Illegal_cinema
SESSION 118, ILLEGAL _CINEMA
by
Screening of Introduction to the End of an Argument (Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, 1990, 45 min), preceded by the shorts Video Hacking (Manuel Saiz, 1999, 5 min), Masaje (Iván Zulueta, 1972, 3 min 14 s) and a brief selection of shorts by Keith Sanborn. Session proposed by Irene Landa, followed by a discussion.
For the Situationist International the term “Détournement” (literally meaning “rerouting”) referred to the practice of appropriating existing aesthetic elements and rearticulating them in new contexts of their own.
An image is not only an image. Or, at least, it is not merely an image in itself. It is traversed by diverse legislative, economic and social frameworks, which determine who produces it, and regulate how it circulates and is consumed. All of the films included in this screening are exercises in breaking the boundaries of authorship/property/law that delimit images.
Video Hacking refers to the materiality of videoclub piracy and the practices of getting around copyright. Keith Sanborn and Iván Zulueta’s shorts place in question the “suspension of image rights” by working with commercial film material appropriated for alteration. By means of a similar strategy of re-editing material taken from the mass media, Introduction to the End of an Argument reveals the Orientalism inherent in the visual culture produced by the West, with the aim of recovering the image that has been stolen by power.
Irene Landa (Bilbao, 1995) is based in Bilbao from where she researches, produces and thinks. She studied a Master’s Degree in Critical and Cultural Theory in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has collaborated and trained in curatorship with different cultural spaces and local museums. At present she is involved in research concerning the cultural mythologies and narratives that surround the category of labour, which she is deconstructing through the writing and the space of identitarian fictions about success, self-fulfilment and effort projected by the neoliberal logic relating to wage labour.