Calendars:Networked Media Calendar/Networked Media Calendar/11-04-2022 -Event 2
LB: Focus group: 14:00 - ±18:00 "The voice within – Decolonizing strategies towards an ethical gaze" facilitated by Laura Huertas Millán (day1), in the large project space (optional- please add your name at the bottom of this page if you plan to join the 4-day workshop)
What is decolonization in cinema? Is it a protocol, a formula, a statement, a new legal set of parameters? Or is it rather a work-in-process, a never-ending conversation, a series of questions constantly renewed? In this seminar, we will consider historic and contemporary examples of groundbreaking non-fiction practices that have reverted and dismantled the colonial gaze inherent to cinema history. Using the voice, in a literal and figurative sense, as the basis for this exploration, we will analyze different artistic strategies engaged with decolonizing processes. We will also discuss, through concrete examples, different methodologies created by filmmakers to engage and to transcend unbalanced power dynamics. We will think together artist processes towards an ethical gaze — and how building a subjective position, voicing something, can support the intertwining of aesthetics and politics. The seminar will also have a practical component, in which students will produce new work that will be reviewed collectively.
The first week of the seminar will be dedicated to considering the voice within through three different aspects.
On the one hand, we will address the “colonial wound” (Mignolo) of cinema considering how silent films could be seen as the containers of implicit violent speeches. Here, the absence of a literal voice doesn’t stand for a lack of subject seeing, exhibiting, and imposing a world representation. We will in fact consider the advent of the voice-over in cinema as a continuation of these systems of representation.
On the other hand, we will analyze films that put the voice at the center of their form, precisely to dismantle the normalized oppressive ways of their medium. By reinventing the possibilities of what a voice can do within a film, these artists voice refusals, reclamations, and new ways of building worlds.
Finally, practical exercises will be proposed to the seminar participants to think through voices. These exercises aim to guide them to work through preconceptions and imperatives, to find modes of subverting discursive limitations and work towards singular modes of expression. They also aim to encourage the students to envision their own structures of ethical necessities through their artistic practice.
After the seminar’s first week, the students will have several weeks to develop a new work, which will be discussed by the group over the second part of the seminar.
14h-15h: Participating student’s intro
15h -18h: First session: the colonial wound
How are the history of colonialism and lens-based practices intertwined? We will dedicate this session to collectively discuss two different films that engage with colonial archives and deconstruct certain visual languages imbued with coloniality. Two films engaging and wrestling with colonial archives, that are also the traces of the filmmaker’s own family journeys and displacements.
Death and Devil, Peter Nestler, 55 mins, 2009.
the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered, Onyeka Igwe, 25 mins, 2019.
- List of participants: please list your name and your year LB1 - LB2 - [10 participants max.]
- 1. Veere (LB1)
- 2. Dachen(LB2)
- 3. Aitan (LB1)
- 4. Pelle (LB1)
- 5. Luis (LB1)
- 6. Kotryna (LB1)
- 7. Tessel (LB2)
- 8. geo (LB2)
- 9. ariela lb2