Things are not what they seem
/FaVU video 2004-2006: videos by students from Faculty of Arts in Brno (Czech Republic)/
Selection made for annual Summer Film School which will take place in July 2006 in Uherské Hradiště (Czech Republic) – and thus will have its premiere in Polvo.
Curator: Lenka Dolanová
Friday June 30 from 7pm-9pm
New worlds can be created in a different ways with the use of video. Although its original utopian subversive aspect already disappeared, it retained a strong personal taste. It still has that positive flavor of amateurism and certain lightness. It is still more or less laughed at alternative of film. “Man poetically dwells on the earth,” says Friedrich Hölderlin quoted by Martin Heidegger. It is necessary to create our own world which will be worthy of us and of which we will be worthy. Expanding our own space and description of our form of dwelling is essential in the world so much replete with technology. The familiar things disappear because their objectivity is too obvious; we try to save or rediscover them by making them part of our personal poetic mythology. Our ideas rearrange themselves into the world game. But the things in this game go adrift. We are afraid that they might be mere things. We are afraid that they might not be mere things. Things are not what they seem.
There is a castle on the hill above Brno called Špilberk (in Czech language) or Spielberg in German, which can be translated as “playful hill”. Castle-Play was but later transformed in one of the most solid prison fortresses. In 1822 the special cells for political prisoners were build in its north wing. Italian poet Silvio Pellico belonged to the revolutionary group Carbonari which was fighting for liberal united Italy, and spent several years in Špilberk prison; he later described his experiences in the book My prisons. Another group of political prisoners was later formed by nearly 200 Polish revolutionaries, participants of Krakow uprising in 1846, and last time was Špilberk transformed into prison during first and second world wars, when that time Czech patriots were dwelling there. Playful castle as a prison-like dwelling for poets and revolutionaries. Videos from Brno are playful. But in a little strange way.
In the world of flourishing animation the moving images are blinking in telephone boxes on the wall and dwelling is being measured by obsessively meandering drawings. Another images repeat in cycles and leave colored memory traces behind. Computer game-characters get out of their rules. The camera itself compresses reality into a certain determined frame, but there are another, more important frames: our inherited ideas but also our obsessions. The frame itself is a certain signature in the meditation on city in the night. Found images and photographs are being deformed; as well as the childhood memories. We long for reconciliation with their loss and we thus intent to appropriate them again. With the help of new relations, movements, sounds, frames. This “signing” of reality makes it our space. To discover the things anew, we have to go beyond that which is too obvious in them. We pass through more or less familiar places with the tools which transform them into unknown new spaces. “Poetically dwells man…”. Only poetry transforms dwelling into real dwelling. It delimitates space for man’s residing. It incorporates the strange, the unknown into familiar. Brno is weird and strange. Poetical and childish. Reputedly, there are disputes over the etymology of the name Brno: it comes either from an old Slavic word brnie, mud, or brniti, to fortify. Brno is being fortified by mud. It imprisons in its muddy melancholy. You can make a castle from mud; but the phantoms of imprisoned poets can creep out of it. And that poets are howling weirdly.
LIST OF WORKS
Petr Strouhal
- Nebeská / Celestial (2:35, 2004)
- 27 / Solamil (5:23, 2004)
Antonín Koutný
- A přeci dlouze I když trochu jinak / But yet long though a little bit differently (5:10, 2004)
Jan Žalio
- Aihio (5:07, 2005)
- Untitled (1:24, 2005)
Filip Cenek and Jiří Havlíček et al.
- Nora (5:20, 2005)
Petr Kocourek
- Untitled (01:19, 2005)
Tereza Sochorová
- MU (4:27, 2005)
- Měsíc / Moon(10:01, 2005)
Michal Kindernay
- La Maitresse Virulente 1 + 2 (1:22 + 3:06, 2005)
Beáta
- I better didn’t restrain them any longer (01:40, 2006)
Marta Svobodová
- Čvachtavý lachtan 07/01/2005 (3:46)
- Krajiny pro malé lidi /Landscapes for small people (1:48, 2005)
Petr Strouhal
- Delissa (2:41, 2004)
And the special Brno-Chicago etude by
Michal Kindernay and Jan Žalio
- Ocellus I (20:00, 2006) /double-screen projection/
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