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TIMESCAPES is a collective editing project for video that explores the possibilities of non-linear editing via the Internet in order to create new forms of narration around the question representation, collective memory, politics and the poetics of the video image.
The collective editing process focuses on a film about the psychological landscape of a geographically defined part of South-East Europe which we call the B- zone (zone of countries which are waiting to become a member of the EU.)
During an open work session hold in Sofia the Timescapes group (7 media-artist from Germany, Belgrade, Athens and Ankara) will present their footage shot in the B-Zone in summer 2003 and start to discuss and link their themes together.
The production of the image as a function of memory and image technology is disputed as an analogy: Flows, cuts, breaks are reflecting different qualities of duration, perception and memory: continuity or discontinuity of narration and image-flow are considered as a psychological developments during the working process in which the editor is shifting inside of "fields of meanings", which have not yet been fixed by representation. The public representation of this workshop on Friday the (XX) will bring the editing room "as a space before representation" onto a theatrical video-scene.
Making films is the art of sculpting time.
Precisely because the editing process is open-ended and because each displacement of an element produces new meaning, the cut as an essential element creating representation can be more then investigated: the intention of this project is to liberate the moving image from stereotypical forms of representation and to allow the image to unfold as visual memory does.
The collective film-database of Timescapes contains several themes of the B-Zone:
1.CORRIDOR X (by Angela Melitopoulos)
A road movie from Germany to Istanbul (via Sofia)
The construction of the highway of "Brotherhood and Unity" was one of the most important projects of collaboration between Western Europe and (Ex-) Yugoslavia since 1945. It was also the most important migration route between Turkey, Greece and Germany on which millions of migrants went to work in Western Europe.
This road movie reflects on the meaning of travelling and questions the processes of subjectivation active during filmmaking. On the other hand it reports on the actual state of a post-war territory in which conditions of travelling and migration have changed completely.
3: VIDEOTOPOS: (Media collective VIDEA)
This footage is a series of images of emptied places and forced migration stories due to the intervention of the Turkish state against minorities in various locations from East to West in Turkey (Hakkari, Tavsanli, Gokceada). Our recordings unfold a connection between oral history and global politics in the general context of the B-Zone. We are heavily affected by invisible borders drawn by a policy of "modernity" in Turkey which is not mediated but which has weight in the collective awareness of the people. Our shootings on physical topographies lead to psychological topographies. This forced migration project explores the becoming stories of migrants within their changing relations about the places they lived and they live now. It also intends to raise questions on the special relation that the process of video making establishes within space.
4: MONASTIRAKI SQUARE. (Freddy Viannelis)
A square located under Akropolis, by a Byzantine church, next to a Mosque that is turned into a museum, surrounded by Mc Donald's, Kebab places, the entrance of the underground station and people that move about.
A girl in her early twenties is waiting.
Her wait is very long, she waits for the whole day. Her day at work comes alive in her mind, she is a model at the art school; the people in the square, the places that surround her, their cultures and their roots and history are coming alive us well allowing us to share her perception.
The images draw the barriers of this cross roads of civilizations.
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