Geert Lovink on Wed, 10 May 2006 14:56:47 +0200 (CEST)
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[Nettime-nl] Old Curtains, New Screens (De Balie, 16-17 juni)
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Old Curtains, New Screens
Media, Minorities and Politics in Post-Communist Europe
Conference and screenings
June 16-17 2006 in De Balie, Amsterdam (NL)
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 formally removed the separation
that had divided Europe for decades. The post-Wall landscape has been
quickly transformed by new forms of mediation: changing
infrastructures, techno-logies, and aesthetic forms that range from
print to mobile phone to satellite television networks. This media boom
has linked the post-communist region to the circulation of Europe and
the globe at large in the last fifteen years. At the same time, new
lines of separation, new curtains are also visible within policies and
representations alike. We are particularly interested in how ethnic,
gender, sexual, and religious minorities have been affected by the
increased post-Wall attention that has been focused on them, and how
they have been able to turn new media and social technologies into
political and representational tools.
This symposium will bring together leading regional and national
experts in the fields of broadcasting, visual art, new media activism,
and film production to examine recent East and Central European media
and political transformations. All panellists are involved in both the
daily tasks of negotiating policy issues and in the theoretical work of
understanding new identity formations that are no longer locked into
national systems but are inevitably hybrid, sustained by and actively
absorbing transnational affiliations. The event will be constructed as
an interweaving series of engaging and informative short presentations,
discussions, as well as film and video screenings.
Xenophobia and the Emergence of New Media Networks
17 june, 10:30 – 11:15
Tomász Kitlinski focuses on how new forms of xenophobia have
accompanied the emergence of transnational gay, lesbian, and feminist
media networks in Central and Eastern Europe. In the center of his
presentation is the “sexual dissident,” whose coming out introduces a
new voice into post-socialist literature, culture, and activism. The
discourses of official media often dehumanize women and sexual
minorities. Kitlinski addresses these forms of exclusion and the ways
in which the groups involved try to challenge them through mobilizing
new media networks.
Tomász Kitlinskiis lecturer in philosophy at the Marie Curie
University, Lublin, Poland. He is the author ofThe Stranger Is Within
Us (Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy: Reflections on the
Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and contributed toOur
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New
York University Press, 2001). He contributed to‘New Europe, Old
Monsters’ and other texts on international and Polish new media.
Virtual Space and Internet Media:
Self-Representations of East European Women on the Web
17 june, 11:45 – 12:35
Arturas Tereskinas analyzes the visual strategies articulated by
Eastern European women in their internet personals. What issues of
self-representation, gender, body and sexuality do these images raise?
What representational conventions do they employ? Examining the
problems of fantasy, pornography and desire, Tereskinas argues that
through these images women describe and specify not only their
sexualities but also their longings, insecurities, yearnings and their
movement towards new possibilities. Iconography and narrative of these
personals offer imaginary forms of resolution for contradictions that
exist in both Eastern European cultures and women’s lives.
Arturas Tereskinasis Associate Professor of Sociology at Vytauras
Magnus University and Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is the author
ofBodily Signs: Sexuality, Identity and Space in Lithuanian Culture
(2001) andImperfect Communities: Identity, Discourse and Nation in the
Seventeenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2005) and the editor
ofPublic Lives, Intimate Places: Body, Publicity, and Fantasy in
Contemporary Lithuania (2002) andMen and Fatherhood: New Forms of
Masculinity in Europe (2005, with Jolanta Reingardiene).
The Role of European Institutions in Support of New Media:
The Case of Roma Media
17 june, 12:30 – 13:15
Valeriu Nicolae will discuss the role that European institutions and
NGOs play in supporting media-related projects. He will explicitly
focus on the ways in which Roma media have emerged in post-1989 Europe,
and how these media have started both to challenge mass media and to
function as alternative sources of information.
Valeriu Nicolaeis secretary-general of ERGO, the European Roma
Grassroots Organizations Network, a network of Roma organizations from
Slovakia, Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, and an OSI
fellow. From 2003 until March 2006, he was deputy director of ERIO, the
European Roma Information Office in Brussels. He developed an
educational project for Roma children in his hometown Craiova, Southern
Romania.
Ghetto Entertainment:
Mainstream media and Minority Representation
17 June, 14:15 – 15:45
Anikó Imre will address the ways in which films and television programs
that explicitly deal with minority issues have become central to public
debates on minorities. In a case study, Imre will present a
‘close-reading’ of the film Nyócker(Hungary, 2004, 90 min) by the
Hungarian director Áron Gauder. Nyóckeris an animation movie on the
conflicts between different Hungarian minorities and the municipality
in the eight district of Budapest, commonly known as the ‘Roma ghetto’.
Anikó Imreis a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She has written extensively on East
Central European film and media. She is the editor ofEast European
Cinema (Routledge, 2005).
Governments versus Art? Art as Alternative Media Space
17 June, 16:15 – 17:00
Pawel Leszkowicz will look at the ways in which artistic representation
functions as an alternative medium that counterbalances the
one-dimensional gender structure of the official, often still
state-supported media. The range of images of sexuality and gender
projected by contemporary art might function as an opening into the
hidden history of Polish subjectivity and society, supplementing and
enriching the dominant media sphere.
Pawel Leszkowiczis is lecturer in Contemporary Art and curator at the
Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland.
He is the author ofThe Iconography of Subjectivity: Helen Chadwick
(Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy: Reflections on the
Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and contributed to Our
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New
York University Press, 2001). He contributed to Polish feminist and gay
collections and magazines, and curated the art exhibitionLove and
Democracy.
Special Evening Program
Timescapes by Angela Melitopoulos
17 June, 20:00 – 22:00
Timescapes is a collective video project based in South-Eastern Europe
that explores collective memory in video imagery and new forms of
filmic representation through the possibilities of non-linear editing
via the Internet. Timescapes’ basis is a database built by five video
artists/activists from Cologne (Angela Melitopoulos), Berlin (Hito
Steyerl), Belgrade (Dragana Zarevac), Athens (Freddy Viannelis), and
Ankara (Videa: media collective) who shaped different subject matters
on the theme of mobility and migration—and memories thereof—in
so-called “B-Zone territories” in South-Eastern Europe and Turkey.
Angela Melitopoulos will discuss and screen her contribution to
Timescapes, the artistic road movie “Corridor X”.
Angela Melitopoulosis a video artist from Cologne, Germany. She studied
fine arts at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik. She
has worked with electronic media since 1986 and has experimented with
single-channel-tapes, video installations, video essays and
documentaries. Her video essayPassing Drama (1999) has won several
prizes, among which the Prize of the Council of Europe
(2000).Timescapes was exhibited as part of a larger exhibition
onB-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond at Kunstwerke Berlin earlier this
year.
Program Saturday 17 June
10:00 Ginette Verstraete, Anikó Imre, Huub van Baar, Welcome
10:30 Tomász Kitlinski, Xenophobia and the Emergence of New Media
Networks
11:15 Coffee Break
11:45 Arturas Tereskinas, Virtual Space and Internet Media:
Self-Representations of East European Women on the Web
12:30 Valeriu Nicolae, The Role of European Institutions in Support
of New Media: The Case of Roma Media
13:15 Lunch Break
14:15 Anikó Imre, Ghetto Entertainment: Mainstream Media and
Minority Representation
Abridged Screening of Nyóckerby Áron Gauder
(Animation
Movie, Hungary, 2004)
15:45 Coffee Break
16:15 Pawel Leszkowicz, Governments versus Art? Art as Alternative
Media Space
17:00 Panel Discussion moderated by Huub van Baar
17:45 Dinner Break
20:00 Ginette Verstraete, Introduction to Angela Melitopoulos’s
Timescapes
20:15 Angela Melitopoulos, Timescapes(Video art, Germany, 2005)
Film Program De Balie Cinema– 16 and 17 June
Special event
On 16 and 17 June De Balie Cinemawill show the documentary The Danube
Exodus by the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács (A Dunai Exodus,
Hungary, 1998, 60 min). Time: 20:15.
On 16 June the German film critic Jörg Taszmanwill interview Péter
Forgács, and moderate a discussion with him and the audience.
Péter Forgácsis a leading practitioner of ‘found footage’ filmmaking.
Home movies and amateur films in particular serve as the sources from
which he composes his stories. The Danube Exodusis a travelogue
documenting the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning
of the Second World War. In two ships, a group of 900 Slovak and
Austrian Jews try to reach the Black Sea via the Danube, and from there
to go to Palestine. Forgács based his film on the amateur films made by
the captain of one of the ships, Nándor Andrásovits. He filmed his
passengers while they prayed, slept, and even got married. At the end
of this journey, it becomes clear that the boat will not return empty:
in an historical paradox, a reverse exodus takes place, this time the
repatriation of Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because
of the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia. A fascinating personal and
historical document.
Jörg Taszmangrew up in East-Berlin and Paris, finished the Budapest
Film School in 1991 and lives in Berlin. He works as a journalist and
film critic specialized in East European cinema.
---
Old Curtains, New Screens is organized by the NWO Research group
Globalization and the Transformation of Cultural Identities in Central
and Eastern Europe(Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University
of Amsterdam), De Balie, The NetherlandsOrganization for Scientific
Research (NWO), the Faculty of the Arts at the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, and Architecturalia.
De Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 (near Leidseplein), Amsterdam.
Entrée fee Symposium, 17 June: 5 € (day progam); 5 € (evening program)
7,50 € (both). Language: English. Reservations: 020 – 5535100
Entrée fee Péter Forgács’s The Danube Exodus, 16 and 17 June: 7 € / 5 €
with reduction. Reservations: 020 – 5535100 or: www.debalie.nl/cinema
Further Information
De Balie: www.debalie.nl
Huub van Baar Huub.van.Baar@uva.nl
Anikó Imre A.Imre@uva.nl
Ginette Verstraete gee.verstraete@let.vu.nl
John Neubauer J.Neubauer@uva.nl
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