A total of 40 proposals participated in the open call, aimed at video artists of any nationality residing in the Netherlands. 16 Proposals were selected for the first edition of the Miami New Media Festival, Amsterdam, with the special participation of Diana Blok and Raúl Marroquín as guest artists.
The selection was made by Christina Della Giustina and Giovanni Giaretta, coordinated by Hugo Palmar, active artists of the atelierWG community, under the proposed theme: HYBRID DIALOGUES.
Dialogue as a tool enables the understanding and comprehension of our differences, in the face of the increasing actions that polarize and encourage misinformation.
Dialogue understood as a transdisciplinary strategy, that advocates hybridizing and creating new routes of thought. The dialogue of art with sciences, different technologies, religion, nature, literature, philosophy, or fiction. In short, to promotes narratives that open up different perspectives and allow us to be permeable identities in continuous transformation.
RAUL MARROQUIN. Guest Artist “LandMarks & Elements” AR/study “Enemy Attack on Brussels Capital of Europe & Nato HeadQuarters” fabricated reality Raul Marroquin DCOT 2022. AR/study for Embedded #NFT @Marroquin_NFT. Animation: Daniel Osorio.
MIAMI NEW MEDIA FESTIVAL, AMSTERDAM 2022, SELECTED WORKS.
This film was made with a class of 10 -11 year olds in the primary school of Varen (Tarn et Garonne, France) within the framework of a residency with Les Ateliers Médicis. For three months, the students and I explored different ways to communicate with more-than-human species who live around their school. In this film, they speak to the trees of the nearby forest through choreographies of light.
The carousel bell rings. We hear the characteristic fairground music, a combination of ‘Merry Go Round’ by Gary Edstrom and ‘Caroussel Honfleur’ by Julien Nicholas. The sounds merge into a ‘distress call,’ a telephone conversation between a refugee boat and the Coast Guard, as broadcasted online by BBC News in 2016 under the title ‘What a migrant distress call sounds like.’
I intervened on damaged 35mm analog film, with ink, trying to keep the same shape. However, this is impossible because the ink always reacts differently to the chemistry of the negative, creating unique shapes. All together they create a movement by their uniqueness. This piece speaks of powerlessness and no control.
Since the post-industrial age, the landscape has been controlled and developed by humankind, which has in turn “developed” our way of seeing. Seeing and defining is something the human eye does, often unconsciously. Once modern humans began to define the landscape on earth based on a common aesthetic, this gave rise to a singular value system that became embodied and remains to this day in control of determining the fate of history, and of memory. Whilst we live in the “development” age, how can we uncover our own, personal perspectives, and see through the flattened image of the landscape–which we think is real, but is merely framed by the homogenizing aesthetic of Modernity? Using a chroma key color curtain, a man wearing a high visibility vest appears in the frame of a landscape that will be changed in the near future. The man seeks his last chance to make the undercurrent, a space of entangled memories, (hi)stories and experiences, visible in the linear time that will soon take over. Through movement, our eyes “breath” differently with imagination and “listen” to the undercurrent that runs within.
The video installation “A Sworn Virgin and a Pink Sister” is about sacrifice and pride and covering the body. It shows the silent portraits of two women who both took an important decision during their younger years which was formative for the rest of their lives. At the time, a well-considered and voluntary decision for both, but one that nowadays hardly ever occurs anymore. A way of life which not too long from now will disappear.
I produced last year a short experimental film called Reality and Fiction, about a dog, a girl, adolescents, and other characters involved in walks in the city, appropriation of spaces and other actions throughout which they observe and reinvent the world around them. Based on the book The insurrection of Daily Life by Raoul Vaneigem, this project comes from a desire to use fiction as a tool of emancipation, to reestablish our ties with nonhuman beings and to our environment, and to explore the idea of interconnectedness.
“The walls have ears Ahmad…”, my mother used to say. In Syria parents tell this often to their children. It is a phrase that all children have been raised with. ‘The walls have ears’, or, don’t speak up about politics or freedoms you have a right to as a human being. Freedom of speech is a taboo in Syria. So, I was silent. I’ve always felt trapped between these ‘listening walls’ and I have even been imprisoned between 4 walls during the revolution in Syria. My past is the inspiration behind my work. I’ve started capturing my stories in art and language, in order to share them with people. After being brought up with the concept that ‘even the walls have ears’; it was a difficult but incredible journey to choose and express myself to the extreme. In art. By painting and portraying I observed my fears. My sorrow. My frustrations. Creating art helped me to heal my soul and mind. I am the maker and I am the artwork. And even though the walls have ears, I am silent no more.
After completing her Piano studies in 2017 and Chamber Music in 2019, in 2022 Livia Malossi Bottignole gained her Bachelor Degree in Composition with full marks cum laude. She is currently attending her Master at Royal Conservatorium in The Hague, the Netherlands. Piero Ramella is a visual artist and performer. From 2007 to 2013 he studied life drawing and painting with Paolo Cervi Kervischer in Trieste. He has been practicing capoeira since 2003 and began teaching it in 2009. He studied dance and movement following in particular Masaki Iwana, Lucia Palladino, Frey Faust and David Zambrano. In 2014 he graduated in Philosophy from the University of Trieste.
Shaped through performances and installations that use video and sound as core elements, I explore my own family archives and other personal histories as a method to focus on the solidification of ‘in-between’ identities. The video As Close as I Get (2021) shows the visit to my family’s home, a place that until this point I had only known through family stories. The house is located in Palestine, in Area C of the West Bank where Israel exercises civilian and military control and it is threatened with its disappearance by settlements that are being illegally constructed. In my attempt to find, and then approach, this mythical home, I am guided by an old photo of the house, holding my legacy up to the light of reality, where it becomes clear that this paradisiacal place is incompatible with the here and now. Similar to the past, the house remains closed.
Halmoni means grandmother in Korean. I visit my grandmother in a nursing home in South Korea through Google Earth. Since she collapsed two years ago, her paralyzed body is staying in a nursing home. This visit is the only way I can go to a nursing home when social and physical distance is required under the pandemic and the obvious way of failure that I will never succeed in meeting with her. The image of a nursing home seen through Google Earth reminds me of Heterotopia which means utopian places that physically exist but never belong to society.
It is an experimental documentary film. Duration: 4:57. The film consists of two parts. A performance by the artist and a personal dialogue between the artist and her mother, who are living in different countries and are trying to have an intimate conversation over the phone. The work investigates parent-child relationships and identity. We are left wondering who our parents are as individuals and how much alike we are.
This video is the story of a ghost bird whom I have named Audrey. She is a small parrot made extinct when eaten out of existence by British colonists on Norfolk Island. By transforming myself into the extinct Norfolk Kaka I engage in an attempt to bring her back to life, allowing her to consume me instead. Audrey & I, our histories tied asks in what ways we can confront the terrors of the past to reflect on impending terrors of the future? Produced for the symposium ‘Impossible Stories; Linking Colonial Collections and Climate Change through Critical Fabulation’ at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
A sad ghost tells us about his Sundays.
This monumental structure was an oil storage tank in the Oranjestad harbor and was demolished in 2012. The beating of the earth, of metal, as of trying to communicate, through a shamanistic repeating rhythm, the forgotten connections between universal materialities which I also made of. This trance we are in now lays bare the fragility of the planet, which stems out of technological warfare, religious doctrine, control, and greed. This rhythmic code reminds us to step back into the circle, for the bad or for the worst. my work questions the almost alien-like epoch of the Anthropocene, the age of a human-induced planet shapeshift.
We are a young artist couple, from China, living in the Netherlands and traveling in Kosovo. In Kosovo, we accidentally lost our Dutch residence permit, and with only Chinese passports, we would be illegal residents here, unable to leave the country for any neighboring countries. So, in this young country, this lost land, we search for our lost documents while we wander and explore the city. The post-socialist behemoth is half silent, half hustle and bustle, full of power and symbols. The closed moments of history slowly open up to us. We deal with the local authorities and talk with the locals – street drug dealers, soldiers who participated in the war, cab drivers, elderly people, children, stray dogs… When we realize that we may not be able to retrieve those documents, we find ourselves in a situation where our trajectories and circumstances gradually overlap, where we seem to be on an isolated island, and where our identity begins to enter a 15-day “shelf life”.
COORDINATED° proposes a framework of a moving decentralized protest, communicating the locations with autonomous flying agents – drones – in an encoded way. Pretending to be just an entertaining performance, drones are transmitting a hidden message – coordinates of the next location – that could be read with the help of AR. The artwork is trying to shift the way we perceive technology. While a lot of machines are being used for war, oppression, and surveillance, could other machines help to organize the resistance? It is time to engage in a critical conversation about the distributed networks connecting humans and non-humans symbiotically to stand for freedom and against oppression in a bottom-up way.