The Concept
With "Hungry Minds Think Alike?" dogfilm has initiated a
cross-cultural multimedia project in 1997 which is now joined by
film and videomakers from Canada, Germany, India, Kazakhstan,
Lebanon and the USA. All the participants are working on the
shifting border between documentary and video art. To realize a
cross-cultural project in the times of economical and political
globalization for us doesn't mean to surf on the wave of
multicultural images and visions but to question these images and
to web a net between each of our own, local, subjective,
abstract, non-representative, radical views without building
another centre. This can only be realized on the basis of common
discussions and audiovisual experiments. The concept is seperated
in different media. Along with the installation of an electronic
database we would like to realize a film/ video programme with a
total length of c. 260 minutes which is based on the structure of
a cinematic relay race.
Thematic Background
Since 1970 the economical elite of the world meets at the annual
World Economical Forum in Davos/Switzerland. They go skiing and
discuss the future of the global markets within a confidential
athmosphere. Politicians from all over the world are queueing to
speak in front of the managers. They compete with each other for
the attention of investors, ask for support to finance their
politics and offer attractive economical locations between
Eastern Germany and Southeast Asia. Davos becomes the symbol of
globalization, for the new world order, in which multinational
companies with their economical power remove the political power
of the national governments. The new order influences every
section of our lives. The market of art and culture is on one
hand being pressed into the rules of this order while on the
other hand its producers become the designers of the outfit for
this new order. The Western industrial nations discover their
multi-ethnicity, proclaim variety and arrange "carnivals of the
cultures". Images created like this are blurring the fact that
this "multiculture" is still related to the same centre, a
Western dominated world order, from which nobody is released.
"Multiculturalism appears as the necessary ideological reflection
of the Global Market or "New World Order", the "one" world of
too-late capitalism and the "end of History". (...) Living as we
do in the era of total Global order and the physical and cultural
environment it secretes, it should be obvious, that particularise
can represent a form of resistance. The totality has therefor
undertaken to appropriate the energy of the resistance by
offering a false form of particularism, empty of all creative
power, as a commodified simulacrum of insurrectionary desire. "
(Hakim Bey: "Against Multiculturalism", 1997)
However, to evade multiculturalism, to reject the role of
designers for the globalization for us as artists doesn't mean to
withdraw into the privacy of our subjective, personal viewpoints.
We rather think it is important to question our own subjective
viewpoint in relation to the society around us, which we are a
part of (if we want to or not). And just because the "global
village" is pretended to us over and over again, we have to
discuss these questions across national borders. In the end there
is a vision of cooperation, of a certain way of communication
which Hakim Bey calls "cross-culturalism":
"The image expresses a non-hierarchic, de-centered web of
cultures, each one singular, but not alienated from other
cultures. Exchange takes place in reciprocity across the
permeable boundaries of this complex of autonomous, but loosely
defined differences."
Our subjective movements in their relation to social/ political
movements, the possibilities and imposibilities of moving
physically across national borders. A cross-cultural project, a
relay between artists from different countries, which ends in a
climatic health resort in Switzerland: Davos.
The Complete Project
The complete project can be diverted into different phases:
Events, Symposium, Internet platform and elektronic database as
well as a cinematographical video relay race.
I First coordination meeting of all participants (4 days) at the
end of august 1998, in Berlin. Presentation of the works of the
participants. Discussion and planning of the project. Start of
the Internet platform.
II Cinematographical video relay race between the different
participants (coordinated by dogfilm). Each participant will make
a video/film about his/her own local situation. Than he/she
travels to the next participant to observe this person in a
cinematographical way, in his/her environment. After that the
perspective will jump to the next participant and he/she will
document his/her own reality and again travel to the next place
and so on. A cooperation with different european tv producers is
planned.
III TV broadcast; mulimedia presentation and screening at the
Kunstamt Kreuzberg/ Bethanien; non commercial distribution via
cultural institutions; festivals, libraries and local meeting
places.
The Film/ Video Programme
In a cross - cultural video-/filmproject with artists from
different countries we would like to try to set our own forms of
"rapprochement", "cooperation" and "net-working" against the
political and economical strategies of globalization. That lead
us directly into reflecting the different meanings of the subject
"movement". On one hand "movement" describes our own "subjective
movements" in the certain places we are situated. On the other
hand it refers to already existing or fictional "social
movements". If we "move" physically from our own context to
another it causes another change of our own viewpoint. As the
most challenging structure for the common work we developed a
kind of cinematic "relay race". In this structure every artist
would take part in three different videos / films: - as "the
documentated object" (the object/protagonist of a documentary) -
as an "anthropologist" in his own context - as a visitor /
documentator of the next relay participant. In the end the relay
should lead to its starting point so that a form of "loop
structure" has been developed.
For example: Artist A creates a subjective video/ film on his own
position between personal "movement" and political "Movement"
within his/ her certain environment. Then he/ she travels to the
next participant, artist B, to work out a portray which takes an
alien, touristic view onto the other one. Then the point of view
switches and artist B realizes a video/ film about himself, then
travels to artist C etc. until the circuit is closed.
After the rough edit of the single films/ videos we will meet
altogether in Davos to realize a kind of framework for the
programme. We now think that we should develop a series of clips
which are compilating material from the pool of material
collected for the project as well as new material shot together
on location in Davos. Our own presence at this place, Davos,
gives us the possibility to involve the annual World Economic
Forum and this kind of "global cooperation" into the framework in
a subtle way. We will be able to show the basic opposition
between our own subjective theoretical and practical intentions
and the ethics of the multicultural images of globalization.
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