Personal Structures | Public Screenings

The European Cultural Centre (ECC) is delighted to organise the first cycle of Personal Structures | Public Screenings, an exclusive screening event presenting videos and films by selected participants of the Personal Structures exhibition 2022

The screening event will take place in Palazzo Michiel on Saturday, 26th of November, 2022. Two special film previews will open the screening day from 11:00 to 13:00. The event will continue from 16:00 to 19:00 presenting a selection of short films. After the screenings there will be an informal get together with the films’ creators with an aperitivo.

To register, please book your free seat on Eventbrite.

Considering the moving image a suitable ground to shape a community’s interest and an effective approach to raise awareness on issues, the ECC Italy will dedicate a day to short audiovisual creations.

The programme is co-curated by the ECC team in collaboration with a committee of professionals from the photography and film festival industry, who selected the videos from an Open Call under three topics: Self-reflections, New ecologies – Back to the Roots, Social Panorama. The committee was formed by Elena Volpato (Photography Curator of ECC), Joaquin Ingacio Gomez (Producer and Director of ONA Film Festival), and Giulia Costa (Television Development Executive).

The programme seeks to promote three key-elements with the aim to highlight ECC’s mission and values:

Self-reflections, focusing on the artists’ creative inspiration-process, including video interviews with the artist, and artist’s videos exploring the concept of Creation and Existence.

New ecologies - Back to the Roots, aiming to highlight the need of humanity to reconnect with nature after the constant use of technology and fast evolution. This could be the start of a positive feedback loop between wellbeing, sustainability and connection to nature, beneficial for biodiversity conservation.

Social Panorama, reflecting on social and cultural issues, as well as exploring the possibilities of camera-based research by employing Ethnography and video-making, to depict human-action through words, images, sounds and silences that articulate anthropologically relevant knowledge.

 

Morning Program | 11:00 - 13:00

I. DISTANCIA by Albena Mihaylova (75m min.) 

The documentary DISTANCIA tells a story of arrivals and departures which tear a family apart. Father and son collide across the ideological divide of Soviet and Western power politics of 1968. The hopes of the young man for a future of freedom shatter. As an act of protest, he commits suicide. Torn by feelings of guilt, the father dies from denial and dementia. Fifty years later, mother and daughter meet in an attempt to smash the wall of distance and taboo. Would they unearth the true reason for the departures of their father and son?

 

II. Albert Scopin by Albert Scopin, AM contemporary & Reinhard Manz (produced by: point de vue DOC) (30 min.)

Drawing brings the artist Albert Scopin into a flow, which allows him to express the painful experiences of his childhood. Art becomes a means of overcoming pain and presenting it universally. The inner liberation was the drive for his work since his residence in the art scene of the 1970s in New York. His latest work with the material asphalt take a stand on the relationship between man and nature.

 

Afternoon Program | 16:00 - 17:30

I. Venice and Reconnection with Nature by Diana Stelin (12 min.)

Go behind the scenes to learn the process of encaustic, to see how Diana Stelin translates her emotive plein-air watercolours into rich and textured oil paintings, why Venice is crucial to her view of the world and how a sustainable fashion line developed from her love for texture.

 

II. SINGING FLAGS / SOUNDS OF CLIMATE by Silvia Micheli (6:30 min.)

The artist presents a video performance on climate in which she waves an emergency blanket like a flag against the backdrop of a desert, underlining the need to work to safeguard our planet. The sound of the performance is a set to music of diagrams on global warming performed by South Tyrolean choristers.

 

III. Mothers, Men, Marilyn: Reflections on a Turning Point by Oh Myung Hee (3 min.)

"This video is about my inspiration and a personal journey I made from an old family album that belonged to my father in law to the exhibition ‘The Days Were Snowy but Warm’. I wanted to bring to light the memories of these women who suffered for hundreds of years in a male-centred community that placed limitations and erased all justice from the women’s lives. I am fascinated how temporality and historicity mix through personal and the memories of the wider community. Korean society was frozen by sufferance and tragedy at the time when Marilyn Monroe arrived in Korea. She brought the sense of freedom to the Korean women. Sometimes we all wish that the past was somehow different and only through art we are able to bring different people under a blossom tree. "

 

IV. Part of It by Rodrigo de la Sierra (15:30 min.)

Where do artistic creation and human diversity meet?. Although we are entities that exist and create in this specific time and space, art has proven itself as a starting point for transcendence, as well as a container of human collectivity; even in its most intimate features. It is within it that ideas, feelings and experiences that cross borders, converge. Within my creation process, I seek to maintain a synthesis that allows me to encompass such collectivity. It is Timoteo, who, still without a mouth, offers me the opportunity to give a voice to the clichés and problems of contemporary society. Through a filter of irony and sarcasm, which at the same time is humanitarian and hopeful. As much as he is a part of me, he belongs to the world. He is part of it.

 

V. Humaniteit by Jeltje Schuurmans & Piet Zwart Institute (2:30 min.)

This work approaches the facets of a growing innovative and at the same time individualised society in which the sense of being a unity diminishes daily and feelings of isolation and identity issues are heightened. By questioning how the collective unconsciousness of society has structured our way of living and how we are monitored and conditioned, I try to open up the conversation about the fundamental rooted structures of the modern world, where these structures come from and how they contribute to the prejudice in society.

 

 VI. A Reaction by Maria Pavlovska (8 min.)

The video is a short documentary on the artistic process of the artist and connection among different mediums of expression. Searching for the visual sign of our modern age, she embarks on a quest for dominant visual and spiritual markers, transposed via fine art and visual recordings in her works of personal reminiscences and emotional recollection. Her artwork contains elements of reality altered into symbolic signs that narrate fragments of memories, intimacy, personal space, and a moment arrested in time – a sort of emotional landscape of the soul and spirituality. The video describes the full process of the project and the installation, produced by MANA Contemporary/ Courtesy of Mana Contemporary.

 

VII. Seeing the Sounds of Rain by Kwak Hye-Young & Lloyd Choi Gallery (3 min.)

Kwak is a South Korean artist who considers ideas of becoming and existence, following the fleeting moments of the rain as it emerges into life only as it falls, to its transformation and dissipation as it lands. Interprets its sound as the voice of the invisible, announcing a brief presence in the world. To record this presence, the artist prepares clay boards with mix media before placing them in Seoul street. The new works capture wider expanses of rainfall as it exists within the same time and area that reflects the beauty of difference and the natural way of coexistence. 

 

VIII. SuperNova by Rah Eleh (15 min.)

SuperNova is a talent show parody that consists of seven characters the artist performs. The performers are Oreo, Fatimeh, and Coco and each of their acts examine issues of race and ethnic performance. The characters perform in the galaxy Messier 82 and present their talent in front of a panel of judges; Sirius, Mira and Bellatrix. SuperNova examines the socio-political, temporal, linguistic and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of identity and the talent show sets a stage to critically examine race and ethnic performance.

 

IX. Spheres - The viable path by Christine Blass & Hans-Petter Bjørnådal (3:30 min.)

The movie is a reflection on the artwork of Hans-Petter Bjørnådal from Bjørnådal Arkitektstudio in which he uses the physical form of fish eggs as a symbol of future life to express a new vision of the world. The inspiration comes from an old meditation, where you imagine that you create a new future with new spheres.The essence of the message in this project is that a simple life, in harmony with nature, is still a viable path to discovering paradise.

Afternoon Program | 17:45 - 19:00

I. Resurrection from Ukraine by Petro Smetana/Gallery Green Sofa (10:30 min.)

The exhibition of Ukrainian Petro Smetana brings up serious themes for conversations. Themes of life and death, destruction and preservation of human assets. We live in the times when simultaneously there is the rise of humanism and liberalism. And at the same time barbaric attitude to culture and the war starts. The war, which shouldn’t be at all in modern civilisation. 

 

II. Making the Unseen Appear by Jim Nickel (5 min.)

In Making the Unseen Appear, Jim Nickel speaks about the simple and subliminal power of black and white graphics that surmount the visual chaos of the urban landscape. He examines the persuasive power of verbal imperatives in the social environment: “Do Not Enter,” “Secure All Chains,” “STOP,” “Turn Left.” This awareness is transformed in the studio by sawing rough-hewn planks of wood and reorganising them into sculptural wall pieces which he calls, “The Venture Series.” He maintains that the creative person always stands “In Venture.”

 

III. From Consumption to Creativity by Elisa Insua (10:30 min.)

"Travel to the streets of Buenos Aires with our next featured Visual Artist, Elisa Insua. How does an economist turn a full time, internationally exhibited artist? Come and find out as she takes us into her home, studio, her latest solo exhibition Virtual Vanitas and find out what challenges she faced on her journey to becoming an artist. PARALLEL presents Argentina’s most up and coming self-taught artist who literally turns trash into treasure, 30 year old Elisa Insua. Represented by MTArt Agency, her work investigates economics and consumerism, reflecting on the concepts of vanity and virtuality in the social media era."

 

IV. MachineTime_NatureTime/Propagation by Mizuho Nishioka (4:30 min.)

In this film, Mizuho Nishioka questions her photography and its role in the act of representation. Proposing a durational photographic practice, the artist delves into the minutiae of her work to expose a hidden galaxy of petals, pollen, sand, soil and insects.  She states, "We capture the sea, but not the sea and the tide, or we capture the sand, but not the seagrasses holding the sand in place in the tide." This film work operates in a manner that allows the artist to re-figure notions of singularity in image-making practices and provokes a  layered, nuanced reading.

 

V. Inside the Studio of Kylin O'Brien - Creating the Quantum Resonance Project by Kylin O'Brien (5 min.)

A glimpse into the studio work, philosophy, energy medicine and heart-mind focus of Kylin O'Brien's current practice. Specifically focusing on the Quantum Resonance Project she completed for the European Cultural Centre's 2022 biennale, "Personal Structures". Exploring the how, what and why of working with "light language codes", quantum physics, astrophysical mathematics, crystalline particles, energy fields and energy medicine -- in art -- as a means to uplift the vibrational frequency of anyone willing and able to receive, in resonance, these powerful transmissions. What is a "belief empowered field" and how does it work? Is it possible to create quantum entanglement with a black hole? Why would we want to do that? In discussing her practice and ideas in this video, as she works on her paintings (and their light language NFTs), Kylin ultimately asks us to embrace the mystery of how, in the end, the artwork may explain itself best.

 

 VI. Ritual by Anka Landtau (5 min.)

All the artist's videos are taken without any help but the camera and a tripod. Everything is happening in real. Working with rituals, nature, chance and nonsense to find out something about the nature of matter and spirit.

 

VII. Hairapy by Outside the Frame & Reed College (5:30 min.)

Distraught by his mothers death by suicide, Jacob gets a haircut as he prepares for her memorial and a job interview. Produced by Outside the Frame, that trains homeless and marginalised youth to be directors of their own films and lives. Young people who are experiencing homelessness are provided a creative outlet, job training, a public platform, a sense of dignity and possibility. More at outsidetheframe.org

 

VIII. Incontry by Gabriel Schmitz (11 min.)

"The film is a documentary by filmmaker Chiara Becattini on the series of live-events that Schmitz was able to organise as a complimentary part of his proposal for Personal Structures. The event consists in a live encounter of a dancer and a visual artist on the surface of a large sheet of paper that serves both as a stage for the improvisation of the dancer and as the ground for large charcoal drawings that slowly fill the paper, leaving a visible and recognisable echo of the movement. The film combines live footage with excerpts of interviews of the artist and one of the dancers and gives a privileged insight into a highly intuitive creative process."

Personal Structures | Public Screenings

The European Cultural Centre (ECC) is delighted to organise the first cycle of Personal Structures | Public Screenings, an exclusive screening event presenting videos and films by selected participants of the Personal Structures exhibition 2022

26.11.2022
11.00 — 19.00

  • Event: Screening
  • Venue: Palazzo Michiel
  • Presence: In-person
  • Language: English
  • Admission: Free of charge
  • Press Kit: Download here

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