calendario eventi  :: 

X

5/6/2009

Two Exhibitions

Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA, Glasgow

This Land is Your Land
Saturday 6 June - Saturday 25 July 2009
11:00am - 6:00pm: FREE

Venue: CCA 2 / CCA 3 / CCA 4 (cinema) / CCA Resource Room
Ages: all

This Land is Your Land is a two-part exhibition exploring everything from the pleasure of planting a seed to issues of territory and national boundaries, inviting us to consider our relationship to the land we live on.

Emerging from new outreach work in Drumchapel, comprising school gardening projects and community guerrilla gardening, from 6 – 19 June part one of the exhibition will be interactive, featuring a continuous series of talks, screenings and cookery, gardening and seed bombing workshops in the main gallery, looking at issues of self sustainability and living off the land.

Glasgow School of Art Architecture students will present their visions for a community garden in Hamiltonhill; Stephen Watts from Sheffield will explain how to forage; Friends of the Earth will run swap shops and films screenings will look at Cuban urban farms, garden protests in Los Angeles, the work of seed activist, Vidana Shiva and the activities of agricultural corporate giants, Monsanto.

CCA Director, Francis McKee says: “How land is used now and who has the right to access it has become a key issue in contemporary society. Ordinary people are challenging formal barriers to growing their own food, accessing land and controlling their own food supply. At the same time, the new discipline of psychogeography has led many people to reinterpret their urban landscape, navigate streets according to their personal histories, experiences and memories.”

In recent years, the term ‘psychogeography’ has been used to describe ‘playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.

Drew Mulholland, Composer in Residence at the University of Glasgow's department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, will present a series of psychogeographical maps while Bob Hamilton, founder of City Strolls will lead tours of Glasgow city centre, questioning how we view the architecture and makeup of the city by renegotiating streets and pathways in order to consider them differently.

In the first gallery space of CCA, a two-week project by practitioners in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan and EyalWeizman, will look at rethinking our urban environment. To do this – they will create a small court room where they will investigate the way in which the legal context of an object, a film or a situation, for example, can influence how we interpret it.

In the second gallery space, there will be a continuous hourly screening of The Desert People (1974) by David Lamelas, one of the pioneers of conceptual art and institutional critique. Part road movie, part documentary, it records the experience of five car passengers who have visited a North American native Indian reservation, and dwells on the difficulties of knowing other cultures from the outside.

Part Two of This Land is Your Land adopts a more conventional exhibition format to present the work of Ursula Biemann, Mark Boulos and Bouchra Khalili, exploring issues of mobility, land resources and migration.

Sahara Chronicles (2006 – 2007), by Ursula Biemann examines the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of current global geopolitics, through taking a close look at the modalities and logistics of the migration system in the Sahara region.

All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008) by Mark Boulos is a video installation about petroleum, dematerialisation and globalisation, depicted through an opposition of two discrete films. One portrays the Nigerian guerrilla group that battles against colonisation of the petroleum resources that are their birthright. The other film depicts American financial traders who buy and sell ‘futures’, the most speculative of financial products, on the last open-outcry trading floor in an increasingly computerised financial world.

Mapping Journey #1 and #2 (2008) consist of short videos by the Moroccan-born French artist Bouchra Khalili. Between 3 and 4:30 minutes is enough time to trace, with just a few pencil lines marking the surface of a map, the hundreds of kilometers traversed by several illegal immigrants in search of precarious employment. Without pretentions and in a direct manner, the artist displays her work, shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style. A close shot of a map slightly in relief, a close-up of a hand holding a marker and a masculine voiceover narrating without emotion the dangerous attempts to cross the Mediterranean and slip across borders, necessary steps for these men and women who, forced to leave their home country and to become outlaw nomads, meet their situation with an exemplary resignation and dignity.

.................................................

The Desert People by David Lamelas
Saturday 6 June - Friday 19 June 2009
11:00am - 6:00pm: FREE

Venue: CCA 2
Ages: 12A

Dir. David Lamelas
1974, 50 min Colour Sound 16 mm
Screening on the hour

David Lamelas describes it as “a study on American film production”. The Desert People begins like a classic road-movie.

The setting is completely familiar to us: a car crossing the desert with a group of people traveling on board. But as soon as the narration begins, it is interrupted by documentary-style interviews. Passing in this way from one film genre to another, Lamelas manages to blur the boundary between fact and fiction.

The five passengers describe their experience on a North American native Indian reservation. Each member of the group has his or her own perspective on the Papago tribe. One offers an anthropological analysis while another discusses writing a feature article for a women's magazine. They each present their version of the 'truth' about how the Papago live. Whilst they examine the tribe's social behaviour, there is little self-reflection on their own group dynamic. Ironically, numerous cuts to their car journey reveal a complete lack of interaction between the travellers.

The final interviewee, Manny, a Papago Indian, comments on the way the American influence on Native Americans is leading to the loss of his own indigenous culture. His English drifts into Spanish and then Papago, as if the meaning of what he wishes to communicate would be lost in translation. For the English-speaking viewer this shift is confusing and demonstrates the difficulty of knowing another culture from the outside. The film ends unexpectedly with a jump cut back to the feature film scenario.

Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA
350 Sauchiehall Street - Glasgow

stampa

permanent link