Selection 2: From the Ruins
Recent film and video by artists and filmmakers who open up new directions in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
Recent film and video by artists and filmmakers who open up new directions in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.
From archival photographs that testify to years of political violence in Peru, the film builds an analytical narrative that combines the artist's memory and that of José Pablo Baraybar, head of the Peruvian team of forensic medicine.
The issue of memory in this film is not related to the descriptions of photographs but seeks seeks to explore the image that forms between what we see and what we imagine. An image that speaks to us, in our position as witness, of a history made up of fragments, of traces. In these photographs, light and dark areas - those that seem vague and imprecise, are the places where the personal memory of the observer is anchored.
Serge is an actor with a past as child soldier in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Reality and fiction switch when he re-enacts his childhood in a theatrical rage.
In The Wave we are faced with poignant images of the exhumation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939). In 2011 the filmmaker Sarah Vanagt and photographer Katrien Vermeire positioned a camera on the spot where nine victims were exhumed, who had been executed in June 1939 under general Franco’s regime. By means of a very precise time lapse series of photos it is possible to see in close-up how the nine victims’ bodies were exhumed, inch by inch.
Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does.