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curated programs
The film program The Binding Element - Artist’s Moving Images from the Auguste Orts catalogue is on show at:
MO Museum on 21 July, 18:00
Community House , Nida on 5 August, 22:00
Hofas Yard, Klaipeda, 12 August at 22:00
by Miki Ambrózy & Suspaustas Laikas Festival
The Binding Element
Films by Manon de Boer, Herman Asselberghs, Sammy Baloji and Mouaad el Salem
Still from Oumi. From nothing to something to something else, part 3 – Manon de Boer - HD video, color, 16:9, no dialogue, ES/BE, 2019, 15’ © Manon de Boer & Auguste Orts
Oumi. From nothing to something to something else, part 3 – Manon de Boer - HD video, color, 16:9, no dialogue, ES/BE, 2019, 15’
Watching Words Becoming A Film (TXT.FLM #3) - Herman Asselberghs - video, color, 4:3, silent, BE, 2017, 6’13
Pungulume (installation) - Sammy Baloji - video, color, 16:9, Sanga spoken, English subtitles, BE, 2016, 29’
This Day Won't Last - Mouaad el Salem, BE, TN, 2020, HD, 25'
This year Suspaustas Laikas (Time Squeezed) Festival has invited the Brussels-based artists' collective Auguste Orts to showcase some of their films. I selected four films from their catalogue, with the intention of opening a horizontal view. There is no thematic or conceptual depth to the selection. When thumbing through a catalogue, each reader or viewer will stop at certain titles, on the impulse of a sensation, an image, a word. The films chosen were based on personal knowledge of or connection to the makers, and sometimes sheer curiosity.
That being said, the selection is representative: it's eclectic. Auguste Orts is a platform that disseminates the work of four artists and guest productions. And perhaps more importantly for the Lithuanian context, they successfully created open spaces of dialogue around artists' moving images internationally. A space for conversation about cinema, audiovisual arts, and where these territories can fruitfully mingle. Auguste Orts's films are varied in subject, methodology, style, form, structure, and length. The binding element is not to be found in conventional places such as aesthetics, conceptual criteria or genre categories.
The platform's ambition is to share the plurality of audiovisual language. To make moving images happen. When talking about their fifteen-year biography, they use the term deepening instead of developing. Making films is a matter of relationships between people, and keeping these connections active is as important as keeping relationship with audiences active. Relationships don't progress in the sense of getting better. Rather, they require time and care. The artists in Auguste Orts’s orbit are engaged on different levels with the audiovisual sector, for example by teaching, working with cultural policy, or taking on advisory roles in production structures. None of them are dependent financially on film production. That freedom is a constraint and a source of power. The films presented in Suspaustas Laikas are a testimony to how films can assert an intellectually, conceptually or critically emancipated experience.
- Miki Ambrózy