Contour interview

This interview is published in the catalogue to Decoder; 3rd Biennial for Video Art curated by Nav Haq for Contour 07, in Mechelen, Belgium. It accompanies our project Parade

Nav Haq: To what extent do you believe that forms of cultural production that sit outside of the mainstream can inform contemporary art practice?

Well, you could think of the whole history of 20th and 21st century art as a continuous dialectic between artworlds and their artworks, and other forms of cultural production; the objects, images or practices of the everyday. Art is revitalized, not just informed by amateur, everyday and ordinary creative drives. From Braque, Picasso and cubist collage, via Duchamp and the readymade to ‘appropriation’ art in the 80’s and now artists like Thomas Hirschhorn, Nan Goldin or Luc Tuymans etc. Virtually all contemporary artists trade on this border. Perhaps the difference with how we work, is that rather than hide this exchange and pretend that our originality pours from a private source, we acknowledge the inherently collaborative and social nature of creativity.

Nav Haq: Do you believe working with existing material, such as you have done with your Enthusiasm project for example, can this lead to a re-evaluation of our means of producing knowledge?

We have long suggested – paraphrasing the American conceptual artist Douglas Huebler from 1968, that there are enough artworks in the world. Museum stores are full of artworks that never see the light of day, and clearly we are all becoming increasingly aware of our planets finite material and energy resources. What we do have an infinite amount of, is creativity. So we have concentrated on creatively reusing existing objects, images and information to produce new artworks and exhibitions through research and interpretation. Enthusiasm which you mention, is an exhibition - first at the CCA, Warsaw, then at the Whitechapel London, KW Berlin, and the Tapies Foundation Barcelona- and evolving Enthusiasts: archive that was the result of two years research into the remnants of amateur film making clubs in socialist Poland. Since the 1950’s onwards these clubs and their members had been making amazing films, everything from documentaries, to animated political satire and epic romance dramas. The creativity of these amateurs (amateur in the true sense of the word) – who seem to invert the logic of production, by doing as little as possible when employed at the factory, and pour all their energy and enthusiasm into their leisure time, by making films- has been ignored and forgotten by public collecting and exhibiting institutions; museums, archives, libraries and galleries. A vast swathe of cultural production is therefore missing from official representation. Through our research, finding, restoring, digitizing, exhibiting and interpreting the material we hope to make it available to others. But we also used the films, the film-makers and their network of clubs to specifically think through the phenomena of enthusiasm. And perhaps trace its movement from a site of resistance, to an instrumentalized resource - we are all expected to be enthusiastic employees now.

Nav Haq: Your new project for Contour 2007 is a collaboration with amateur film clubs that are based in the city of Mechelen. How do you wish this collaboration to occur?

I’m not sure we or the film makers would call this a collaboration, more an exchange of resources, or capitals and opportunities. The invitation from you 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 to the Contour for exhibition -which is the convention for Biennials - we began to research what kind of film making practices already existed. With help we found two active amateur film clubs, MECINA and KFKM, which have both been in existence since the late 1950’s and part of a wider national and international amateur film club network. Guido de Konning of MECINA and Gaston Rombouts of KFKM have both been extremely generous with their time and knowledge, sharing access to the clubs’ films and even inviting us to the annual club competition!

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. And this throws up all sorts of problems and fascinating tensions between tradition [and traditions of representation] and contemporary lived experience. Many of the films we have seen are of official civic festivals and parade’s; part of how the city and its people represent themselves to others, increasingly the tourist ‘other’. 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, 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, and quickly choreograph the filmic ‘essence’ of an event, 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 recording 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.

Nav Haq: Can you tell me how you may go about developing these ideas for the presentation of your work? It is evident that the form your work takes in terms of its presentation for an audience is closely bound to the content of the work.

Research is central to how we practice. We saw from documentation of previous Biennials 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 an official, monitors are provided to display relevant information against a background of banal commercial stock-footage films. We negotiated to display a film programme Parade, edited from films made by the film makers from KFKM and MECINA to run 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.

Nav Haq: With your work often fusing collaboration and research, do you think that you have been able to develop any interesting new research methodologies for your art production?

We’re not sure we have pursued any particular research methodologies, a methodology implies something repeatable and transferable. We live with the terror and excitement of having to reinvent what we do, and how we do it at every opportunity a new project might offer. This means we have to remain curious, be prepared to risk, we are always learning new skills, endlessly negotiating, collaborating, and continually thinking about how, and with what, do we practice. One of the few constants is an engagement with how cultural value is made, and made visible; and how we as artists participate in its production, dissemination, and consumption. So we have some methods for working, a persistent question to research, but no methodologies.

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return to already published or visit the Parade project page