Conversation Between Collections
Animal Love

On April 29, 2021 at 7 pm
Livestream on Facebook and YouTube

This programme is presented one evening only

As part of the dv_vd series, Vidéographe and Dazibao are pleased to dedicate two online broadcasts to Filmform, under the aegis of Karine Boulanger (Vidéographe), Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman (Filmform). In Conversation Between Collections, Vidéographe and Filmform offer a cross-curation of their respective collection, through two new video programmes, Animal Love and Traces et territoires.

This programme, born of a meeting of the two teams in Stockholm in 2018, during which the similarity between the organizations became apparent, is the first collaboration between Filmform (Stockholm) and Vidéographe (Montréal). Founded in 1950, Filmform distributes and conserves a rich collection of international experimental cinema from the 1920s to the present day. Vidéographe, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, continually develops a distribution catalogue of more than 2,300 Quebecois and international titles from the 1970s onwards. The two programmes presented here bring together recent works from their collections based around complementary themes that undoubtedly reflect the current times: Animal Love, curated by Andreas Bertman and Anna-Karin Larsson and Traces et territories, curated by Karine Boulanger.

Programme (60 min.)

Borrowing its title from Ulrich Seidl's infamous 1996 feature film, this programme elicits questions of control, communication and desire through the relationship between humans and animals. In the opening films by Marte Aas and Ilona Huss Walin, anthropocentric perspectives begin to shift and eventually become muddled. Here, animals are seen mourning, remembering and observing human culture and behaviour instead of the other way around, as is later imagined in Elisa Gleize’s virtual zoo and Hillside Projects’ search for a disappearing blue bird. Nowhere are the ideas of natural behaviour as exposed as in the human understanding of sexuality, which echoes throughout the programme in several works. This occurs on a more symbolic level in Lova Hamilton’s oral domestication of a rooster and Frédéric Moffet’s exploration of a nature reserve-cum-human cruising ground on a deserted air base, while a more direct and performative method can be seen in Joanna Rytel’s confrontational striptease for monkeys, and Rachel Echenberg’s dissolving into a flock of pigeons. Through all these various portrayals of control and identification, animal and human relationships are stripped down to the bone, skin, feathers and fur.

－ Andreas Bertman, Producer & Anna-Karin Larsson, Executive director of Filmform

Marte Aas (Norway)
What I Miss About People, and What I Don't Miss About People ( 2017) － 10 min. 51 sec., English subtitles

What I Miss About People, and What I Don't Miss About People is a vision of a future world where people are gone and where a lone dog describes what she misses and what she does not miss without people around. The dog moves around in a deserted rock landscape where she has settled for unknown reasons. This landscape, with small traces of human activity, suggests a disaster that has wiped out all of civilization, while hinting at human exploitation of natural resources as a possible cause of the disaster. However, the dog does not appear to be affected. She talks about extremely prosaic things as she traverses around the quarry. The use of double exposures and the soundscape underlines the alienated perspective in the film. How is the world constituted when man is no longer present?

Ilona Huss Walin (Sweden)
What if I was a rat? (2002) － 7 min. 48 sec., English subtitles

The real time film What if I was a rat? is a performance that was broadcasted directly from the studio of nonTVTVstation night and day from October 7 – November 10, 2002. Huss Walin built a human home scaled to be suitable for rats. For five weeks, four rats lived in this home. She documented their lives in the apartment with eight cameras, peeking in from different angles. The apartment box was placed at the nonTVTVstation during these five weeks. From there, the scene was directly broadcasted via the Internet to different art museums in Scandinavia, among others, Kiasma (Helsinki) and Moderna Museet (Stockholm). The streamed real time film continuously shifted between the eight camera angles from the rats ‘apartment’.

Joanna Rytel (Sweden)
Monkey Performance (2002) － 2 min. 30 sec., English subtitles

I saw laboratory monkeys on TV who looked so bored. They looked ill, sad and disturbed, all at the same time. After all, they are really bright creatures. It’s so unfair. “Whatever, let people die from disease instead, only so they won’t have to suffer for us.” “What if it was your child,” someone said. “Wouldn’t you want good medicine and its life saved, of course at the cost of animal testing?” “Certainly not,” I said. The guy who asked had kids. I didn’t. I was never allowed inside a research centre. “The monkeys have AIDS, what if you get squirted in the eye and become infected.” “I see. Is there anything else one could do for the animals?” I did Animal Performance. But it became something completely different. In my Animal Performances I am seen dancing in front of sheep, goats, horses, cows and stripping in front of monkeys. The spectator becomes a voyeur, watching the animals who are watching me. The spectators are deprived of their passive roles. Who is looking at whom and why? Who has the power over the gaze, the power over seeing?

Frédéric Moffet (Canada)
The Magic Hedge (2016) － 9 min., English and Spanish with English subtitles

The Magic Hedge explores a bird sanctuary located on a former Cold War Nike missile site on the north side of Chicago. Left to wander and observe, the viewer becomes aware of the park’s open secret: men looking for fleeting sexual contacts within the trees and shrubberies. The video highlights the many contradictions of a site historically devoted to military surveillance and now designed to preserve and control the ‘wildlife’.

Lova Hamilton (Sweden)
The Kiss (1994) － 2 min., English subtitles

The artist shares a kiss with a rooster. One of several video works by Lova Hamilton from the 1990s that explores gender, loaded symbols, the male gaze and sensuality.

Rachel Echenberg (Canada)
Blanket: Pigeons (2004) － 3 min., no dialogue

Shot in Norman-Bethune Park in Montreal, in August 2003, the video shows two perspectives of a woman lying immobile on the grass as pigeons crawl over and around her to eat the birdseed that covers her body. The first is an outside perspective of the body from above; the second is the tightly framed viewpoint of the birds from ground level. These two angles are juxtaposed in ways that push and pull the viewer in and out of the video images.

Hillside Projects (Sweden)
Searching for the European Roller ( 2017) — 16 min. 36 sec., English subtitles

Searching For The European Roller is a lecture performance that has been presented in a number of formats, each in response to the context in which it takes place, e.g. arts festivals, research seminars, gallery spaces, universities, and site-specific responses within archives and institutions.

The project was initiated in 2015 and maps the life, movement and disappearance of the blue bird, The European Roller. The lecture continues to evolve, experimenting with performative methods and different adaptations of the original narrative. Most recently, it includes only one performer rather than the original two.

Elisa Gleize (Switzerland)
Mex and the animals (2020) — 8 min. 22 sec., French with English subtitles

Mex and the animals could be the title of a children's book. How does a person grow up without animals? What imaginary world will we construct around them, and from what?

The story is narrated by Mex, a melancholy cyborg who wanders through virtual space among images of different animals. These creatures are no more than rough virtual reconstructions of those that have long since disappeared, visibly still dominated and commodified.

Mex's quest raises anthropological questions through a fictional story set in an unknown time. It belongs to a common fantasy world fuelled by eco-anxiety and portrays a 'post-animal' epoch through an individual who is nostalgic for these absent bodies.

Marte Aas

Marte Aas, born in 1966 in Norway, is a photographer and filmmaker based in Oslo (Norway). Aas’ main area of interest is the intersection between contemporary image culture, history, technology and the landscape. Her work attempts to address underlying structures and gestures that form political and ideological narratives. These different subjects of interest manifest in the form of films, photographs and installations, folding them into non-linear and layered narratives.

The starting point for her works is often a story from contemporary or historical material, which, through research, is processed into different formats and media, although strongly grounded in a photographic practice. Photography’s material aspects, the connection between sign and signifier, and the representational aspects of photography is thus also investigated and processed in her art.

Aas studied at The School of Photography at The University of Gothenburg and at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Her films and art works have been shown in film festivals and exhibitions such as the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Anthology Film Archive (New York), and the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück) as well as The National Museum of Art (Oslo), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Kiasma (Helsinki) and The Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen).

Ilona Huss Walin

Born in 1967 in Sweden, Ilona Huss Walin lives and works in Gothenburg (Sweden). She studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Bergen, the Academy of Fine Art in Gothenburg, and at the Gerlesborgsskolan in Stockholm. Her artwork has developed more and more towards conceptual video projects where acting and installation often are key elements and the design methods being different and innovative are of great importance. Huss Walin strives for an end result that is open to interpretation and lets the observer discover something unexpected or make them start thinking in different directions. Reoccurring in her work is an interest in the possibilities of the video as a medium, acting as a phenomenon, movements in the room, spatial installations and combining the spoken or written word with specially staged situations.

Joanna Rytel

Born in 1974, Joanna Rytel lives and works in Stockholm (Sweden). She graduated in 2004 from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She has developed a complex artistry, which always points out our times most poignant issues of gender, power and identity. She approaches these issues with great integrity, putting the personal at stake, making her form of address accessible to those outside the usual art and film worlds. Considering how loaded these topics are, one might guess that Rytel would handle them with political correctness. Far from it. The politically correct answers are left out and the reaction becomes stronger when viewers are deprived of their passive role and become a part of the answer.

Frédéric Moffet

Frédéric Moffet is an award winning media artist, educator, video editor and cultural worker. He lives between Montreal and Chicago. His work explores the slippery territory between history, lived experience and fantasy. Recent work include Hard Fat (2002), Jean Genet in Chicago (2006), Postface (2011) and soon The Faithful. Recent screenings include: Rotterdam Film Festival, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), PPOW Gallery (New York), Biennial of Moving Images (Geneva), Pleasure Dome (Toronto), Other Cinema (San Francisco), Kassel Documentary Film Festival, Microwave (Hong Kong) and Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival.

Lova Hamilton

Lova Hamilton is born in 1968 in Stockholm (Sweden), where she is still based. She studied at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm and works as an artist in mixed media.

Rachel Echenberg

Rachel Echenberg (Montreal, Quebec) is a visual artist who primarily works in performance, video and sculpture. Echenberg’s continual interest in possibilities for active empathy has lead to artworks that highlight vulnerable, intimate and uncontrollable relationships. Since 1992, Rachel Echenberg’s work has been exhibited, performed and screened across Canada as well as internationally in Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States. Many of her videos are available through Vidéographe Distribution in Montreal. Echenberg holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada (1993) and an MA in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts in the UK (2004). Rachel Echenberg currently teaches in the Fine Arts Department of Dawson College in Montreal.

Hillside Projects

Hillside Projects is a collaborative research and production collective based in Stockholm, formed by Emily Mennerdahl and Jonas Böttern in 2011. Hillside Projects work in an interdisciplinary way, always trying to dismantle and reconsider facts and knowledge with a focus on nature/culture. The collective reflects upon methods of collecting, ordering, layering and presenting information and research material. Performative strategies, storytelling, collaboration and artistic research are important components of their joint practice. The projects are manifested through drawing, photography, lecture performances, installations and video. Hillside Projects are committed to working in dialogue with other thinkers and professionals from a variety of fields. Hillside Projects are members of the artist run galleri ID:I in Stockholm. Who decides what is to be told? Who decides how it is to be told?

Elisa Gleize

Elisa Gleize is a Swiss artist born in 1995. She originally trained as a graphic designer before studying Visual Arts at the Haute École d’Art et Design de Genève, where she graduated in 2019, specializing in documentary-fiction video-making.

Gleize is currently finishing a DESS in Arts, création et technologies at the Université de Montréal. She works with text, installation, video and appropriated virtual platforms and video games. She explores ideas around the body, biotechnologies, and human and animal identities, as well as their futures and the ways in which they are represented in the cybernetic sphere. She is particularly interested in the 'gray area' permitted by spaces that invite us to put ideas that reside outside of the norm into action. More recently, she has been looking at 'cyber-sexualities' or the process of rendering certain groups invisible, equipped with their cameras or computers. Gleize most often articulates her subjects through 'info-fictitious' stories that suggest a future tainted by today's issues, against a sensitive and sometimes sarcastic background.

Dazibao thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Programme Exploration et déploiement numérique, whose support made possible the online presentation of this event.