Public Workshop: Between tool and matter: The Art of Interview
Duration: 3-7 June:
A workshop organised by Anna Rispoli and Adva Zakai
The practice of interview is living a golden age in visual arts and live art contexts. Often a series of interviews supports the creation of video-documentaries as a research tool, frame site-specific performances, or create the first bonding for community-based projects. At the same time it is not rare to experience works of art that take interviews as their conceptual object of artistic reflection. The difference between those two approaches often appears blurry. More so, it produces challenging ethical and aesthetic questions concerning the power relation between the interviewer as an author and the interviewee as an authority - or inverse.
Methodologies and perspectives from various fields will be reflected upon in relation to each other during the workshop: Artists who make use of the interview in their artistic trajectory will discuss their works with each other and the participants. Sociologists and phd researchers will introduce interview protocols and share their exploration of ethical implications linked to the relationship interviewee/interviewer. Specifically, we will exercise sensitive listening, watch and analyze case studies of interviews, and focus on the creation of subjective tales within the urban experience. Along the workshop days, participants will share and feedback the content produced during the workshop from the perspective of their own practice.
Schedule & invitees (biographies below)
>> 3rd June, 14h00 - 21h00: Introduction to the workshop (Anna and Adva)
Guest: Jan Zienkowski
Intervention by: Delphine Hesters
Jan Zienkowski will outline a view on the interview as a technology of the self, a mode of interaction whereby interviewers and interviewees co-construct a particular sense of self in relation to each other, and in relation to the topics discussed within the interview context. As such, he will outline a critical perspective on the classic social-scientific interview and its ideals of objectivity and neutrality. Examples are derived from his research on interviews conducted with activists and intellectuals involved in the Flemish debates on integration and diversity. Particular attention will be devoted to poststructuralist and interactional approaches to the interview.
Delphine Hesters, sociologist and researcher, will join the session and intervene with comments and additional informations and observations from her field of operation.
A screening of the film Same river twice (2013), by artists Effi & Amir
effi & amir: www.effiandamir.net Same River Twice: www.deuxfoislememefeuve.net
>> 4th June, 10h00 - 17h00
Guest: Antonia Rahofer, PhD at the University of Art and Design in Linz
Intervention by: Benedikte Zitouni, St-Louis University, Brussels
Having a background in cultural studies, Rahofer will focus on the use and appropriation of the interview in recent video art. She will discern fundamental core interests or forces in interviewing procedures and ask about their relation with representation and power. During the session there will be an introduction into the roots of the practice in conceptual art, effects of media change, tendencies of recent documentary style videos etc.The day will include theoretical sessions ,practical exercises and group discussions.
>> 5th June, 10h00 - 17h00
Guest: Jean-Yves Petiteau
In the last ten years the sociologist and anthropologist Jean-Yves Petiteau developed a methodology of deep listening of the interviewee person. The inhabitant invites us to follow him, to choose and re-stage the places where he is confronted with fragments of his history. The Itinerances Method allows to transmit this experience which is directly linked to the art of making the city. « Le territoire est à la fois celui qui est expérimenté et parcouru dans l’espace-temps de cette journée, et celui du récit métaphorique. L’interviewé nous livre en situation une histoire au présent et la mise en scène de cette journée particulière confère à son récit la portée d’une parabole. »
During the day, Petiteau will give a lecture about his practice and will show and comment the film Itinerary, created together with Jean Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet.
>> 6th June, 13h00 - 18h00
Guest: Kobe Mathys / Agency
A collective reading session of 2 law cases about interview copyrights and authorship. the cases witness how intellectual property rights interfere with an ecology of interview practices.
……
Guest: Elke van Campenhout, Effi & Amir
An interview about interviews
Elke van Campenhout conducts interviews in her artistic and theoretical practice. She explored over the years various strategies of not only the act of interview itself, but as well the process of its data into a presentation of different forms. Based on her experience and interest in the field, Elke will interview Effi and Amir about their last film.
>> 7th June, 10h00 - 17h00
A session lead by Nicolas Galeazzi about participants feedback and reflection on their own practice.
Biographies
Jan Zienkowski currently teaches Media Studies en Critique at Erasmushogeschool Brussel and research associate at the University of Antwerp. He also taught a course on the anthropological study of intercultural contacts at the KULeuven. In 2011, he obtained a PhD in linguistics on the basis of his research the political engagements of intellectuals and activists with a Moroccan background in Flanders. Throughout the past ten years, Jan Zienkowski has developed a broad area of interest and expertise in disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, and communication sciences. In the meanwhile, he has organized and taught various non-academic workshops on discourse analysis, debating, and media-training. Most of these workshops were organized within the context of the intercultural platform Kif Kif.
Delphine Hesters studied sociology and cultural management. Since 2011, she works as a researcher at the Vlaams Theater Instituut (Flemish Theatre Institute), where she studies the field of the performing arts and cultural policies in Flanders. Before, she obtained a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Leuven based on a research on the concepts and methods for the study of identity and culture in research on ethnic minorities. In Fall 2009, Delphine was a visiting researcher at the sociology department of Harvard University. As a cultural sociologist, she equally researched the careers of contemporary dancers in Flanders, the Brussels’ dance community and Flemish cultural policy. Between 2007 and 2011, Delphine Hesters was a member of the Advisory Committee for the Arts of the Flemish government. Delphine equally works as a researcher at the Institute for Human Activities, for which she is affiliated to the School of arts (KASK) in Ghent.”
Antonia Rahofer is currently pursuing a PHD about interviews in the arts. Together with Usha Reber, literature scholar from Vienna and Marc Ries, professor at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, Rahofer is developing a research project on interview as cultural technique.
Benedikte Zitouni is professor of sociology at Université de Bruxelles - Saint-Louis. She studied in Brussels and Paris and had research residencies in Oxford et à Berkeley. Her books are : Agglomérer. Une anatomie de l’extension bruxelloise (1828-1915) (VUB University of Brussels Press & ASP, 2010); Usus/usures (CFWB, 2010, with Rotor and Ariane d’Hoop for Biennale d’Architettura di Venezia). Recently she has written articles about: Donna Haraway et les savoirs situés; some experimental notions about social sciences (otherworldliness,more-than-human-worlds); Brussels urbanisation versus the technocratic invention. She is currently writing an article about 80’s American and English eco-feminists.
Jean-Yves Petiteau is a French sociologist and professor of urban studies associated with CRESSON - CNRS workshop of École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble. His work especially focuses on staging strategies of the public space, and on the relationship between image and narration. He wrote together with Elisabeth Pasquier Cultiver son jardin, Chroniques des jardins de la Fournillère 1992-2000. One of his texts inspired the film Itinéraire de Jean Bricard by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
Agency is the generic name of a Brussels-based agency that was established in 1992 by Kobe Matthys. Agency constitutes a growing list of things that resist the split between culture and nature. These things are mostly derived from juridical processes, lawsuits, cases, controversies, affairs and so forth involving intellectual properties (copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc…). The concept of intellectual property relies upon the assumption of the division between culture and nature and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and tradition, individuals and collectives, mind and body, etc…. Each thing on the list invokes the moment of hesitation in terms of those divisions.
Agency calls things forth from it’s list via varying assemblies inside exhibitions, performances, publications, etc… Each assembly speculates topologically on a different question of the performative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices and paying attention to other types of agencies.
Effi & Amir are visual artists who live and work together since 1999. Studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Their work is not confined to a specific discipline but often involves video, performance and partcipatory elements. In their work they are interested in collective or symbolic identities and the way they are constructed through myths, beliefs, memory, self-image design and such. Apart from their own artistic projects, they collaborate with other artists as editors, cameramen and effects designers. They facilitate video workshops worldwide, destinated to diverse audiences. Same River Twice is their first feature length documentary.
Elke van Campenhout and Nicolas Y Galeazzi are artists and researchers in the field of performance. They are the coordinators and mentors of the a.pass artistic research program