Date: July 6th Time: 19h-21h Free entrance - RSVP
For the exhibition Hear All Voices, we are giving international video makers a space to hear their vision of democracy in relation to their own context and what is currently essential for them.
Seven short videos have been selected. During the evening, we will explore the notion of democracy through different themes such as self-serving political ambitions, accepting the difference, the senselessness of war, political manipulation or the prevalence of work over human relations.
The artists will be invited online to share with the audience their reflections on democracy and the role that could have governments nowadays.
‘Hear all Voices’ exhibition is supported by AFK (Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst)
PROGRAMME
- As a Yogi by Ornela Alia | Video (2’01”) , 2022-2023
As a Yogi was inspired by the popularity of yoga in pop culture and/in our digitalised era. Ornela Alia sees spirituality as a rejection of hustle culture and capitalist systems. She uses many elements that represent hope for the future, appreciation for our bodies and minds, a refusal of extreme wealth, and a dismissal of empty promises.
- #NoWar by Olga Butenop | Animated film (10’17”), 2022
This film is about no specific war but war itself. In it, she has a dialogue with the Malevich painting Red cavalry galloping from the October capital to defend the Soviet border, in which she showed the senselessness of the Soviet revolutionary movement. In the picture, the red riders look lost between the infinitely indifferent sky and the multilayered earth. Behind and ahead of them, there is only emptiness. Their path has no purpose, no meaning, no end and no edge.
- The problem we all live with by Antoni Hidalgo | Video (2’59”), 2021-2022
There is a man in a lost space. He lives his own routine and he is focused on his work. He is drawing something on the stones while trains are passing fast behind him. Time passes and the people on the trains might be watching him, a man who is out of reality because he is just counting their votes. Meanwhile, days are going by so quickly.
- The Fire Sermon by Leslie Lawrence & Sophia Simensky | Video (19’42”), 2020
In The Fire Sermon, Sophia Simensky and Leslie Lawrence address the idea of employment as a moral value and question if, during a crisis, there is an opportunity to prioritise social relationships instead of work as an end in itself.
- Solutions (Tiebreakers) by Jennie E. Park | Video (2’30”), 2021
Under what conditions will something contradict itself, become fractured, replicate the oppositional framework in which it is nested, or, alternatively, embrace its other side and become with it an integrated whole? One view of difference entails incompatibility, while the other aims for integration. In the video, Litmus paper can be seen. The colour-changing characteristic of it comes from lichen, which are symbiotic fungi-algae associations that extend their intrinsic mutualism outward. Thousands of lichen species proliferate on many surfaces in a nonparasitic manner. Biologist Scott Gilbert noted that “we are all lichens”, meaning that human bodies are also an assemblage of co-functioning organisms, rather than entities siloed apart from nature or each other.
- (After The fact) Positive Feedback Loop by Gina Peyran Tan | Video (12’), 2022
A positive feedback loop is a process where some sort of occurrence creates a disturbance, which is then amplified again and again, forming a loop. So, here, “positive” is to be taken as an increase and not as something good or desirable. In fact, a positive feedback loop can lead to instability in systems. A system is considered stable when its output is under control, so a positive feedback loop can tell us about the status quo and what we can expect if the loop continues.
- Sabotage by Jean-Michel Rolland | Video (2’ 34”), 2021
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. - Howard Zinn after the Nuremberg trial.
The character presented in this video is not wearing a uniform and yet behaves like a soldier. With his fellows, he ends up building an army where everyone seems to follows different orders. A disorganised body which pretends to obey but which in reality does as it pleases. When disobedience seems impossible, "misobedience" may be the solution.