in Music Composition from the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music in 2016; and a Maîtrise and BA in Film and Video Studies from Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in 2008 and 2006 respectively. She is the videomaker of On Familiar Waters, 2018, and Graphic Composition on White Background, 2015; and the composer of Je chante pour passer le temps (2016), Ce soir je dîne à la maison (2014), and RAVENSCRYTOO (2013). She participated in “Immaterial Collection II, Forum 1: The Sides of Our Sea,” Beirut Art Center, May 2018, and “les 13e rencontres internationales de composition musicale de Cergy-Pontoise,” France, April 2014.
The Stream VII – Hiroya Sakurai – Japan – 2017 – 6 min
In the man-made waterways of rice paddies, the water in nature must follow artificial rules. In that way, nature is made abstract, giving rise to a new form of beauty distinct from the natural state. The theme of this work is the liveliness of the water as it follows the man-made course. “This work is a ballet using the sound and the movement of the algae and water. With the waterway as the theater, I filmed the choreography of the algae that flows in the water.” “I shot this with a waterproof camera on a slider dolly. Using this device I created a simulated experience of walking through the waterway for the viewer.” “This time I focused on the expression of the movement of the sand in the waterway and the reflection of the surface ripples on the waterway’s inside walls.” – HS
Hiroya Sakurai. Born in Yokohama, Japan in 1958. Professor, Seian University of Art and Design. Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J. Paul Getty Trust. Sakurai was awarded at “35th Asolo Art Film Festival (2016)”, Italy, “39th Tokyo Video Festival” (2017) and 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2018).
i am also here “PTP” – Bin Li – China/USA – 2018 – 30 min (outdoor projection, loop)
Readers
Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections include a book of poems You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017), a novel Periodic Companions (Tinderbox 2018) and short fiction in two editions, one French, and one English in The Book of Moments (Presses universitaires de rouen et du havre, 2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.
Hanna Rose Shell studies aesthetics, media archaeology, textiles, and the interface of art and science; her scholarship takes the form of text and film. Shell’s book on camouflage, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, published by Zone Books in 2012, has since been translated into French (Zones Sensibles) and inspired her own and others’ multimedia works. Shell has published widely in scholarly and popular journals on subjects including taxidermy, waste processing, and the history of chronophotography. She is currently co-editor and art curator for a volume on science studies forthcoming from Princeton University Press and previously released an edited reprint of The Extermination of the American Bison [1886] with Smithsonian Institution Press (2002). The founder and commissioning editor of “Beyond Words,” a section on film and audio-visual practices in the history of technology for the journal Technology and Culture, her scholarship has appeared in publications Journal of Visual Culture, Configurations, History and Technology, Bidoun, Natural History and Cabinet among others. Shell’s films and media works have appeared worldwide, at art and film venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Machine Project, Slamdance, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Machine Project, the Zimmerli Art Museum and many more. Shell’s current book manuscript, Shoddy: Textiles, Technology, and Identity in Rags (under contract with University of Chicago Press), examines recycled textiles as transformative media forms through the lenses of aesthetics, material culture, history, and critical theory. It dovetails with a series of experimental documentary shorts and a textile installation in the Czech Republic on the subject of waste, recycling and old clothes. Prior to her arrival at UC-Boulder in 2018, she was Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before which she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Shell also taught previously at the Rhode Island School of Design. Jointly appointed in the Department of Art & Art History and the Film Studies Program at CU, she is currently teaching Curatorial Studies and Topics in Film Theory: Science on Screen.
Rebecca Zinner is a multi-media documentary artist and recent MFA graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder. She studied the clarinet under Doris Hall-Gulati during her time as an undergraduate student at Franklin & Marshall College and continues to perform with campus and community ensembles. As her artistic practice has expanded, Zinner has enjoyed taking her clarinet beyond classical contexts and utilizing her skills as a musician in performance art pieces.