Fuzzynarrators-report

Thematic Project 3: Navigating Borders and Contours: From Direct Address to Fuzzy Narrators

Report introduction (by Colm)

The task at hand here is to explain the mode of address of the report of this thematic project: Navigating Borders and Contours: From Direct Address to Fuzzy Narrators but not introduce the topic itself. We write this report as means to keep trace of, give access to and in a sense, archive the happenings. We're doing this for ourselves (the participants / students) but also for who ever you may be, reading this now.

We found ourselves shortening the name of the thematic to a simple 'Fuzzy Narrators', because the full title is long, but also because the two word version encapsulates a majority of the items raised, while remaining blurry enough to properly represent the vastness and intangibility of the theme. It's about fuzziness, in narration. It's about narrators being fuzzy. Interchange accordingly.

We viewed and discussed a wide array of pieces that purposefully used non clarity as a means to tell, or in some cases, untell a story. Texts were read, in order to nurrish the talks and discussions we had about these techniques. For a more factual point of view on items, readings, pieces, see the 'archive' section at the end of this page.

Meanwhile, we chose to embrace the topic of the project, within this report, and give non factual accounts of experiences of the three days spent together. We're keeping a minimal structure, one of chronology, but the rest is up to the individual reporter. We're putting things inside envelopes.

Day by day personal reports

Monday AM (by Max)

Monday mornings – there are a lot of songs dealing with this theme¹. So I don't need to go into deep here. Fact is: Monday is funday. Above all when a new thematic seminar starts. In this case "From Direct Address to Fuzzy Narrators" with Tina Bastajian. After we had introduced oneselfs in turn, Tina gave us an overview of the next three days and of the (historic) origins of the narrator, his role(s), his change over time and his reliability ("Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth." - Robert Flaherty [circa 1922]). It was very interesting to see the techniques and developments, by means of which people have told immersive stories. We watched clips of some apparatuses (like the Zoetrope or the Lanterna Magica²) and some events (like the Hale's Tours³) because it is always better to have some visual material when talking about tis topics.

After this introduction presentation we startet to unveil our "fuzzy objects". As a small assignment for this day we had to bring 2 research ‘objects’ which relate in some way to our work, research interests, working methods, etc. Pleun introduced us to Mark Lombardi diagrams: large scaled visualisations and each node (= name) or connection of the diagrams is drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations. So people get connected to other people. As an example Pleun mentioned that George W. Bush is connected nearly directly to Osama Bin Laden (wiht only one stopover). But we couldn't examine this because the quality of the image material was too bad.

¹ Monday Morning - Melanie Fiona, Monday Morning - Christina Aguilera, I Don’t Like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats, Mondy Morning - Tupac, Easy like Monday Mornings - Lionel Richie, Monday Morning - Fleetwood Mac, Monday Morning - The Velvet, Monday Morning - Maroon 5, Monday Morning Love - The Rolling Stones.

² Lanterna Magica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1XkqtzLfKo

³ Hale's Tours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THofINfihrI

Tuesday AM (by Natalie)

The first thing that came to my mind how to crack this essay about Tuesday morning session that I don't have clear memories of is, obviously, to restore chronology. Trite, but effective.

So here is it:

1. Erin Latour, introduction
2. mess with the mandatory texts reading
3. Talk about Graphic Novels and Comics
4. discourse on truth, memoir and autobiography, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity
5. Images and truth "Une Minute Pour Une Image" by Agnes Varda
6. Concrete poetry
7. Sappho and Greek poetry
8. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée

Tuesday PM (by Julia)

On Tuesday afternoon, 26th of January, we find ourselves completely bewildered and shattered. There is no truth, She said. No truth! And She said it so lightly as if She’d described Her lunch to us (which I am sure couldn’t be great considering her disappointed-with-“these-people”-intellectual-level companion and the drowning-in-mayonnaise-broodje-place on the Boomgardhofstraat they both went to.) You, dear reader, has to understand the impertinency and cruelty of Her deed. We are a group of kids, young idealists who cannot yet swim without knowing the ground underneath them. And that wicked woman, Tina Bastajin, who just flew into our young lives straight form HER sunny San Francisco, abruptly has informed us that the ground we stick to doesn’t exist.

Wednesday AM (by Stone & Chloe)

We discussed the narration of essay film, which is in between fiction film and non fiction film, narration based on the author's point of view, exposed the gap between narration and reality. We watched following essay films as examples and discussed this form of narration.

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s video The Unreliable Narrator (2014)
https://vimeo.com/97740538
narrates the 2008 Mumbai attacks, sourced from CCTV recordings and Bollywood films, switched the different angles between the attackers and their controllers. The author's description as a narrative thread, however the images could not match the description well which made the narration more fuzzy.

Johan Grimonprez's film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997)
used clips from archieve footages, science fiction films, home video and reconstituted scenes, traces the history of airplane hijackings as portrayed by mainstream television media.

Jon Rafman’s film Still Life (Betamale)
https://vimeo.com/jonrafman
With the main scene of disgusting computer desks covered in bits of food and cigarette ashes, surrounded by energy drinks and dirty dishes, the main character which is a fat man with panties covering his face, pointing two guns at his own head. Most of the footages are selected from the website: 4Chan. The film shows us the darkest and the most alternative part of web.

Alain Resnais’s Night and fog (1955)
This documentary short film shows the history of Nazi Germany's death camps of the Final Solution and the hellish world of dehumanization and death. With the linear timeline and objective voice-over, audience are able to understand the concentration camp with very specific introduction and documentation. Colour images are applied showing things happened during present time and space, and black and white images are applied showing the past. This two occasions negate and query each other.

Wednesday PM (by Sara)

“How is history written? By whom? And for whom?” This is how Solveig Gade started her essay on performing archive, taking two collectives as her material of reference; Rimini Protokoll, a collective founded in 2002 by three German artists, and The Atlas Group, which, counter to common belief, only comprises one member, Lebanese artist Walid Raad. And this is where our discussion on the third day of the thematic seminar proceeded.

Watching at Rimini Protokoll’s work, Call Cutta, in parallel to Walid Raad’s discursive project, The Atlas Group, we examined the relations between narrative, visual-photographic, and spatial components that created an alternative approach to history and to historical events.

In Call Cutta, Rimini Protokoll staged a number of situations where call center agents (experts in their field of work) from Kolkata would call a participant in the performance; a German person living in Berlin. The purpose of the call is to guide the participants through their own city. The caller, who had never been to Berlin and whose identity is concealed, speaks with confidence and ease, borrowing elements from personal experience to narrate the city. The Indian and the German conversation partners start to share a piece of their respective histories on one geographic location. It is as if one is re-enacting or travelling in both space and time, experiencing history at first hand, establishing a relation with the other, with colonialism, Nazism, and globalization: creating the power of alternative histories.

When it comes to the The Atlas Group, and considering the fuzzy history of Lebanon’s 30 years of violence, one more element is added to the question posed by Rimini Protokoll. It is how create history from scratch, in the absence of a major narrative, rather than trying to create alternatives. As Lebanon's 15-year-long civil war supposedly ended with a general amnesty law, it was a general amnesia that was forced on the war-torn country. How can you think of the past, when the past has willingly erased itself? How can you talk about traumatic events when an entire nation is suffering some sort of forced forgetfulness?

Walid Raad tried to create an "archive" of the war. He collected notebooks, home videos, documents, letters, memories that belong to people, ordinary people affected by years of destruction. He performed those archives over the years; using his collection as a screenplay to his 10-year-long performance, and both time and space seem to bend and adapt to the representation of the irrepresentable.