On May 8 and 9, PVF#1 participants share with you some of their their video-materials and reflect upon them. Five panels in total will be organized with three participants per panel. Click on the panels to learn more about the participants and their projects.

 

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PANEL 1: Participation, methods & position of the researcher - 8 May, 11:00h-13:00, Cinema room

This panel focuses on the process and nature of participation in different stages, and the relationships between all actors involved.

Luca Arend, Tessa Boeykens and Matt Mullins.

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PANEL 2: Technologies, methods & epistemologies - 8 May, 14:30-16:30h, Cinema room

This panel focuses on how the use of PV methods can generate different kinds of of knowledge.

Natalia Calderón, Maya Dalinsky & Elli Vassalou and Maarten Hendriks.

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PANEL 3: Place making - 8 May, 14:30h-16:30, Koer Cafe

This panel focuses on how video allows people to claim and transform the space they are living in.

Claudia Faraone & Elke Dhaenens, Catia Rebelo and Aurélia Van Gucht.

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PANEL 4: Representation, power relations & ethics - 9 May, 10:30h-12:30h, Cinema room

This panel focuses on what it means to use visual images of people and how power and representation are negotiated.

Arjang Omrani, Damjan Peric and Janine Santos.

 

PANEL 5: Impact, action & format - 9 May, 10:30h-12:30h, Koer Cafe

This panel focuses on how to reach specific audiences and use effective formats to do so.

David Dhert, Duduzile Ndlovu and Julie Schiltz.

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DAY 1 - 8 MAY

 

PANEL 1: Participation, methods & position of the researcher 

8 May, 11:00h-13:00, Cinema room

This panel focuses on the process and nature of participation in different stages, and the relationships between all actors involved.

 

Luca Arend

Inhabitant of the Zad of Notre Dame des Landes

Participatory video, to what ends? A look from the zad

 

The film ‘Two hands, no head’ is an assemblage of images and talks by a variety of inhabitants of the zad of Notre Dame des Landes, a ‘zone à défendre’ in struggle against an airport project and its world. It is an honest introspective questioning about what it means to try to live without the state in this zone of a wide social and political diversity. Having led this video project with activist, non-academic aims, in the context of this festival Luca would like to look to it as a research project. She wants to question how means and ends of the researcher relate to each other, and how the choice for a certain way of doing or representing research always has a very real, more or less obvious, political impact.

 

The whole process of the video making on the zad was formed in function of certain needs of communication. The movie not only aims to offer a tool for creating external understanding and support, but also for better internal dialogue and rebalancing differences in power of communication among the inhabitants. Thus, Luca invited people to talk together in front of the camera, people which knew each other barely or which were in concrete or theoretical political conflict. The video isn’t a documentary, because if it’s goal had been to solely document or analyse, it’s result would have been different and its participants wouldn’t have participated. Whereas the video claims no truth, it still tells its own story. The accumulation of more and more voices may ensure a better, safer view of what the ‘zad’ could be, but in a way it also gives a lot of dangerous power to the one behind the montage…

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Tessa Boeykens

Ghent University, History Department

Living & telling historical injustice: narrativity and political action in 'post-conflict' Guatemala

 

Tessa is a PhD researcher at the History Department of Ghent University. Through ethnographic fieldwork & participatory action research, she explores transitional justice & memory processes in indigenous communities in the Alta Verapaz Department in 'post-conflict' Guatemala. Her research evaluates the transformative potential of storytelling after violent conflict, specifically the link between narrativity and political action. This resulted in an ongoing co-creative video project with a community of returnees resisting the construction of a hydroelectric dam on its territory. Tessa is also co-founder of the Participatory Video Festival #1.

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Matt Mullins

Manchester Metropolitan University

Reimagining Challenging Behaviour

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Community arts & participatory filmmaking project based in Pupil Referral Unit (an organisation set up to serve pupils expelled from mainstream education) located in Greater Manchester, UK. The project involved a series of weekly art projects with the pupils aimed at exploring the complex emotional needs of pupils in a safe environment. One workshop involved giving pupils a camera and allowing them to film their school environment; developing over time into a short documentary offering insights into 'challenging behaviour' for training teachers.
Using raw footage, a film that explains the aims of our project & a film made from the young peoples camera work, I will explore the successes & challenges of using film as a research method around young people.

 

As a Manchester based Artist & Filmmaker, Matt began working in Participatory Film as part of a collaborative research project with Developmental Psychologist Gabrielle Ivinson looking into attitudes held within mainstream education regarding approaches to 'challenging behaviour'. Previously he worked within Arts Education, Commercial & artist film production.

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Preview video-materials.

 

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PANEL 2: Technologies, methods & epistemologies

8 May, 14:30-16:30h, Cinema room

This panel focuses on how the use of PV methods can generate different kinds of of knowledge.

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Natalia Calderón

Universidad Veracruzana, México

Disrupt what we know!

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How to make research in academic traditional standards? We know,
How to make an artistic project and learn with it? We also know,
How to communicate the learning we generate to other fields? We start to know,
Where can we place objectivity and truth in this new relation? We hardly know.

It is impellent, now, to distrust what we know. To be able to unveil our epistemological horizons and break them down, or up, directions here do not matter. But, can audiovisual media be a tool to record and reconstruct the un-known? How can videomaking care to reflect our viewpoint and our political-epistemological position? Is videomaking able to create new unstable positions, gazes and stands?

 

Mexico City (1984) Natalia Calderón is an artist, researcher and teacher. She completed a PhD in Art and Education at the Barcelona University, Spain and a MA at the Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on generating and exploring pedagogical experiences through art practices and research. She has presented her work at various international institutions like La Antigua Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City 2017, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 2015, the 1st Tbilisi Triennial Offside Effect, Tblisi 2012, the San Diego Museum of Art, 2011, the Kunstvlaai Art Fair in Amsterdam, 2010. Currently, she woks as a fulltime researcher at the Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico and coordinates the Artistic Research Seminar (SPIA). 

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Preview video-materials.

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Maya Dalinsky & Elli Vassalou

KASK (Autonomous Design Department) Ghent, School of Love

Parallel Perceptions: Social and choreographic research using video walking

 

Maya Dalinsky and Elli Vassalou present “Parallel Perceptions”, a collaborative format they developed to explore various aspects of video walking and its applications in specific socio-political environments. Video walks allow the videographer to share her/his perception with another person by layering times and spaces: a video is recorded in a single shot, then given to another person who watches and re-animates in situ the videographer's movement on a handheld device. "Parallel Perceptions" guides participants through “affordance theory” and somatic-based exercises to awaken individual and group perception, and to build a shared toolkit of compositional approaches to space.

Dancer, translator and visual artist Maya discusses how video walking entered her choreographic practice and how it has evolved over time with each new creation. Her main interest is in the medium’s potential for “digital uncanny”: a disorienting perception of self that results when digital technologies layer times, spaces and perspectives. She approaches participatory video from a movement background and roots her practice in notions of embodiment, co-presence, cycling feedback, and proprioceptive expression. Elli, coming from architecture and socially-engaged art, discusses her interest in the social aspect of the medium. How do we construct spatial narratives, how do they relate to our gender, size, history, age and how do these narratives, when shared, transform individual ones? Can the collective kinesthetic practice of video walking subvert the sociopolitical and architectural conditions of a space? Is that polyphony, experienced non-verbally, able to shift our identities, build counter maps, oppose pre-established dominant narratives and lead to place-making? She draws on her experience in the contested space of Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, to frame the workshop's potential and challenges.

 

Elli Vassalou (1983, GR) is a Brussels-based multimedia artist, architect, activist, researcher and performer. She has studied Architecture [M.Arch.] at the Patras School of Architecture – GR and Visual Arts [M.A.] at KASK School of Arts, at Autonomous design department, Gent - BE. She designs participatory events, actions and socially engaged projects. She also works with documentary film-making, photography, movement and multisensorial tools, site specific installations, web and archive art. She is seeking for new ways of polyphonic narrating, assembling bodies, spaces and objects in a critical and creative dialogue. Her work has been presented in exhibitions, conferences, festivals and events around Europe.

www.evassalou.com
Other current projects: the school of love - www.schooloflove.info

Syntrofi performative lunches- http://graduation.schoolofarts.be/student/elli-vassalou/

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Maya Dalinsky (1981, USA) is interested in choreographic video. She has an MA in Art in Public Space from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and works as a dancer, translator and research assistant. Her work seeks to invert our habitual physical relationship to technology in search of the “digital uncanny”: a new sense of kinesthesia mediated through digital devices. As a dancer and visual artist, her solo and collaborative work has been shown internationally in festivals and galleries such as UNA Gallery (USA), Netwerk (Belgium), Lokaal 01 - Breda (Netherlands), Farm Cultural Park (Italy) and Athens Video Dance Project (Greece), among others.

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Preview video-materials.

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Maarten Hendriks

Ghent University, Conflict Research Group

Street life - Participatory Fiction 

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Maarten is a PhD researcher at the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University. He examines the so-called “Anti-gang”, a rather ambiguous 'everyday policing actor' in the city of Goma (DRCongo). On their demand Maarten facilitated the movie “street life”, a fiction movie made by the Anti-gang wherein they perform how they see their life and role as policing actor in the cités of Goma.​ Maarten is also co-founder of the Participatory Video Festival #1.

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PANEL 3: Place making 

8 May, 14:30h-16:30, Koer Cafe

This panel focuses on how video allows people to claim and transform the space they are living in.

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Claudia Faraone & Elke Dhaenens

IUAV Venezia - UniPadova - Temporary research fellow

On Moving Public Spaces in De Sterre and Videomaking as Negotiating Tool

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The southern urban fringe of Ghent, similar to twentieth century neighborhoods in other cities, is subject to structural change. These changes manifest themselves on in many ways: changes in demography, gradual densification, a growing functional mix, and perhaps most of all in changing patterns of use and appropriation of public space. The landscape is dominated by autonomous enclaves such as schools and hospitals, who have found a place to expand in the historic periphery of the city, regardless of the limitations and preconditions specific to the city. Today these campuses have been overtaken by urbanization. The result is a landscape of ‘institutional islands’ between residential areas, with a large scale diversity and an often unclear border between public and private use. Many of these institutions are currently developing master plans and future visions. These are usually mainly the expression of their own organizational goals and say little about the relationship with the changed context. The video, produced by students, is conceived as a form of commentary on these plans. Two subjects structure the aim of the project: the changing patterns of use and sense of belonging that form a prelude of the further urbanization of this area and the possibilities of video making in documenting use and appropriation of public space. The assignment was organized in the context of the Urban Academy, a collaborative effort between university and city, aimed at shaping research and teaching initiatives that are explicitly oriented in coping with pressing urban questions and major transitions assignments in Ghent.

 

Claudia Faraone is an architect (2004, Venice School of Architecture IUAV ), European PhD in Territorial Policies and Local Project (2011, Urban Studies Department of Roma Tre University, LAA | Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie of Paris Villette ENSA), post-graduate at EMU - European Postgraduate masters’ degree in Urbanism (2007, UPC Barcellona, TU Delft e KU Leuven). Since 2004 she has been participating and organizing several workshops, research projects, exhibitions and audio-visual productions dealing with urban explorations, cultures of production of urban space and its practices and imaginaries. The most recent was with the students of Prof. Michiel Dehaene at Ghent university and the collective video she will be presenting at the PV Festival.

Elke Dhaenens holds a master in architecture (2013, KULeuven) and urbanism and spatial planning (2016, UGent). Her master thesis focused on institutional enclaves in the 20 th fringe of Ghent. Since 2016 she has been working for Labo S (VAS, UGent) where she co-curated the exhibition University and the City (STAM, 2017) and was involved in developing a masterplan for campus de Sterre (2017). Since October 2017 she coordinates the of the Urban Acadamy, a collaborative effort aimed at shaping research and teaching initiatives that are explicitly oriented in coping with pressing urban questions and major transition assignments in Ghent.

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Webpage for more information about the project (in dutch): http://destadsacademie.be/bewegende-publieke-ruimte-moving-public-spaces/

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Preview video-materials.

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Catia Rebelo

Cardiff University

Place Ambassadors

 

Collaboration and cooperation between multi-stakeholders is, currently, understood as prerequisite to achieve sustainable tourism (Beritelli, 2011; Bramwell, 2011). Nevertheless, the mainstream activities and studies in tourism planning and branding are still based on top-down approaches (Higgins-Desbiolles &Whyte, 2013). Exclusive approaches that provide few room for cooperation and dialogue, but rather imposition of elites' ideas and strategies. According to Miles (2010) this has been resulting in failure of these strategies due to lack of local support, and even in some tensions and conflicts (e.g. grassroots movements). Accordingly, the number of critiques towards these approaches is also rising in academia as well as the call for more collaborative and bottom-up approaches. Aiming to answer this call we purpose a new framework. It intends to be grounded and inclusive as well as enable local communities’ engagement and empowerment by giving them the opportunity of influence, be part and communicate their own brand via their own stories and place values (place ambassadors). To test this framework an innovative and collaborative multi-case study was carried out in Portugal and is going to be equally developed in Wales. The multimethod comprised three main interventions 1) individual video-taped interviews; 2) individual video elicitation interviews and 3) focus group and collective video elicitation – final documentary. In the Portuguese case study using a rather innovative and collaborative approach based on the proposed framework resulted in: new and insightful knowledge; meaningful cooperation; shared ownership, power and responsibility over the visual narratives (documentary); agency for participants to take action for their place; and public engagement as well as community’s building capacity.

 

Cátia Rebelo is Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN Early Stage Researcher (ESR) at the Sustainable Places Research Institute as well as a PhD student in the 2nd year of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, UK. Her project entitled Place Ambassadors is part of a network called SUSPLACE that explores the full potential of place shaping practices on sustainable development. Her project explores visual methods (collaborative videos) as way of promoting more inclusive strategies in place branding and tourism development.

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Preview video-materials.

 

 

Aurélia Van Gucht

Group ALARM, Molenbeek

"Le parti du rêve de logement" - How people can take place in the public space

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"La parti du rêve de logement" is a fiction film about the housing crisis in Brussels made in 2016. The film is created through improvisatory methods by a group of people (Group ALARM) who have all experienced housing poverty/homelessness, a majority of whom are former asylum seekers. Members of the group ALARM decided wich stories they wanted to tell, wich characters they wanted to play. 

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Aurélia is a social worker in charge of the Alarm project in Molenbeek, Brussels. For more than 16 year, they have been working around housing problems in an old industrial neighbourhood. In 2001, vzw Buurthuis/"Maison de quartier Bonnevie" started to work with people who had difficulties to find a good home for an affordable price. A small group of people, who take the name ALARM started to think about their situation. Since de nineties, rents in Brussels increased a lot and there are a lot of discriminations connected to origins, source of income, big families, etc. The group ALARM wants to be hear by the political authorities to get structural change and to find an issue on housing problems. Today more and more people are living on the street. In 2012 for and before the local elections, group ALARM made a videoclip "If I was Burgemeister" that they spread through social media. You can find it on you tube under "Moi si j'étais bourgmestre".

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Preview video-materials.

 

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DAY 2 - 9 MAY

 

PANEL 4: Representation, power relations & ethics 

9 May, 10:30h-12:30h, Cinema room

This panel focuses on what it means to use visual images of people and how power and representation are negotiated.

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Arjang Omrani

Münster University lecturer

Self reflexive film review : PASAGER

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In 2013 I was invited to join a project that aimed to organize film workshops for unaccompanied minor refugees in order to produce a film shot by them about their journeys. Being highly critical of the idea, as the director of the film, I transformed the project into a film that none of the original participants appeared in. In 2016-17 in contrast to the previous project, with the collaboration of a young refugee in Greece, we made a film that was shot by him with his own mobile phone. This paper, through a self-reflexive approach, compares these two experiences in an attempt to address the dilemmas regarding the critical aspects of image making regarding the people who become the subjects of research as well as consuming the images that are produced by them. By doing so I also would like to address the possibilities of the poetical and political strategies in film.

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Audio-Visual Anthropologist-Filmmaker. Born in 1972 in Tehran. I am engaged with Audio-Visual, sensorial, and performative modes of presentation in Anthropological studies and human life, most notably, transcultural condition. I created some feature length and short films-videos that have been presented in different international and local festivals and venues as well as collaboration in different performative and collective art projects.

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Damjan Peric

Film student, KASK, Ghent

Handing over the camera

 

This short film was made for the atelier of An van Dienderen & Renzo Martens. The aim was to explore and/or bring to light the relations of power inherent in (documentary) filmmaking. To explore the triangle, the camera/filmmaker/subject-complex. For the short film, I wanted to approach migrants because this is a theme I am interested in, since my parents emigrated from Bosnia, Ex-Yugoslavia themselves. In the film, the focus is not on this theme though, altough subcurrents are present.

I will talk about the strategies I used in the making of this short film. What is the background story? Why did I choose for this approach? What is the relation between subject, camera and filmmaker? Essentially, the short film is a play between these three elements, a triangle, if you will. What, how and why does the 'subject' film? What, how and why does the 'filmmaker' film? The gesture of handing over the camera to another human being has its obvious effect on the image captured. Can I film in the name of my subject? Or can the subject only film in his/her own name?

In essence, the gesture of giving the camera to a subject is a gesture of mutual respect, a gesture of the filmmaker acknowledging the 'otherness' of the subject and his/her own inability to fully comprehend this 'other'. On the other hand, a gesture of the willingness of the 'other' to participate in this process. In a way, it is a reciprocally closening of the gap between two individuals. The filmmaker can not film what the subject films, the subject can not film what the filmmaker films. The project is a means of acknowledging human uniqueness as well. Every single person would have filmed something else, some wouldn't have even participated in the project. Hence, one could argue that anything that a person films is of value, regardless of whether or not the film in itself is of artistic quality.

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I was born in 1993 in Borgerhout, Antwerpen. After a leap year, working and travelling, and two years of Bio-Engineering at UA, I started studying Film at KASK Royal School of Arts in 2014. I am very much interested, and aiming to explore in the future, the concept of approaching FILM as SYSTEMS-THEORY based, a method used in sociology, psychology, economy, chemistry, biology, physics etc. focusing on how a system and its constituent parts interact/react.

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Janine Santos

KU Leuven

Representations of the Third World: (Mahal, 2017) and the Subaltern Perspective

 

(Mahal, 2017) is an experimental autoethnographic documentary composed of shot and donated footages from Belgium and the Philippines. In an attempt to represent the subaltern perspective and counter the homogenizing narratives of Third World representations by Western filmmakers, (Mahal, 2017) serves as a voice to the collective experiences of Filipino scholars and migrants who are confronted with issues of displacement, 2nd class citizenship, racism, among others. The participatory nature by which the collective experience has been shaped was through the call for footages and personal photos that fall under the theme of family, friends and longing for home from Filipino migrants and locals. (Mahal, 2017), as an autoethnography which uses the voice as the primary driver of the narrative, allows for the subaltern to speak using the tools provided by Western means of representation.

 

Janine Santos co-founded Cactus Productions with Jeanie Derillo and Hussein Butoyi. As students of Visual and Experimental Anthropology, they came up with (Mahal, 2017)—an experimental authoethnography about their experiences as scholars from the ‘Third World’. (Mahal, 2017) won Best Documentary at the recently concluded Sinag Maynila Independent Film Festival in Manila, Philippines.

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PANEL 5: Impact, action & format 

9 May, 10:30h-12:30h, Koer Cafe

This panel focuses on how to reach specific audiences and use effective formats to do so.

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David Dhert

Independent researcher, filmmaker and visual artist, Belgium/Brazil

"A Place Where We Exist" - Participation and narratives that serve

The story starts in 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As the 2014 FIFA World Cup approaches, the urban indigenous community of Aldeia Maracanã desperately tries to hold on to the last piece of indigenous land in the city. The ground includes an old colonial building that in 1910 had been donated to the indigenous and that ever since has been used as central meeting place for indigenous of diverse ethnicities coming from all over Brazil. It became the symbol for indigenous memory and ancestrality in Brazil. Unfortunately located right next to the world famous Maracanã football stadium, this land is being claimed for the construction of tourist facilities for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. As tension rises and no agreement is being reached, the local government has the indigenous community evicted in a turbulent military operation on March 22, 2013. With no valuable housing alternative being given, the indigenous were now to live spread out over the various favelas of Rio.

I have been living and working within the indigenous movement of Rio from 2012 until 2016, a long term engagement which allowed me for a proper understanding of the people behind the movement, the deep grounds behind the resistance and also to sense the community as a whole. But, perhaps more essential, it also allowed me, as an outsider, to show myself to the community as a potential useful tool for them, for example, by going through some wars together, being able to provide visual proofs of police violence for cases in court and for international human rights organisations. Nevertheless, enticed by the speculative value of the land, the leading politicians chose the money over the indigenous rights. And what for the indigenous had started out as a hopeful road towards having place to live in the city, gradually made place for government involvement, suspicion, an internal fight and finally a violent breaking apart of the community. After the military eviction, the once united indigenous movement of Rio de Janeiro split up in two groups, who remain on fighting terms until date.

 

My presentation will not be a presentation as such, rather a call for participation/a provocation based on some film fragments made when taking part in an indigenous occupation as a filmmaker. While the community increasingly came under pressure and tried to resist to its emanating eviction, several issues came to the front. How does one construct a narrative from within (or at least nearby) a community in conflict? How does one position oneself in that community? And, as forms of resistance are likely to be met with divide-and-rule attacks: how does one deal with the chaos and a flaring internal conflict within the very community and how does one construct a narrative that serves (not extracts)?
 

David Bert Joris Dhert is a Belgian researcher, filmmaker and visual artist working in the field of ethnography. Since 2010, he lives between Belgium and Brazil, where he researches forms of indigenous resistance and identity.

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Preview video-materials.

 

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Duduzile Ndlovu

Post-doc, University of the Witwatersrand

Participant engagement with research output through poetry

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Duduzile Ndlovu is a postdoctoral fellow with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She completed a PhD focusing on the contestation of the silenced memory of the Gukurahundi violence, which occurred in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, by ‘victims’ located in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr Ndlovu’s current research interests are in the use of poetry as a research method with migrant and marginalised populations. She is a Newton Advanced Fellow 2018-2020 at the University of Edinburgh.

 

This video is a project report on using Music and Poetry in a PhD research project. I summarised my PhD thesis into poems in order to disrupt unequal research/participant power dynamics and facilitate better participant engagement with research outputs. The video presents music that formed part of the data in the PhD research project, poetry by the researcher that summarised the thesis and poetry by participants in response to the thesis poetry. The video project aims at producing a project report that can be disseminated to a wider audience beyond the research participants as well as the academy. Participants wanted a documentation of their history, as the topic of the research is one that has not been documented and instead silenced by government authorities. The video is therefore further aimed at giving participants an opportunity to see their stories documented beyond a research report and shared to wider audiences.

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I have blogged about the project at https://letmetellmystoryblog.wordpress.com

 

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Julie Schiltz

PhD researcher, Ghent University, Department of Special Needs Education

Toward a culturally sensitive conceptualization of resilience: Participatory research with war-affected communities in northern Uganda.

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Julie is a PhD researcher at the Department of Special Needs Education at Ghent University. She works on a VLADOC project with South Sudanese refugee youth in northern Uganda and uses photos and videos to better understand how youth experiences their lives in the refugee settlements. She also aims to use video as a means to disseminate her PhD results with a broader audience, as many of the youth explicitly wanted to share their stories. Julie is also co-founder of the Participatory Video Festival #1.

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