Since 1984, Videoformes has organized an annual international festival (which has become a benchmark for several years), in Clermont-Ferrand, which presents the latest news in digital creation: installations, videos, performances, multidisciplinary digital creations, and round tables on themes extended to the creative industries and societal developments linked to digital technology.
Despite restrictive health measures due to Covid-19, Videoformes 2021 offers professional meetings, exhibitions and video selections with the winners.
18.03.2021 - 14:00 | Focus #1 : No Lockdown Art - Video Selection
Professional meetings – Digital Acts #2
Commissioner : Philippe Franck (BEL), Transcultures & European Pepinieres of Creation
Présentation, projection, round table
This year, Philippe Franck, director of Transcultures and European Pepinieres of Creation, is invited to present – on March 18 – the activities of these partner structures as well as a video selection (works supported as part of the No Lockdown Art initiative launched in spring 2020 during the first confinement) and to participate in debates with other managers of international structures and creators.
As part of the No Lockdown Art ongoing project initiated by Transcultures and the European Creation Nurseries during the first lockdown linked to the Covid-19 to support contemporary artistic projects likely to be broadcast online, several videos have been produced by artists (visual, sound, multimedia…) integrating the sonic and experimental dimensions in creations of various aesthetics, which escape traditional classifications and offer a poetic and alternative look on our mutant world.
Visions of inside (Common Ground Project) – Kika Nicolela, BR, 2020, 8’51
Visions of inside is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project initiated by Kika Nicolela in April 2020 in reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. It promotes the creation of a shared database of videos, sounds and texts by worldwide artists, reflecting on the multiple issues raised by the crisis and the lockdown. Above all, the Common Ground Project’s goal is to collectively use creation as means of communion and resistance.
Kika Nicolela edited videos, sounds and texts by
Aline Yasmin & Alex Cepile, Anna Berndtson & Yingmei Duan, Anthony Siarkiewicz, Carlos Landaeta, Carlosmagno Rodrigues, Cecilia Dougherty, Christophe Litou, CRACA, Daniel Silvo, Davi Cavalcante, Gauthier Keyaerts, Gerard Chauvin,Gustavo Marcasse, Ivelina Ivanova,Isa Belle + Paradise Now, Jan Kather, John Sanborn, Jorge Lozano, Junebum Park, Katia Maciel, Kika Nicolela, Luana Lacerda, Marcia Beatriz Granero, Marina Fomenko, Mateusz Vianna, Mike Hoolboom, Mirella Brandi & Muep Etmo Nia Pushkarova, Nung-Hsin Hu, Philippe Boisnard, Phyllis Baldino, Rejane Cantoni, Samuel Bester, Sara Não Tem Nome, Simon Dumas, Simon Guiochet, Sonia Guggisberg, Susana Lopez, Ulf Kristiansen.
Coproduction : Transcultures, In progress asbl, European Pepinieres of Creation
Prince, John Sanborn/Commando, USA, 2020, 5’23
In the process of creating ths video, the American queer writer/performer Lynn Breedlove provided this insight into the text: “I wrote this when Prince died, about how he affected me and my pals’ personal lives by speaking up and being himself. It’s about how an artist never knows how or where their work’s gonna land, whose life they’re gonna change.
But if they make something with integrity, The World gets different….” This led her to focus on the feelings of longing and loss prompted by dealing directly with painful memories from turbulent times, and towards crucial voices, long neglected. The result is relevant, raw, and intensely intimate – a “home movie” (with a post rock soundtrack of her group Commando) of emotions confessed to camera and to the world.
Silent Noise, Tamara Lai, BE, 2020, 5’29’’
“What flavors here?” What scents now … “Nostalgia for the days before … Carelessness, freedom of movement, human warmth, nature … which the Coronavirus does not block deprives us cruelly.
This new video-poem by Tamara Laï whose images were filmed in various places and countries (Belgium, China, Scotland, Italy, Netherlands) was finalized in residency at home in Liège in the lockdown period.
Direction, writing, image and sound editing : Tamara Laï – Musique : Caroline Boë
Production : Thalamus Prod avec le soutien de Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
No Lockdown Drift, Pastoral, BE/FR, 2020, 5’09’’
Produced via connected exchanges during the first Covid-19 lockdown in Spring 2020 by the Pastoral post pop duet, Lockdown Drift captures the expectation, the floating sensation but also the domestic reverie, the imaginary transfiguration and a form of sweet melancholy.
The images and sounds that dialogue between the residences (both in Wallonia-Belgium) of the protagonists (Huy for Christophe Bailleau and Mons for Philippe Franck) all come from the interior spaces and their close surroundings.
An invitation to cherish the living in these different forms (human, animal, mineral, celestial …) and its power-hope of creative metamorphosis.
Production : Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Flux & Densités, Alain Wergifosse, BE, 2020, 5’
In a set of prisms, filters and mirrors, Alain Wergifosse offers some fragments of opto-mechanical treatments on pure light and on some digital images put into video feedback.
These images and sounds come from a multi-channel video installation project in work in progress for the Vice Versa 2020-21 residency/exchange between Transcultures (BE) and La Chambre Blanche (QBC).
Production : Transcultures, La Chambre Blanche, European Pepinieres of Creation
Triptyque Prototype, Thomas Israël, BE, 2020, 2’50’’
Triptyque Prototype is an enigma with an exploded temporality which allows cross readings, associative. Its protagonist (the dancer Marilyn Daoust on a choreography by Manon Oligny) is in tension between the doll or the android and the woman of flesh.
This video filmed in Montreal in 2015, as part of the interdisciplinary performance project Les Oracles (initiated by Productions Rhizome-Quebec in partnership with Transcultures-Belgium) was finalized in Brussels in Spring 2020 with a minimalist soundtrack by Paradise Now.
With the support: Transcultures, des European Pepinieres of Creation, Productions Rhizome
Ces riens essentiels #4, Gauthier Keyaerts, BE, 3’19’’
Ces riens essentiels is an infinite work-in-progress, initiated during the lockdown. The journey actually started in 2018 when Gauthier Keyaerts was in Brittany, shooting images from the Ocean, the shore, lichens…
He brought back this particular energy and feeling of spirituality (felt by André Breton).
It helped since March to focus on the essentials: family, body, nature (insects, trees, flowers…), love… this sublime chaos.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
After Covid_19, Philippe Boisnard, FR, 2020, 7’
After Covid_19 is part of the research on disaster landscapes carried out by Philippe Boisnard in recent years. This creation, achieved during the first global confinement, was made live from pure-data (graphic programming software for musical and multimedia creation in real time) in both sound and image.
This landscape and its evolution attempts to aesthetically show the emergence of the vertigo of the epidemic. Like a metaphorical vision, its crescendo is that of the psychic panic of man in the face of the surge of the pandemic.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Post Human Survival, Didié Nietzsche/Radio Prague, BE, 2020, 5’20’’
On a meditative soundtrack by experimental group Radio Prague (Didié Nietzche, Jules Nerbard – electronics, Renata K – flute) A soft hallucinogic evocation of nature taking back its rights and peacefulness during the pandemic lockdown, but also afterwards, when the evil human species will have left the earth…
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
18.03.2021 - 15h50 | Table ronde : Résonance
Professional meetings – Digital Acts #2
with : Philippe Franck, Oscar A, Alex Augier. Moderator : Elise Aspord.
Résonance. In the literal sense, it is the way a room, a body, reproduce sound: the vibration is therefore physical. In the figurative sense, the term refers to intimate resonance, that which makes the mind or heart vibrate. The combination of the two allows total immersion. Encounters, evasions, impacts, fusions… The artist Oscar A invites us to this experience with his inventive recordings. Alex Augier creates live, free, vibrant, and organic audiovisual performances. P(o)st is a 360° audiovisual spatialization game, a transversal experience that breaks free from the traditional forms of electro. On the question of the place of the creator and the place of the spectator, we are faced with two different approaches. Oscar A has been fighting for several years against the figure of the all-powerful creator. In his work, visitors bear a large part of the responsibility for the future of the work. Oscar A is more laissez-faire, in opposition to Alex Augier’s attitude, which is at the heart of the system: creator and creation become one.
18.03 > 04.04.2021 | John Sanborn – The Friend
Transcultures is also co-producer of the new multi-screen installation project « The Friend » by Californian director John Sanborn, pioneer of video art, premiered in Clermont, at La Chapelle by Videoformes, executive producer of this project which will be presented later in Pau by the Acces (s) festival, in Karlsruhe at the ZKM (2022) and finally in the Federation Wallonia-Brussels by Transcultures.
Everyone needs to believe in something.
We spend our lives searching for ideas, structures and people to invest our faith in, because we think they will provide us with answers to questions we KNOW cannot be answered.
We have no answers for American Messiahs.
But we have questions. Like: what causes claims of personal divinity, goofy pseudoscience, and communication with the dead or prophecies of worldly glory from spiritual entrepreneurs? This is the modern representation of the most zealous exponents of America’s unofficial national faith: a spiritual smorgasbord of positive thinking, seasoned by the eclectic 21st- century movement known as New Thought.
This multi-channel installed work presents the leader of New Thought as a mysterious but charismatic figure, who calls themselves “The Friend”, delivering seven sermons filled with instruction, divination, personal confession and a sticky mass of ambiguity.
John Sanborn is a key member of the second wave of American video artists. His work has been shown at every major museum in the world. Sanborn’s recent works are media installations addressing questions of identity, cultural truth, memory, mythologies, and humanity’s compulsion to tell stories.
Informations
- 18 > 19.03.2021 > Professional meetings
- 18.03.2021 | 14:00 – No Lockdown Art #NoLA
- 18.03.2021 | 15:50 – Round Table Résonance
- Free | Youtube et Facebook Live
- festival2021.videoformes.com/actes-numeriques
- 18.03 > 04.04.2020 > John Sanborn – The Friend
- Free – Chapelle de l’Ancien Hôpital Général
- Rue Sainte-Rose, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
- festival2021.videoformes.com
Production
- Focus : NoLA – No Lockdown Art
- With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation and the Minister-President of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels
- John Sanborn – The Friend
- Production : Clark Buckner, Videoformes
- Co-production : ZKM, Transcultures, Festival Access(S), Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
