Tag Archives: workshop

Free Masterclass “The making of €urovisions”

The Making of €urovisions – A Free masterclass on Remix and Live Cinema by the international artists’ collective European Souvenirs

Are you an arts student? Are you interested in remix culture and techniques, Live Cinema performance, expanded documentary and audiovisual culture?

Find out what happens when four artists from different backgrounds and countries come together to research and use existing audiovisual archives to produce a live cinema experience. What is the collaborative and creative process they go through? What tools do they use?

Want to know more about different techniques for multiscreening, sampling and more? Want to find out about composing and performing live music while tackling the difficult topic of how migrants are shown in the mainstream media in Europe?

€urovisions is a Live Cinema performance that encompasses all of that. The Spanish online newspaper El Diario, wrote this about the €urovisions premiere in Seville last month, “It isn’t cinema, a concert or a live broadcast. This sum of many parts is quite incomprehensible until you find yourself in front of it.”

We see pictures of migrants from news footage, illustrating rhetoric about the political and economic causes and pre-assumed effects of migration – but what are these people’s names? Why are they here? What are their own personal stories?

The show is produced in collaboration with the Spanish collective Zemos98 and Chris Allen and Tim Cowie, artists of The Light Surgeons, the renowned UK-based live cinema group.

The Dutch premiere of €urovisions will take place at the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam on 20 May. You can attend for free. And if you can’t make it in person, the show will also be streamed live on ECF’s website.

You are also invited to join the special European Souvenirs artists’ masterclass on the 22 May to find out more about the complexity of the processes of an international collaboration and live cinema performance. During this informal masterclass, the artists will be happy to share their experiences and enter into a dialogue with participants!

To get your free ticket for the premiere and to join the masterclass, please register your interest by sending an email with the title “masterclass” to this address: masterclass@culturalfoundation.eu. Please be aware there are only 25 places available for the masterclass – and these are available on a first come, first served basis.

Prior to the €urovisions performance, you can also join the launch of the bookRemixing Europe: migrants, media, representation and imagery. This will include a conversation about the role of media in democracy, with Naema Tahir, a human rights lawyer based in the Netherlands and the Spanish Deputy Director of El Diario and contributor to the book, Juan Luis Sánchez.

The €urovisions premiere, the presentation of Remixing Europe: migrants, media, representation and imagery and the masterclass are supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Stichting Democratie en Media.

€urovisions is part of Remapping Europe – a Remix Project, an investigative artistic project by Doc Next Network with activities that stem from one underlying principle: re-mixing of media as a method to re-view, re-investigate and re-consider prevailing imagery of migrants in European societies. The Doc Next Network was set up in 2010 by ECF with the aim of generating access to wider public opinion.

MODE Istanbul exploring the ‘Gezi Spirit’

Humorous tag lines and strong imageries on banners, walls, and social media, rainbow colored stairs, the ‘standing men’ on the streets… Clever and provocative videos, documentaries, remixes… Activism became art, art became activism…

dervis_arda Creative resistance, online and offline, was at the core of the recent Gezi Protests in Turkey and fueled the ‘Gezi Spirit’: People of different social/cultural backgrounds used different outlets to spread the news and to share their voices, while the mainstream media kept its silence. The Gezi (Media) Lab was launched by Doc Next partner MODE Istanbul at the onset of the protests to provide a space for young people to explore the Gezi Spirit and to produce new media works, individually and collectively. Each mini lab, held once a month, includes talks & discussions with guest speakers, hands-on workshops, visits to and screenings at park forums, and focuses on different themes such as “The Symbols of Gezi”, “Video Activism”, “Gender and Resistance”, “The Sound of Gezi”, “The Right to the City and Migration”.

come as you are The labbers seek to create links between the widely discussed subjects the Gezi events brought to the forefront like citizens rights, censorship, urban transformation, the reclaiming of public spaces, collective action, commons and migration, and express via their media works their views.

BFI’s Doc Next Media Lab open for entries.

Aged 21 to 25? Have experience making films? Read on…

BFI is looking for 10 filmmakers to become a part of our Doc Next Media Lab. As part of the Lab you’ll receive a £750 bursary, technical film training from professionals, tutoring on different documentary styles, methods and ideas, and the chance to develop and hone your art into something special. Continue reading →

Remapping Europe Atelier Seville

Within Remapping Europe, a Remix project, we organize international Ateliers in Warsaw, Istanbul, Seville and London. An Atelier is a safe place for young people with migrant backgrounds to reflect on the existing imagery in Europe and to contribute to this imagery with their own remix-ed media works.
Artistic remix performances (scheduled for 2013 and 2013) are connected to the process, the participants and the outcomes of the ateliers. Continue reading →

Expanded Education – The English Edition

Somewhere between a fork and a spin-off, the notebook Expanded Education – The English Edition compiles a series of materials that revolve around the notion of expanded education and are related to the book that Doc Next Network hub partner ZEMOS98 published on the subject.

Click to download

Education has always been one of the core themes of the ZEMOS98 project. Not just any old education, but the kind of education that is inseparably bound up with communication and that connects to and networks with other concepts such as audio-visuals, art and experimentation. Education as an element of on-going personal growth, that is not limited to one particular stage of life. Education as play, a way of unravelling the media theatre. Education as an open source operating system that turns us into critical citizens. Education as a game played by all individuals, from all eras. Education as a utopia for a culture-sharing society. When we talk about expanded education, we are not talking about a new concept or something that has just popped out of the blue. Continue reading →

Training Course on inclusion of young immigrants in creative media making

Istanbul: The Sound of the Muscle.

At the beginning, our eyes are closed, listening to the sound of a control at the customs, the city, the calls to pray, the traffic, the trains, the bells… And with this exercise of proactive listening we get started on the work with the audiovisual artist Filastine in Istanbul, inside a room with warm wooden floors within the cozy and inspiring ‘Simotas Binasi’, the base of the European Souvenirs team in its stage at the Old Constantinople.

The prominent sounds of the city emerge, not only when it’s time to look to the Qibla and the muezzins appear to be competing with each other. Istanbul sounds in its cars, its ships, its tourists and inhabitants. Sure that in other cities, sounds are equally powerful and ever-present, but in Istanbul they vibrate around you as well as within you, for whoever wants to listen and loose themselves.

During the days working at Simotas, we would go out recording these sounds and buying percussion instruments. Then, we gathered all this and thought of the soundtrack for our live cinema show. Music was present while working all throughout the comforting jam sessions with the material supplied by the archives. First, with Grey Filastine’s help -who also delighted us with a magnificent showcase of his last album with the awe-inspiring background of Fatih Sultan Mehmet’s bridge, which links Europe and Asia- and later, with the team work, where we started exercising the muscles, the sound, getting them ready to the flow of the live show.

Bones and Muscle: building stories.
We spent the rest of the time at work in Istanbul putting together stories, getting over the first few keywords, all of them actually, in order to equalize the aspects we were more keen to highlight in this research process that is European Souvenirs. It is then when we appreciated the workshops in Seville with Toni Serra as well as with Silvia and Nuria, and invoked the muse ‘Structure’ to pull together the outline of our project.

This task led us to over three days of narrative games, writing the story separately, analysing keywords, using exquisite corpses… And these conversations brought up the main subjects, for now, of our own cosmogony. The basis of a multiple, fragmented, domestic story. These being: Family, Travel, Borders, Utopia vs. Dystopia and Memories.

Ingredients of a multimedia stew which five artists will have to cook together, although coming from different realities, in different places and with different thinking.

So, how to cook it all at once? How to serve it on the table? What about the technique?
The third part of the work in Istanbul was that one we always like to discuss about. How are we appearing on stage? What technical equipment are we using? How do we approach the challenge of having the audience seated? And here is where the collective intelligence and the background of the art team get down to business: video-projections, quadraphonic sound system, gadgets, instruments, buttons, cables… Everything is possible, not every thing is necessary. The tough part is knowing how to adequate the technique to the story, not succumbing to the virtuosity of technology, facing the simplicity (and the toughness) as opposed to being too theatrical or using entropic multilayering.

In the middle of this debate, always unfinished but quite advanced, we left Istanbul, satisfied with the good work and looking forward to Warsaw, our next stop. Meanwhile, we will work far away from each other, but still being able, if we close our eyes, to hear the sound of that muscle that joins Europe and Asia… in Istanbul.

Text by Pedro Jiménez & Malaventura. Pics by Benito Jiménez and Cansu Turan.

Video report – click to view.

Reporting from Sheffield Doc/Fest.

This is an account of Victoria Fioravante’s experiences at the Sheffield Doc/Fest with the Doc Next Network.

“On a glorious British summer’s day of spitting rain upon coats and scarves, the ‘Doc Next Team’, which consisted of two Spaniards from Zemos98, two Polish ladies from Association of Creative Initiatives “ę”, a Turk from Mode Istanbul and two Londoners, arrived at Sheffield. Among visible signs of a film festival – posters everywhere, people rushing with Sheffield Doc bags, open-air screens and quite a lot of excitement – we entered without any expectations, not knowing what events we’d go to, what we would see, whether we would indeed be able to watch any films at all…

“After a pit-stop in a charming hotel (Thank you Doc Next Network!), it was straight onto the Documentary Workshop ‘Life’s a Pitch’ . After a brief sequence of games and laughs to get to know the talented members of the Second Light scheme, it was onto serious business. Andy Glynne, clinical psychologist turned executive producer of Mosaic Films and member of the Documentary Filmmakers Group, provided an excellent and inspirational speech on the hurdles, difficulties and successes of giving a pitch and what was most important; Narrative, Characterisation, the all-important question “What am I going to see?”, Access, and Demographics. His receptiveness, humour and enthusiasm were exceptional and I thoroughly enjoyed being there – especially when it came to the screenings of the short documentaries ‘Dekay’s Guide to the Estates‘ and ‘I Speak Hinglish‘. Then, after a few team exercises, we were left to our own devices to come up with a pitch that would be presented the next day – one by one, nerve-wrecking stuff. This would be the first time I’d ever presented or even prepared a pitch, so the pressure was most definitely on.

“The 24 hours I had to think of and plan my pitch were reduced to a measly hour in the middle of the night; there were too many great films and events on offer to do my time doing anything else! Our trip wasn’t only about pitching, it also involved a good deal of freedom to explore and investigate the festival. Of course, there were brilliant films – my favourites included ‘Putin’s Kiss‘ (Lisa Berk Pederson, 2011), ‘Planet of Snail‘ (Seungjun Yi, 2011), and ‘Call me Kuchu‘ (Zouhali-Worrall and Fairfax Wright, 2012). Then there were other events and talks, ranging from documentary distribution to filming in the Balkans, from Music Rights to Women in TV, interviews and – best of all – real Pitching competitions. The WorldView / Community Channel Live Pitch moved me the most – Intense pitching in action by six immensely talented applicants competing for a chance to win £10,000 to film a positive story of women in the developing world. After this, the Doc Next pitches would be a walk in the park!

“I was fully aware that there would be three industry experts (Daisy Asquith, documentary film-maker, Emma Hindley, freelance executive producer, and Ravi Amaratunga, head of Creative Diversity at Channel 4) evaluating and assessing our pitches the next day, but what I didn’t know was that there would also be a live audience – and quite a big one. Neither did I expect Matt Cuzner (of BFI fame) frantically waving signs at us with a cheeky yet embarrassed little grin. I guess he wanted to ‘help us’ by increasing the pressure. I was last in line to present, and I was pleased to see that my idea created some controversy among the panel after which a lively debate followed – which was great to see. Since then, I’ve followed up my idea with members of the panel who have encouraged me to film a teaser for my idea and to send it back to them. Then, it was on to networking in many different ways; from new talent drinks and receptions to the all important, leg-breaking Roller Disco!

“Sadly, this was the last night of our intense two-day trip. However, I’ve taken a lot from Sheffield. Andy Glynne’s motivational insights, my first ever experience pitching an idea of mine to a live audience, and most of all the opportunity to meet a group of inspiring and immensely talented group of people from all over Europe with whom I fully plan to work with in the future. And was Sheffield Doc Fest worthwhile? There is no doubt about it. I’ll see you there next year.”