Calendars:Fine Art Calendar/Fine Art Calendar/28-10-2020 -Event 1

WET WORKSHOP

Description of Workshop: Communal Luxury is a three-day intensive workshop in de Player, which asks the question: what would truly collaborative filmmaking look like? We will draw on Kristin Ross’ book Communal Luxury, an account of the affective texture, revolutionary praxis and contemporary relevance of the Paris Commune of 1871. Ross describes “a worker-led insurrection that lasted seventy-two days and transformed Paris into an autonomous Commune whose social life was recalibrated according to principles of cooperation and association.”

We don’t have seventy-two days, but rather, seventy-two hours, in which we will consider historical examples of horizontal organization and filmmaking, devise our own structures and filmic strategies, and produce our own collaborative film.

One of the ‘recalibrations’ Ross describes in Communal Luxury is what she calls the polytechnic, a “formation designed to overcome the division between manual and intellectual labor.” In our workshop, we will strive towards a polytechnic environment, thinking and making together. We feel a strong affinity between the ideals of the Commune and the moving image works we are interested in, such as those produced by Karrabing Collective George Kuchar (with his students and wider community in San Francisco) and Ulrike Ottinger (whose Berlin Trilogy was made with a long list of collaborators, including Delphine Seyrig). These artists, working in a lineage of low budget, camp excess, have a sense of joyful abundance which chimes both with the aims of WET and the aesthetic attitudes of the Communards.

Afrang, Rabi, Madeleine, Andrea, Linus, Junghun, María, Dagmar, Xiaofeini