Participants 2012
"Tunisian Fragments" is a subjective, fragmented collage of a post revolutionary country that is struggling with the after effects of the Revolution. The film aims to create ambiguous, personal impressions from encounters with Tunisians throughout the country who are caught between excitement, pride and the consequences of the historic event on their every day reality. My project interweaves encounters and observations, contradictions and emotions, opening up a landscape of disillusionment and pain, but also humor and hope.
Many of the people I know who have immigrated have chosen to integrate a different society due to its perceived superiority - whether economically, socially, politically or otherwise. However, most leave their country of origin with preconceived ideas of what life in a new society will be like, the image of which is often shaped by the media. By engaging in a dialogue with Sub Saharan African women who have immigrated to Washington D.C., this film will seek to address the disparity between expectations of what a ‘new life’ will bring and the reality of living in a ‘host’ country and dealing with issues such as social and cultural displacement and the consequent re-negotiation of one’s own identity within a foreign environment.
Emilie is a visual anthropologist and dancer and lives and works between Lyon and Manchester.
Juxtaposing and bringing together mutually independent and very different kinds of image-centered narratives and residues, tied to a northern light expedition to Akureyri in Iceland 1899-1900, my proposed audio-visual project for the SIC-program intend to explore the idea of 'time-images' and the ways in which such are culturally constructed.
As the director at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and responsible for the expedition to Akureyri, Adam Poulsen was accompanied by researcher Dan la Cour (my grandfather) as well as the visual artist Harald Moltke. His painted documentations and illustrations of scientific observations and results, potentially function as examples of the relationship between scientific facts and artistic fictions in the production of knowledge, which is part of the more ephemeral subject matter of my proposal.
Eva is an artist and visual anthropologist and lives and works in Copenhagen. www.evalacour.com
Je veux voir la Tour Eiffel
"Je veux voir la Tour Eiffel" takes off in Lampedusa where the author meets a number of Tunisian migrants to Europe. She then follows three main characters who during the filming process take on the role of project ‘assistants’, to Paris and Tunisia. Through personal (and at times intimate) narrations, the author not only analyses social, political and economic aspects of migration, but rather explores whether recent migratory projects could be drastically reduced to the question of masculinities, and if and how hegemonic masculinity can be preserved in extreme quotidian situations.
Helena is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker and lives and works in Berlin.
Each and every daughter (working title).
Growing up in Soho the conflicts that face my daughters as they define themselves and their gender identity are inevitably influenced by their immediate environment. The extent to what this influence may have I cannot define but already their explorations through play exhibit the early signs of the assimilation of cultural identity through indoctrination. This project will explore the landscape of female development through a triptych of sound-led films which are part auto-ethnography / part sonic exploration, documenting cultural influences on women in English culture, at three key stages in the development of female identity. Including intimate and changing acoustic perspectives to understand to what extent the indigenous rituals, religion and environment perpetuate the female perception of self in English culture.
Isobel Clouter is a curator, artist and mother living in Soho, London..
This film project reveals and explores the sentiments of diasporic people. 'Indo' culture came into existence only as a subsequence of the Dutch colonisation of what now is Indonesia. Today, this culture exists only within other dominant host cultures. The filmmaker, together with members of this community, will explore and negotiate the meaning and the cultural politics of being 'Indo' and discover/reconnoitre the material objects that help them to recall their cultural background and engender their culture in the present.
Jaason lives and works in Nijmegen. He is a Videographer and Curator/programmer for visual, audio, and performative arts at Artist Initiative Extrapool.
The Persian side of Nilou
"The Persian side of Nilou" is an intimate family portrait following my daughter Nilou from the moment she is born. Through a child's eye the film tributes the people of Iran and as Nilou grows up between Belgium and Iran, careful questions start to arise that investigate the role of (digital social) media.
Julie is a movie director and lives and works in Brussels.
Derrière les volets
A factory will be demolished. Its front shows my name and yet I am not allowed to enter, and can’t see anything of the inside. It was the factory of my grandfather, who torrefied coffee there. His wife, my grandmother, lives vis-à-vis since 1932. She goes blind. I quest to look at her place. I am entering the plant by way of personal memories and intimate perceptions by all those who have crossed it. They draw me little by little the collective and fantasized image of a place crowded with imaginations and memories.
Messaline is an artist and lives and works in Brussels.
The One to be Taken / Home is the first of in a series of films looking at family and memory. It is a video work I made while spending three weeks with a Medanese family at a temporary urban settlement in North-Sumatra. The film follows the structure of night and day, and the lives of Fitri, Julie, Talenta and others.
In this work I attempt to become part of a place unknown - to explore a landscape like a naive ethnographer, if that's possible at all. The film invites the spectator to experience simply being there, sitting by and walking with the family members and the children.
L’ Age des Cabanes
Why does the field of contemporary art-cultural substantiality in the Occident and eschewed by popular classes - encloses itself in self-satisfaction? Why is it that “in Africa, contemporary art, no one cares”? The more one comes up to the contemporary age, the more one feels the symptom of exile in the context of repression and the erosion of models. The project “l`âge des cabanes” aims to understand in an empirical way, the decay of our cultural system.
Salomé is an artist an lives and works in Brussels and Gagny / France.