VideoPerforma: McButo / HI-RES

exhibition and opening of the festival

This year’s video:performa embraces two perspectives that cross the bridge between the normative and the marked reading of a relation, which they attempt to surpass also by posing relevant questions. Two unavoidable views on passion and a lump in one’s throat, which are an integral part of any "love relationship". This kind of "love relationship" can be recognised also in our work as well as in our relation toward other things – toward dance, theory, food, way of life. These two views will be traversed by introducing the new and the unknown, contributed by multimedia artist Nataša Berk.

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SIVA: McButo

The collective SIVA (Andreja Džakušič, Ivut Aivai, Simon Macuh), founded in 2009, investigates common everyday phenomena, such as clothes, food, leisure time, and alike, in extraordinary ways. SIVA prepares their works depending on the characteristics of the event and the space where it is held.
 
The action McButoh belongs to a series Clothes … the man, in which SIVA investigate how man’s outer appearance (the clothes) defines the environment’s reactions to him. To be more precise, the collective has devised a series of actions through which they subvert the codes of social knowledge in relation to differently marked public spaces, with an aim to disclose the procedures of marking, encoding, and standardising the relations knowledge / clothes – situation.
The video McButoh is opening up a number of questions about the procedures of encoding and normativization. Through simple and everyday situations and by way of shifting the markers, the collective reveals how the body is immersed in the area of the norm and the attendant self-regulation. Similarly as in Butoh dance, everything in the video is slowed down – micro movements function as an opposition to hyper-accelerated lifestyles, or to be more concrete, to eating habits, imposed by fast-food restaurant chains.
With the choice of the form of a dance video, the collective also cuts through the field of the medium itself, playing with the difference between capability/possibility of the body and the capability/possibility of technology (slowing down the movement for the camera or with it).

Created by: SIVA
Genre: Video performans / video performance
Duration: 36:39 min
Medium: DVD – Video

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Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid: HI-RES

Produced in collaboration with Institute EMANAT, Ljubljana, and VPK, Ljubljana, 2006

The video HI-RES is based on the dance performance HI-RES by Maja Delak and Mala Kline. The video poses questions and gives some unexpected answers to what is to be done in contemporary art/dance today, what are the limits of representation as a framework that affects and infects contemporary dance, and what is the capacity of the dancing body in generating meaning for itself and others. HI-RES develops two powerful states of action and contemplation: boredom and dizziness, which are constantly perpetuated by politics and the analysis of the global capitalist system and its performative politics.
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Written and directed by: Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid
Text in the video written by: Marina Gržinić
Choreography: Maja Delak and Mala Kline
Dancers: Maja Delak and Mala Kline
Actor: Gregor Zorc
Camera: Ivica Stojanović
Camera assistant: Iztok Sajdl
Editing: Svetlana Dramlić
Post production of sound: Drago Kociš
The Song is performed by Stefan Geissler and Jakob Ortis

Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid are involved in video since 1982. They have collaborated in more than 40 video art projects; they made a short feature 16 mm film and numerous video and media installations. Independently they directed several video documentaries and television productions. In 1997, they realized an interactive CD-ROM for ZKM, Karlsruhe. Their works have been presented and exhibited in more than 100 video festivals around the world and have received several major awards. In 2003, a retrospective of their works (1985 – 2003) was held at the Oberhausen International short film festival, Germany. A book was published about their work in Slovenian (2006) and in English (2009).  http://grzinic-smid.si/