DOKBIZIA

Rabih Mroué

MAKE ME STOP SMOKING
Presentation of ideas under study
A non-academic lecture by Rabih Mroué

In "Make Me Stop Smoking", Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars. He pieces together countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clippings and eyewitness reposts, to create a complex system of meandering narrations.
The veracity and cogency of the archive documents is questioned; the artist negotiates the validity of the reconstruction of “reality”. What happens when a lost landscape is reappropriated through its archived representation?

Rabih Mroué. Born in Beirut and currently living in Berlin, Mroué is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. He is the co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC), and a contributing editor for TDR/ The Drama Review. He has performed and exhibited internationally including dOCUMENTA (13), MoMa and Centre Pompidou. 

Oligor and Microscopía

LA MELANCOLÍA DEL TURISTA
Theatre of documentary objects

"La melancolía del turista" is the decomposition of the instants and objects that give shape to the idea of a paradise, a gallery of mirages on what lies behind a sublime landscape that no longer exists or that never existed. Created and produced by Shaday Larios and Jomi Oligor, the work questions the life of the images associated with leisure and takes a critical look at the imagery of vacation.

Melancholy arises here as a state of awareness that happens in that moment of suspension of inertia in life, and that allows us to reinvent ourselves. It addresses the breakdown, that deliberation that decomposes the processes of establishing oneself as a foreigner; the impulse that places us in a situation of self-criticism during the typical paraphernalia of a trip, what happens to a person who no longer recognises the place in which he lives due to gentrification, the transformations of desire when comparing imageries between cities in decline that were once tourist paradises, and the questioning of the materiality that tries to pre-establish the idea of recollection with souvenirs and photos.

Creation, production and performance: Shaday Larios and Jomi Oligor
Poetic collaboration: Ángel Hernández
Inventive collaboration: Ivan Puig and Jordi Fondevila
Music and sound collaboration: Suetszu & Jayrope

A coproduction by: Iberescena, Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza, Pyren Art - Interreg POCTEFA, Le Parvis, Temporada Alta y Festival Grec.

Microscopía Teatro is a Mexican laboratory group for stage research that works with atmospheres of the intimate through objects, models, furniture, toys, mechanisms and shadows. It also implements schemes for social inclusion and stage philosophy through the values of miniaturisation and the dissociative powers of the theatre of objects.
Oligor is a company dedicated to the poetics of objects which was created on the basis of the show called Las tribulaciones de Virginia. In 2012 they went into partnership to explore the documentary possibilities of the subject matter. 

Jessica Sarah Rinland

THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER 
Jessica Sarah Rinland. UK, Argentina, Spain. 2019. 67’

"Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another" meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection about forms of representation, replicas and embodiments of various materials, disciplines and institutions. Rinland reveals the fascinating work of a group of restoration artists; she is infected by the infinite patience of their practice and portrays long sequences of the preparation of molds and the imitation of textures, focusing on the reproduction of an elephant's ivory tusk. 

Argentine-British artist filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland has exhibited her work in galleries, film festivals and universities internationally including New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Bloomberg New Contemporaries and Somerset House. She has won awards such as the first prize at Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Arts and Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and M.I.T's Schnitzer prize for excellence in the arts. Some of her residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Kingston University, Locarno Academy and Berlinale Talents. She is currently an associate artist at Somerset House Studios and a Film Studies Center fellow at Harvard University.

Hila Peleg

UNCUT: FROM GORDON MATTA-CLARK'S FILM ARCHIVE
Lecture by Hila Peleg

Artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) considered architecture to be dynamic by nature— part of a larger social and political system, conditioned by constantly shifting economic, cultural and environmental factors. His sharp observation of the contradictions taking place in the wake of widespread deindustrialization and so-called urban renewal fuelled his critical artistic response. Matta-Clark's most iconic body of work is a series of meticulous and monumental incisions into abandoned and derelict buildings. These "building cuts" demonstrate the potential of individuals and groups to establish alternative self-determined spaces, structures and systems. Matta-Clark devised an elaborate documentary practice to represent the different phases and dimensions of his architectonic intervention as a means to convey the extreme physical action and energy involved in the transformation and subsequent demolition of the buildings. The curator Hila Peleg will discuss her recent exhibition project and present content of rare original film reels and videos, including rough cuts, outtakes, and working edits from the Canadian Center of Architecture (CCA) Gordon Matta-Clark Archive.

Hila Peleg is a curator and filmmaker. She has previously curated solo shows, large-scale group exhibitions and interdisciplinary cultural events, across the visual arts, film and architecture. Between 2010 to 2014 she was the Artistic Director of the Berlin Documentary Forum. More recently, she was the curator of documenta 14. She directed the documentaries "A Crime Against Art" (2007) and "Sign Space" (2016), and edited the book "Documentary Across Disciplines", and currently works as a curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin. 

Carlos Casas - Sonic eye

SONIC EYE PROGRAM - CARTE BLANCHE CARLOS CASAS
Session of "films for hearing" at the Planetarium

Sonic eye program is a short sound program composed of four pieces that have been a key influence on my work and that have shaped in some ways the developing of my last project "Cemetery".

Carlos Casas. Filmmaker and artist whose work shifts between documentary film, sound art, video installation and performance. Casas develops sound landscapes to explore themes related to the natural world, memory and death. His films have been projected and awarded at festivals around the world, such as the FIDMarseille, Venice, Rotterdam and BAFICI. He has also exhibited his work in the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou Centre and the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and the Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona (CCCB).

Sanctuary
Chris Watson, 2020. 40’
The piece is a journey from an elephant sanctuary to the elephants graveyard and beyond. Featuring sounds from locations around the world from Iceland to Borneo, from Burma to Namibia, from the deep seas currents where oceans meet the deserts of Africa. Taking the narrative from Carlos Casas's film Cemetery, this piece is a work in progress of the films soundtrack presented tonight as a live spatial audio diffusion. (C.W.)

Presque rien n°1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer
Luc Ferrari, 1967–1970, 21’
“Following the complete disappearance of abstract sounds, we can regard this piece as a sonic snapshot and the culmination of an evolution. This is a realistic rendering (as faithful as possible) of a fishing village waking up. The first idea of minimalism.” (L.F.)

Benthic Storm
Francisco López, ‎1993, 8’ (part of one of his early milestone releases “Azoic Zone”)
“A soundscape journey to the life and environment of abyssal organisms.” (F.L.)

L'Œil écoute
Bernard Parmegiani, 1970
"From the very first moment, caught by the musical tone heard from inside a train, the trip offered by this piece triggers in us various climates able to give our imagination power over sounds: the power to guide them through our secret mazes rather than to blindly follow them like Panurge. This form of (auditory) contemplation thus attempts to enable us to lose ourselves outside our far too familiar and usual territories." (B.P.)

Carlos Casas - Cemetery

CEMETERY
Carlos Casas. France, United Kingdom, Poland, Uzbekistan. 2019, 85'

Artist Carlos Casas traces the journey of an elephant and his mahout to a sacred hidden elephant cemetery. As they move toward the mythical place through the jungle, questions opens up about death, reincarnation, immortality, and where Hindu and Buddhist traditions collide. "Cemetery" is a deeply sensory film about memory, colonialism, extinction and the unmapped. A road film guided by a monologue voice over, the amazing sounds of the jungle and a deep research related to the sonic language of the elephants. "Cemetery" is a requiem for the unknown, for the undiscovered, for our Shangri-La.