re<local>ization: 14 film programs, art project, lecture, discussion

[Kurzfilmtage]

RE<LOCAL>IZATION
Special program of the 49th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 
1-6 May 2003

This year's special program, re<local>ization, delves into the 
tension-charged push and pull between globalization and localization. What 
artistic strategies are used to delimit, (re)localize and articulate the 
local, and to form a bulwark against all-pervasive globalization?

re<local>ization inquires into specific local situations  in the Middle 
East, Southeast Asia, South America  as well as into local elements of the 
late-modern metropolis. The program looks at cinematic confrontations with 
immigration and uprooting, and with the problem of interpreting the body as 
the location of identity. Globalized economic policies will also be up for 
discussion, as will the methods with which filmmakers survey a territory. 
Oberhausen offers opportunities to pursue these questions in the course of 
13 film and video programs, as well as a lecture illustrated with film 
excerpts, a panel discussion with the curators behind re<local>ization, and 
one five-part art project, film<lokal>, which presents five different 
site-specific installations by five different artists on five days during 
the Festival.

Conception:
Lars-Henrik Gass, Bady Minck, Katrin Mundt

Organization:
Katrin Mundt

Curators:
Bady Minck, Vienna/Luxembourg
Claudio Caldini, Buenos Aires; Catherine David, Rotterdam/Paris; Marina 
Grzinic, Ljubljana; Mark Nash, London/Cambridge, Mass.; Viola Shafik, 
Cairo; Pimpaka Towira, Bangkok; Ian White, London.

Curator film<lokal>:
Markus Heinzelmann, Siemens Arts Program

-------------------------------------------
The programs

I.      Curated by Bady Minck

DELIMITATION, CONTAINMENT, EXCLUSION
One of the principles of the local is that it delimits itself from other 
localities  a tendency that may be reinforced by martial means, broken down 
through aesthetics, or dissolved in the juxtaposition of equal and 
individually delimited local parts of a global whole. The program leads 
from Paula Wessely's propagandistic "Heimkehr" (Homecoming) monologue from 
1941, to Czechoslovakia in 1968, to the 70's in Yugoslavian Vojvodina. 
Featuring films by Jan Svankmajer (CSSR), Roland Klick (Germany), Barbara 
Graf/Caroline Weihs (Austria), Karpo Godina (Yugoslavia) and others.

SURVEYING THE TERRITORY
On foot from Munich to Berlin, a daredevil tour de force through Lodz and a 
twelve-minute single-frame odyssey through the Norwegian lakelands -- at 
50,000 times normal speed: ever since the first days of cinema, filmmakers 
have been setting out with their cameras in tow to survey territories both 
urban and rural. By circling, trekking through and accelerating these 
landscapes, the familiar takes on a new face  and opens up for the 
stranger, i.e. the cinema audience, new insights into local structures and 
processes. Featuring films by Oskar Fischinger (Germany), Zbigniew 
Rybczynski (Poland), Morten Skallerud (Norway) and others.

THE SKIN OF THE CINEMATIC BODY
24 'local' images yield one second of the whole, a global film second. This 
program gathers together works that undertake a journey across the various 
celluloid skins, and on into the heart of the cinematic body: into the 
single frame, which appears here as the local per se, the centrifugal 
centre of film. After the eye of the camera has felt its way along the 
epidermis of the film material, it penetrates further into the (perforated) 
pores, into the subcutaneous zones of cinematographic movement, and there 
attempts to get to the bottom of the laws of the individual frame. 
Featuring films by Takashi Ito (Japan), Gary Beydler (USA), Pipilotti Rist 
(Switzerland), Egbert Mittelstädt (Germany) and others.

WINDOW ON THE WORLD
The window as cinematic frame, as observation and exploration station, as 
symbol of the boundary between public and private space, as point of 
departure for impressionistic and structural camera shots. This journey on 
film takes the viewer from a New York pizzeria to a snowy landscape in 
Germany, from the Polish city of Lodz to Calcutta  a mosaic composed of 
both the familiar and the alien. Featuring films by David Rimmer (USA), 
Kurt Kren (Germany/Austria), Jozef Robakowski (Poland), Hans Scheugl 
(India/Austria) and others.
POLITICS, ECONOMICS
The origins of trade chains, both global and regional, can be traced to 
precisely localizable places: from the fabrication of Japanese platform 
shoes, to an Afghani street cinema or a traditional weaver in Burkina Faso, 
to the manufacturing history of those Senegalese suitcases that are made 
out of old US soft drink cans, and then, in an act of reverse 
globalization, reimported back into the USA. A program on the foundations 
and structure of globalized economic politics. Featuring films by Sebastian 
Schroeder (Afghanistan/Switzerland), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), 
Jorge Furtado (Brazil), Felix Samba Ndiaye (Senegal) and others.

ICI ET AILLEURS
Exile, flight, wanderlust, exotic places, emigration: what is part of us, 
what is alien to us, and how is it construed? How does our concept, how do 
images of what is home and what is foreign get into our heads, of what is 
here and what is there? Which yearnings, which fears are generated by the 
disparity between the familiar and the unknown? And what happens when that 
which is foreign to us becomes, or is supposed to become, a part of what we 
are? Featuring films by Sandra Kogut (Brazil), Armand Debrée (France), Lisl 
Ponger (Austria), Joseph Kumbela (Congo/China) and others.


II.     Programs presented by the guest curators

A CENTRIPETAL MOVEMENT
Curated by Claudio Caldini, artist, filmmaker and curator, Buenos Aires
We cannot escape the social mechanisms that form our identity. The 
centripetal movement toward relocalization can only be understood in 
relation to the centrifugal countermovement of globalization. The works in 
this program, primarily from South America, tell of the places we live in 
or those we flee, of the inner map we turn to for orientation. Included are 
reflections on Buenos Aires and New York, three immigrants in Buenos Aires, 
a video clip by Pablo Rodriguez Jáurequi on the subject of World Music and, 
finally, the relocalization of a universal archetype, that of the siren and 
her seductive allure.

MIDDLE EAST: MANY STORIES
Curator: Catherine David, curator, Rotterdam/Paris
This program shows contemporary short films from the Arab world, far 
removed from the familiar news clips full of violence or from reports 
marked by simplistic ideas and representations. It presents very personal 
and unconventional images that give viewers an idea of the political and 
cultural complexity in the Middle East. Featuring works by Omar Amiralay 
(Syria) Mohammed Soueid (Lebanon) und Hassan Khan (Egypt).
NOT-QUITE/NOT-RIGHT
Curated by Marina Grzinic, curator, filmmaker and author, Ljubljana
This program tries to redefine the meaning of ”re-local-ization” as an 
intermediary situation, a situation of permanent instability, squeezed 
in-between what Homi Bhabha describes as not-quite/not-right. The local is 
about confusion of boundaries, and this confusion demands from us today, 
more than ever, a responsibility, especially when using technologies of 
reproduction. The works selected here explore the body as place  from 
issues of gender and reproducibility to re-interpretations of the locality 
of found footage out of porno films to the ill, marginalized, HIV-positive 
body of performance artist Ron Athey. Featuring works by Maria Klonaris and 
Katerina Thomadaki (France/Greece), Sandra Lahire (UK), Peggy Ahwesh (USA) 
and others.

EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH
Curated by Mark Nash, lecturer, film producer and curator, 
London/Cambridge, Mass.
Short films by filmmakers and artists who in very different ways deal with 
the issue of voice - how to speak about history, racism, eroticism and so 
on. Their work is clearly inflected by their location in what were formerly 
called the second and third worlds. Featuring works by Amar Kanwar (India), 
Deimantas Narkevicius (Lithuania), Seifollah Samidian (Iran) and others.

DISPLACING TIME AND SPACE
Curated by Viola Shafik, curator, filmmaker and author, Cairo
The Arab short films assembled in this program try, each in their own way, 
to break the essentialist dichotomy of the local and the global, tradition 
and modernity, self and other, by deconstructing cinematic continuity, by 
stretching or displacing temporal and spatial unity. They thus enable not 
only a new vision of history but also of transnational interdependence. 
Featuring works by Elia Souleiman (Palestine), Ammar al-Beik (Syria), Daoud 
Oulad Syad (Morocco) and others.

INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES
Curated by Pimpaka Towira, filmmaker, author and curator, Bangkok
It seems that in the modern world, the creation of high-tech information 
systems has diminished the distance between territories. We seem to think 
that there is no boundary. But we haven't taken into account that there is 
a line drawn through past memories and shifting space  an unseen line 
hidden deep within each of us. Looking at works from Southeast Asia, the 
program questions the relationship today between the specific geographic 
place in which we live and our inner lives. It tells stories about 
teenagers searching for their identity in Singapore, a lost passport in 
Malaysia, or an American blonde who becomes a superstar in Vietnam.
TODAY WE LIVE
Curated by Ian White, author and curator, London
A pattern of local work is set against a pattern of the State, constructing 
community through the emergency of war and emergent modernism. Community is 
the indivisible location, the State’s own home ground made a state of mind. 
The indivisible location is the cinema as the final locale, our locality. 
Featuring works spanning seven centuries of British short film history, 
including films by Ruby Grierson and Emma Hedditch.

LECTURE: ON THE RELOCALIZATION OF HORROR
Horror videos from Ghana and Nigeria
Lecture illustrated with films, presented by Tobias Wendl, cultural 
anthropologist and filmmaker as well as director of the Iwalewa House at 
the University of Bayreuth.
The lecture describes the video boom in Ghana and Nigeria, which centres on 
the horror genre. These works provide a microscopic focus on the way in 
which African modernism attempts to break with the continent's expanding 
"occult economies".

ART PROJECT: FILM<LOKAL>: FIVE INSTALLATIONS
An art project organised in co-operation with the Siemens Arts Program 
which takes up ideas of the film programs: five artists examine the cinema 
space in five different site-specific installations, each of which will be 
presented for one day. Costa Vece starts off with an installation combining 
film projections and supermarket cartons from all over the world. Thomas 
Steffl plays with helicopters, symbols of mobility, Albert Weis screens 
infrared-pictures of Oberhausen  and of the visitors. Markus Schinwald pays 
tribute to Chris Marker’s ”La jetée” in a series of slides of culturally or 
religiously significant places, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster turns the 
visitors themselves into actors caught in an artificial storm.

BADY MINCK - BIOGRAPHY
Artist, filmmaker and curator. Initial localization in Luxembourg, 
relocalization in Vienna; sculpture and experimental film studies in 
Vienna. Films include Der Mensch mit den modernen Nerven (The Human with 
Modern Nerves, 1988), Mécanomagie (1996), Im Anfang war der Blick (In the 
Beginning was the Gaze, 2003). Exhibitions and retrospectives at the Centre 
Pompidou Paris, Kunsthalle Vienna, the World Exposition in Lisbon, 
Kunsthalle Fribourg, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. She has 
participated in film festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Toronto, New 
York, Rotterdam and received awards in London, New York, Frankfurt, 
Saarbrücken, Vienna, Rome. She curates programs for Batofar Paris, the 
Academy of Arts, Berlin, the Festival Fantoche, Zurich, Bogacici 
University, Istanbul, Filmcasino Vienna, and Cinémathèque Luxembourg.
www.badyminck.com

Artwork for the program is available as downloads at www.kurzfilmtage.de 
from March 5 or can be ordered at the Kurzfilmtage press office.

Deadline for ACCREDITATIONS for the 49th International Short Film Festival 
Oberhausen: April 7, 2003

Oberhausen, March 4, 2003

Press Contact: Sabine Niewalda, niewalda at kurzfilmtage.de


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