HITO STEYERL IMMERSION
Saturday April 12 • 10am-4pm
York Film Norman Jewison Speaker Series
And Goethe-Institut Toronto present
An intimate day-long ‘immersion’ with the legendary artist/theorist/activist Hito Steyerl (Berlin). Her essay films, documentaries and installations have been exhibited internationally in museums, festivals and at Documenta 12 (2007). These include: Lovely Andrea, (a playful investigation of Japan’s bondage porn industry); November, (about the interrelationships between territorial power politics -as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany- and individual forms of resistance), Film Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression, (about the impossibility of reconstructing the lost materials of the Sarajevo film archives), and The Centre (a close analysis of the processes of urban restructuring and transition that took place in the center of Berlin for eight years after re-unification). Normality 1-10, (a series of short video essays –set in Austria of the year 2000-, registering everyday neo-fascist violence as being something that is declared normal by some and accepted as such by the majority). Rigourous, militant, hilarious, defiant…
This Immersion is limited to 15 participants — it will include screenings, discussions, two lectures by Hito (one addressing the politics of the archive) and lunch together at Schulich. This workshop is designed particularly for studies and production grads engaged with the essay film form — pre-registration is required: hayashi@yorku.ca
April 13th, 2008 at 4:44 am
I hope that I am posting this correctly. I’m that guy who sits in the southeast corner of the room.
Thank you, Sharon, for organizing this immersion. Although I arrived late, I was quite taken with the discussion of the Archive as a site of cultural exclusion (before taking on my own archival research, I had thought that acts of exclusion were not necessary to dwell on as great offenses because they must be incidental - and have since seen this reinforced occasionally but more often challenged), as well as the changing face of storage (I had no idea that The Pirate Bay had such fascist associations - but then copyright violation is so often linked to free speech by the left, we sometimes forget that the most vocal pleas for free speech are often lodged by the extreme right), as well as Steyerl’s foreign reception and preservation history of Valter Brani Sarajevo. I’d like to see the rest of her film about the bordered post-divide Berlin, if it is brought to VTape. For those of you who did not attend (if anyone is still reading this), her documentary Lovely Andrea is an incredibly bare autobiography (with what, by comparison to her Berlin film, seemed hyper excess) and will be playing at Hot Docs on the 25th and 27th.