Parade

The invitation to participate in the Film and Video Biennial Contour 2007 in Mechelen, enabled us to make several visit the city. And, rather than bring a previously made film for exhibition -which is the convention for Biennials - we began to research what kind of film making practices already existed. With help we found Guido de Konning of MECINA and Gaston Rombouts of KFKM, two active amateur film clubs which have both been in existence since the late 1950’s and part of a wider national and international amateur film club network.

Following some themes that emerged during Enthusiasm, we are currently interested in issues of self-organization and self-representation. In this instance, how Mechelen is represented in film by the people who live and work there. Many of the films we have seen are of civic festivals, parades and carnivals; part of how the city and its people represent themselves to others, increasingly the tourist ‘other’. These films made us aware of fascinating tensions, between tradition [and traditions of representation] and contemporary lived experience.

Inevitably there is a continuity in these festivals, a repetition of forms, objects and gestures –a group of men throwing a baby up in the air from a blanket, boys riding a wooden horse, giant caricatured figures, carnival floats decorated with flowers, etc- and a peculiar style of dress that tends to look back to an imagined ‘Middle Ages’. Yet theses events are made ‘new’ again, every year.

The film makers have been filming the festivals for 50 years, so within endless repetition there is evidence of change. A change in people and their behaviour, in the ritual objects, and even the mood of the event - from mad carnival to somber procession; and through a change in film stock, cameras and editing styles.

Moreover the films themselves are not made by a professional film crew, a team driven by the conventional logic of broadcast or exhibition, who parachute into a situation, quickly choreograph the filmic ‘essence’ of an event, and then leave. These films are made by the family, friends and neighbours of those gathered before the camera, they are full of tender moments of people sharing experiences, not merely reporting them. Seen en masse, these festivals are simultaneously a model for culture itself, and a metaphor for the film making process; of repetition and difference.

From documentation of previous Biennials, we saw that artists and curators preferred dramatic abandoned buildings or spectacular religious settings in which to locate their work, as if the artwork and biennial benefited from drama and spectacle. It seems to us, that these locations for artworks encourage a kind of art tourism, where interested visitors trek through the city ‘looking’ for the art – it’s the same in biennials the world over. Given that we are working with film-makers that live and work in Mechelen, we tried to find a location where there is already a local audience.

While spending time in the city, we came across the recently built House of the People of Mechelen, an extension to the Town Hall. It’s where everyone has to go if they want to obtain certain documents, register a residency, birth, death, marriage, etc. It’s the administrative heart of the city, and in keeping with contemporary notions of governance the interior is open plan, while the building is composed of huge glass walls suggesting openness, transparency and accountability.

While people wait –on comfortable benches- to see a city official, monitors are provided to display relevant information against a background of banal commercial stock-footage films. We negotiated to display an hour-long film programme Parade, edited from films made by the film makers from KFKM and MECINA to play on the same monitors – the films will play to a patient readymade local audience, and still be visible outside to the more general public, and art tourists.

Read our interview for the catalogue with the curator Nav Haq

Or visit ArtLife our project for Gallery Transit, also in Mechelen