“Are those kids living in the liberated zone?”

(from the screening in front of Moderna)

The youth of America are filing a lawsuit against the president and the federal government

(slideshow image included in the screening in front of Moderna)

link

Phil Collins, marxism today (prologue), 2010, HD video, 35min. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions

On August 26:th we return to Moderna in Malmö for yet another screening of artvideos, accompanied by more talks about pedagogies. The videos to be shown are marxism today (prologue), and use! value! exchange!, both made by artist Phil Collins. The films deal with the experiences of teachers in Marxism-Leninism in the GDR, and looks at the relevance of these classes for our contemporary societies. The first film marxism today (prologue) consists of interviews with three former teachers, mixed with footage of stadium gymnastics and footage from a GDR TV programme made by and for teachers. The soundtrack was provided by Laetitia Sadier and Nick Powell. The second film, use! value! exchange!, features former Marxism-Leninism teacher Andrea Ferber lecturing present-day students in Marx’s Das Kapital, and the audience of the film also become sit-in students of the class for the twenty minutes that the film lasts. You can learn more about the films

here

or here

or at the website of the project

Phil Collins, marxism today (prologue), 2010, HD video, 35min. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions

Propaganda poster for the train that filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin operated from

We were told, and it was many years ago so the details and facts are blurry, about how these trains would transport paintings borrowed from Russian art museums around the countryside and make stops at various villages. Once every month, a new painting would arrive in your village. It would be carried from the train station to the town hall or the house of culture. The people of the village would form a queue outside and wait to be let in. You would enter an auditorium, where the painting stood, covered up, on a small stage or podium at the front. Once everybody was sitting down, the painting would be uncovered for twenty minutes, and people would sit, just looking at this one painting, for the full twenty minutes.

(The poster pictured above has nothing to do with this story – it announces the arrival of another train, carrying filmmaking- and editing equipment, which will turn your small village into the temporary site for the production of a newsreel. Maybe a distant relative to the Super 8 workshops in Mozambique that we looked into in a previous post.)

We carried this story around in the backs of our heads, until we were approached by Moderna Museet in Malmö, the museum of modern art. They asked if we wanted to collaborate on a screening, and we asked if we could borrow works from their collection, to show in our small village.

The village of Höja has 60 mailboxes, and around 200 inhabitants.

From the 400 works in the collection of Moderna that were classified as moving images, we chose four. They were screened in Höja on August 6. To mark the occasion, we had booked a band, Lila gatuorkestern, with connections to the village, to play a gig before the screening. Nils Svensk from Moderna Museet was present, to hold an introduction and answer questions from the audience.

The films that were shown:

Till minne av en stor man – ILAC (1972), by Björn Lövin
ILAC is a ficticious insurance company. Its underlying principle, Lövin writes, is that of inverted risk. “According to this principle a whole life can be insured, on condition that the life values are formulated in terms of consumer levels and social relationships.” If you enter into a contract with ILAC, you are promised security and a perfect life, on condition that you honour the obligations of the contract.

His-story (1998), by Deimantas Narkevičius
The film tells the story of the precarious life of the father of Deimantas Narkevičius in Lithuania during the Soviet years. The film was made with the same cameras and rolls of films that was used in the Soviet Union during the 1970’s. “I wanted to make a film about the time when I was growing up, with the kinds of images that were made then, in order to tell a story that would have been impossible to tell back then.”

Turn on (2004), by Adrian Paci
Unemployed men sit waiting next to a city square in the Albanian town Shkodër. Each morning they go there in the hopes of being offered employment. In the film, Adrian Paci has paid them to hold up lightbilbs connected to rumbling generators. “The flickering light of the bulbs can be read as a contradictory metaphor for the men’s vulnerable condition but also for their inner strength and spirit. In the twilight, the bulbs appear shining like stars against a dark sky.”

Women at Work I – Under Construction (1999) by Maja Bajevic
Refugee women worked at embroidering patterns on the protective tarp covering the facade of the National Museum of Bosnia-Hercegovina, which was under renovation for damages incurred during the war. At night, the women worked by lamplight, creating small intimate rooms with see-through walls. Their embroidery works were otherwise excluded from the collections of the National Museum.

The tour bus of our cinema

In the Swedish magazine Artikel 14 (issue #4/2014), researcher Matthew Scott writes about the very first family that was officially granted asylum as refugees from climate change. In 2014 a family from Tuvalu in Polynesia was granted asylum in New Zealand on humanitarian grounds, and climate change was explicitly mentioned as the reason. Meanwhile, around 22 million people were in migration due to natural disasters in 2013, and the number is expected to rise sharply over the years ahead.

Artikel 14 website

There is also the question of what other catastrophies are provoked by climate change in addition to natural disasters, such as famine following drought, and war following famine, for example. In a blogpost at Copyriot.se, researcher Rasmus Fleischer writes about Romanian migrants in a provisory camp in a Stockholm suburb, Högdalen. He argues that, as the migrants left their homes after a disastrous flood that hit not just Romania but several countries in south east Europe in 2014, they could be considered as climate refugees (in addition to being persecuted on ethnic grounds).

Copyriot post

Written in January 1979

And now included in the library of our cinema

We’re back at our cinema in the village Höja. On Thursday July 2:nd we’ll be screening art videos by Petra Bauer, Sandra Schäfer, Joanna Lombard, and more. The library will be open, and small comforts will be provided. Gates open at 21, free entry, all are welcome!

Stills from ‘Conversations: Stina Lundberg Dabrowski meets Petra Bauer’ by Petra Bauer

In the videowork ‘Conversations: Stina Lundberg Dabrowski meets Petra Bauer’ we see the artist Petra Bauer being interviewed by a famous Swedish reporter. Stina Lundberg Dabrowski is otherwise well known for her personal interviews with cultural celebrities and heads of state, like Margaret Thatcher and Muammar Gaddafi, for Swedish television.
“In a TV studio setting, Lundberg Dabrowski interviews Bauer about her occupation as an artist and film-maker in three consecutive live takes. In reverse chronological order, they talk about Bauer’s oeuvre. But the conversation does not stop at that. Based on her studies of British film collectives in the 1970s – such as the Berwick Street Film Collective – Bauer contrives to incorporate the films and concepts of these collectives in her own filmography. She responds to Lundberg Dabrowski’s direct address by almost consistently referring to her work with the plural pronoun “we”, as though she were constantly part, of and a representative of, a collective context.”
– Fredrik Svensk

Still from ‘Details from the Future’ by Joanna Lombard

In 2006, Joanna Lombard learned that her mother and aunt had both acted as extras in the film ‘Z’, directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras and recorded in Algeria in 1969. They had participated in scenes portraying a demonstration. Joanna Lombard looked through the film to try to identify her mother, and eventually found that all women in those scenes could potentially have been her mother. Joanna Lombard’s mother came to Sweden in 1973, and hasn’t told her daughter much about the years of her youth. There are for example no photographs preserved from those days.
In the videowork ‘Details from the Future’, Joanna Lombard scrolls through the scenes from the demonstration in the film ‘Z’, and studies the various women who participate. All the while, she recounts and comments upon her memories of her mother.
The film ‘Z’ is a fictionalised account of the actual murder of Greek opposition leader Grigoris Lambrakis. Lambrakis was murdered in 1963 by a group of right-wing extremists and military. The title of the film refers to a common Greek protest slogan; Z means “he lives”. In the beginning of the film, the head of the secret security police gives a speech in which he describes the measures taken by the right-wing government to repress and subdue any leftists, which he refers to as “sunspots”.

Still from ‘The Making Of A Demonstration’ by Sandra Schäfer

‘The Making Of A Demonstration’ by Sandra Schäfer portrays the recording of a scene in the film ‘Osama’, the first film produced in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. During the first day of shooting, the team reconstructed a demonstration in which Afghan women had demanded the right to paid employment. Around 1000 women participated as extras in the scene. In the short video by Sandra Schäfer we see the director passing instructions to the women before their re-enactment of a demonstration which some of them possibly took part in when it happened in real life. We also see how the women receive their paychecks at the end of the day on set.

In the yard of Signal, screening The Myth Of The Many In The One by Kennedy Browne

The program of films for the evening on June 14th was composed to provide thoughts on some of the themes and questions raised by the opening of the new facilities of Signal. A center for contemporary art housed in the building of a former textile factory; the city of Malmö which is described as undergoing a transformation from being an industrial town to a hotbed of new knowledgebased economies; a ritual to provide good energies for a new beginning. The films never comented upon this directly, rather by analogies, like the use of storytelling and mythbuilding in economies, for example.

We ended the evening with three old photographs found in the presentation materials of the former textile factories of Malmö. The first one shows a group of women employees exiting the gates of the Kürzel factory, reminiscent of the old Lumière film. The photo was printed in a book celebrating the 50 year jubilee of the factory, in 1945. Ten years later, the factory closed down. 500 employees lost their jobs, most of them were women. The industries of Malmö, at first dominated by textile and food production, employed mainly women, up until the post-world war II period. After that, the textile factories started shutting down, and women moved to jobs in the public sector. The factory in the photograph now houses the student gallery of the art academy, and various other art spaces.

The second photograph shows the ruins of an old factory half-preserved inside the walls of a much larger space built up around it. The MYA corporation expanded their businesses in the late forties. Production work carried on around the ruin even while it was being torn down. Later, the factory of MAB would be replaced by the high end shopping centre Hansacompagniet, while the factory of MYA would be replaced by the Mobilia shopping centre – both former sites of production, now dedicated sites of consumption.

The third photograph shows the mess hall, the cantina, of MAB. The wall in the background is covered by a fresco painting made by artist Lars Norrman. This type of wall painting, typically portraying workers in mid-production, also fills the purpose of celebrating work. Rather than being a documentary piece, it idealizes: it proposes that we are all working, together, building a better future.

Some books on the transformation of Malmö, as officially recommended on the city website – link

Still from The Myth of the Many in the One (2012) by Kennedy Browne

A film evening on images of Malmö and good energies on June 14:th. The program sets out with an image from 1946 found in the jubilee publication of the textile factory Kürzel and an educational film on the future green jobs in creative Malmö. Throughout the screening of a number of art videos, we will discuss the use of generalizing images of the nature of a city, what is to be exorcised from old industrial buildings, and flatness. The films will be projected directly onto the former industrial buildings in the courtyard of Signal, and is part of their celebration of the opening of a new space.

This evening’s film program includes among others the video The Myth of the Many in the One (2012) by artists Kennedy Browne, based on sampled biographies of visionary entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley; the anthropological film Makwayela (1977) by Jean Rouch and Jacques D’Arthuys, documenting a dance performed every morning outside a bottle factory in postcolonial Mozambique, and a secret language invented by miners in South Africa in order to communicate without being understood by their overseers; and the video Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974 (2009) by artist Mario Pfeifer, revisiting one of the industrial structures Lewis Baltz documented in his historic New Topographics from the outside and depicting the interior setting of a metal workshop with an eleven minute tracking shot. During this time, the 1974 book version has been reconsidered from back to front, each turning page a montage within the continuous 16mm black and white footage.

Link to Signal

I’m A Fucking Panther by Anders Rundberg, Leo Palmestål and Jennifer Jerez

On June 1:st we returned to our old folkhighschool in Munka Ljungby. On the invitation of the artschool, we screened the film I’m A Fucking Panther by Anders Rundberg, Leo Palmestål and Jennifer Jerez.

In February 2011, inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a group of young people of color in Gothenburg, Sweden, organized themselves and formed the Panthers for the Restoration of the Suburbs. The film follows their organization through various activities and protests

“Biskopsgården is a socio economically exposed suburb to Göteborg, Sweden. The last couple of years this suburb has suffered from reductions in the welfare system, causing increasing poverty and social vulnerability. As a result, criminal gangs grow stronger and shootings resulting in deaths have almost become an everday occurance.

A group of young people in the area refuse to stand by and watch while the world around them collapses. Inspired by The Black Panther Party For Self Defence they organize themselves and form the Panthers For The Restoration Of The Suburbs. They demand participation in the decisions taken by politicians and officials in order to create a shift in power which means more power to the people.”

– quoted from https://imafuckingpanther.wordpress.com/english/

We began the evening with a radio interview with Murat Solmaz, a founding member of the Panthers. In the interview he talks about his days as a student at the folkhighschool in his suburb, what the teachers meant to him, and how he helped organise the students in order to save the school when it was threatened with closure. In the talk following the film, we quoted statistics from researcher Tobias Hübinette on the segregation of the Swedish job market and of housing. The students in the audience were great, braving the cold of the evening throughout the whole of the program, and contributing with questions and opinions of their own.

 The students of the folkhighschool!