Thinking in photos

Media is like languages. For some time I have been in VideoLandia: everything I thought came out in video. Soon I visited BookLandia (and would subsequently live between the two). Now I have returned to PhotoLandia, maybe just for a visit. Perhaps I will make a mountain home here.

Here are a few thoughts from PhotoLandia:




Maybe one day they will form a community so that I will not have to change currency every time I cross a border.

Two Weeks In ...

Once again I have found myself in the cultural cross-roads. It seems that I freely choose to be in this predicament. It seems that perhaps I enjoy the difficulty. Almost two weeks and barely an English conversation. The same frustrations that I have experienced in the past have resurfaced. Yet, there is a new relationship with them. Maybe it is because I have been through similar situations, but this time I can look at it in an objective manner, or rather, from a more educated position.

Somehow I identify as a fake Spaniard, as a fake Catalan. I don't want to give up what I know, what is familiar to me. When I walk into a store my instinct is to greet everyone with "Bon día" and when I leave "Adeu". Every once in a while a word wants to come out in Catalan. I don't want to say " Buenos días." I don't want to have to re-think what comes natural to me in a Spanish speaking country. I don't want to use the choclo for corn. I don't like it. I like maíz. I like how it rolls of the tongue. "Choclo" is to choppy. Maaaaaeeeeeeeeeeez. The dipthong phonetic connection feels nice in the mouth. Not only do I not want to use the word, but I want everyone to know that I don't want to use the word, that I know and prefer a different word - as if I needed something else to help solidify my foreignness.

As if I needed something besides the slight Castillian accent and frequent errors. As if I needed something other than the slightly different gait, or preference to cross at a crosswalk, yet not wait for the light. As if I needed something other than my inability to tell the difference between a 500 peso coin and a 100 peso coin. As if I needed something other than everything that I am.

I don't want to lose my foreignness. It is part of my identity, in every culture. Sometimes it was a bit irritating when people in my home town would ask me where I was from, thinking I was even from a foreign country, but I would have probably been more offended if they thought that I was from there.

From there. From where? That is one thing that I find quite striking about Santiago. In Barcelona there were many Catalans, yet many had traveled quite a bit (if only in Europe, or the surrounding countries). Most people are from Santiago and have barely traveled. They don't find it too strange that a foreigner wants to make a home for themselves in their city, yet most (at least from what I can tell as of yet) do not feel that they would not be able to answer that question: where are you from?

For many people I know, that question is perplexing. Not only Americans, but others alike. Yet, I think that even Americans in America, well many, have trouble answering. Where do you identify your home as? With what people do you identify? While you may have been raised in one place, there are other places that are a part of your adult life. These places, at least from where you are standing now, have moulded you into who you see as yourself now much more than a place where you learned to ride your bike, yet have no visible identifying marks.

Next, I ask, why do you fight it so much? There was a point when the experience was about the experience. Now, what is the experience about?

Launch it! Cologne OFF IV - Here we are!

Happy Video! - Merry Christmas !!
------------------------------

-------
15 December 2008

VideoChannel - video project environments
is happy to launch online just in time before Christmas 2008
//
"Here We Are! - the 4th festival edition of
CologneOFF - Cologne Online Film Festival
\\
presenting until now the largest festival program
featuring 142 selected short films and videos.

CologneOFF is a new mobile type of film and video festival ,
taking place simultaneously online and
in physical space in cooperation with partner festivals.

This year, the world premiere took already place in October at Museum of Contemporary Art MACZUL
in Maracaibo/Venezuela, in the framework of the annual digital art festival, the German premiere
in the framework of 24 Hours of Nuremberg Film Festival im November 2008

"Here We Are!" - is offerering the visitors the entire heavenly festival program in three sections online
//
1. -->OFF - the offical festival program inclusing 35 Films
2. -->LAB - the laboratory for 80 films under different thematical aspects
--> (de)materialization LAB
--> memory LAB
--> identitymix LAB
--> (de)(re)socialization LAB
--> re-performance LAB
--> re-naturation LAB
3. -->MOTHER - a special program of 27 films on the theme of "mother"
//
For each section an individual PDF catalogue is dowbloadable from the festival site.
\\
Enter the festival via --> http://coff.newmediafest.org
//
The launch of CologneOFF IV represents also the occasion for publishing
50 interviews on VIP - VideoChannel Interviews Project
with authors participating in CologneOFF IV, intending to give the visitors
interesting background information about video art creating.
\\
Further, VideoChannel is starting a new tool,
i.e. VAD - Video Art Database -
in order to manage the comprehensive collection of hundreds of videos
included in the project platforms of [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne -
in this way all videos can be accessed in future also individually.
//

Cologne OFF Launch Monday!

Two videos of mine: (d)espere [2006] and Walk with me [2007] are being screened in the fourth edition of the Cologne OFF Festival.

(d)espere is a part of the LAB section and Walk with me is a part of the Mother section. This Monday will be the online launch (yipeeeeee), while the world premier was in Venezuela in October.

Here is a list of the other artists participating in the festival. Stay tuned - Monday I will post the link.

Hasta el lunes ...

Choices

toss; trash; throw away; dispose of; abandon; cast; cast off; chase; clear; discard; dismiss; dispense with; ditch; drop; dump; eject; eliminate; evict; extrude; free oneself of; get rid of; jettison; junk; lose; refuse; reject; rid oneself of; scrap; shake off; shed; shuck; slip; throw off; throw out; turn down; unburden; get rid of; abandon; relinquish; shed; do away with; dump

I think this is the opposite of collecting. Hmmmm first, you have to collect what you want to dump.

What is the residue of abandonment?
.

Messes of Life Mixed Up with Systems of Messes

One mess of things to take and another of things to leave behind. Packing up a life into a couple of suitcases just isn't possible. I guess that is why we have family members - to store what doesn't fit.
Why am I keeping all of that crap? Why am I still collecting crap?

This leads me to think about something I heard recently that collecting and individuality aren't as interesting as system and principle. So collecting is synonymous with individuality? Is that true? I had always thought of collecting as about groups, but each component of a collection is individual. Usually people say that the individual components make up a whole. Can the individual components stand on their own?
You ask that question often as an artist, especially if you work with dipyichs/triptychs, or anything that may be a series. Can those pieces stand on their own? And do they need to? If they stand on their own, does it make the whole piece redundant?

But back to this whole more interesting thing. System and principle are more interesting than collection and individual. The principle for your system of collection; you collect individual things.

...

I tried to write a story about this. I do mean "tried". The concept of deconstructing collection and system seemed so abstract as to not lend itself to narrative. Now this seems odd. Narrative exists in everything, even non-narrative (I can touch on that in a later post).
Here is an except: I didn't think that any of them were particularly interesting. The seemed pretty boring; a few were gray-ish, some were brown-ish; some were large-ish, some were small-ish. From what I could tell he may as well have collected them moments before our encounter.
I plan to finish that story one day. A narrative must exist somewhere. Even if it is only a non-narrative.

...

This begs the question: what is my system of collection? is it still valid? WHAT NEEDS TO BE THROWN OUT?