Mad Parade

The HTMlles Festival 2014

Diyan Achjadi (Vancouver), claRa apaRicio yoldi (London), Alison Ballard (London), Beate Hecher (Vienna), Sandra Araújo (Porto), Cristine Brache (London), Francesca Fini (Rome), Anne Golden (Montreal), Myriam Jacob-Allard (Montreal), Markus Keim (Vienna), Nelly-Ève Rajotte (Montreal) and Sabrina Ratté (Montreal)

SPECIAL EVENT

GIV (4001, Berri (105). Metro: Mont-Royal)
Free entrance
November 12, 7 PM

Featuring ten works produced between 2010 and 2014, Mad Parade is a 45-minute film and video programme curated by Anne Golden (GIV). It brings together local and international artists who indirectly address the concept of #zerofuture. The re-purposing of images, sounds, and music figures prominently. Also threading their way through the programme are “obsolete” or disappearing and reemerging technologies, as employed and/or critiqued by the artists. The screening will be followed by a Q&A and reception with artists present.

When I hear the words ‘zero future’, I think of ‘no future’, and a notorious punk anthem by the Sex Pistols:

God save the queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

The lyrics are snarled, spat and screamed by Johnny Rotten. Though released in 1977, ‘God Save The Queen’ seems to have thrashed its way through three plus decades, remaining current and prescient. The lyrics ‘England’s dreaming’ continue to resound, as they were chosen for an acclaimed history of the punk movement by Jon Savage (England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, 1991). The headlong punk rush into oblivion also offers a timid form of hope:

When there’s no future
How can there be sin
We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future, your future

Familiar music and soundtracks echo throughout this program. There is a version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ (Harte Arbeit, karger Lohn), the repetitive singing of a word cherished in country music (Les soleils se couchent à l’ouest), re-workings of video game soundtracks (Runtime Error) and a stirring albeit frightening national anthem (Sign Off).

The artists in this program come at the idea of zero future implicitly. Several artists propose a Marxist-influenced re-think of labor and culture (Keim and Hecher, Ballard, Brache) within current ideological systems.

The re-purposing of images, sounds and music also figures prominently. Myriam Jacob-Allard presents a compulsive cataloguing of the word ‘maman’ coupled with images of sunsets. Nelly-Ève Rajotte isolates iconic moments from The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) and places them in conversation with images of disasters. A fictional narrative about violent bird attacks on humans becomes linked to documentary images of appalling catastrophes.

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid

‘God Save the Queen’ makes links to war and to Orwellian surveillance culture (‘All crimes are paid’). Totalitarian Nature (Cristine Brache) oozes observation and control. The words ‘mad parade’ have been in circulation for a long time. Ford Maddox Ford’s tetralogy about the First World War, Parade’s End was published in 1925. The Mad Parade is the title of a 1931 film about women canteen workers near the front in France during World War 1. Mad Parade is also the name of an American punk band formed in 1982. The lyrics of the Sex Pistols song have proven to be highly influential, spawning other bands, books and covers of ‘God Save the Queen’. This one song is rife with allusions to well-known history and culture but it also throws out its own tentacles. This accumulation of associations is mirrored in White Sugar (Francesca Fini), a gleefully macabre collage film, and in Fragmented Memory (claRa apaRicio yoldi), which provides visual ‘evidence’ of the evaporation of knowledge.

Threading their way through the program are ‘obsolete’ or disappearing/reemerging technologies as employed and/or critiqued by Nelly-Ève Rajotte, claRa apaRicio yoldi, Sabrina Ratté and Sandra Araújo. Some of the signals in this program come to us from a video past, one of obsolete formats/technologies and the makers’ (dis) passionate nostalgia.

i
Nelly-Ève Rajotte, 2013, 1 min, no dialogue
Distribution : GIV

An apocalyptic blend of carnage and disaster mixed with excerpts from ‘The Birds’, ’i‘ also references obsolete video technologies and forms.

HARTE ARBEIT, KARGER LOHN (HARD LABOR, MEAGER PAY)
Markus Keim, Beate Hecher, 2013, 2 min, no dialogue
Distribution : the artists

As a particularly saccharine instrumental version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ plays, the artists demonstrate just what hard labor and meager pay entails.

HER NOISE ARCHIVE: SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY OR COMMUNIST UPRISING?
Alison Ballard, 2012, 5 min 5 s, English
Distribution : the artist

A split screen video that is a paean to democracy, a wink at communist propaganda and a manifesto on the role of women in sound art.

FRAGMENT EDMEMORY
claRa apaRicio yoldi, 2013, 3 min 4 s, no dialogue

This video is about the passing of time and about how memory works. The work also engages with the idea that traditional avenues of distribution are becoming obsolete. There are new modes of production, distribution and exhibition that bypass material objects.

TRANSIT
Sabrina Ratté, 2011, 4 min 6 s, no dialogue
Distribution : GIV

An illuminated map of Paris becomes a landscape through various image transformations.

TOTALITARIAN NATURE
Cristine Brache, 2013, 3 min 38 s, English
Distribution : the artist

Totalitarian Nature sheds light on the perception of ‘today’s futures’ as it explores and examines surveillance in contemporary society and exhibitionism in the age of social networking. The video foregrounds issues such as the infantilization of women and restrictive codes of beauty.

WHITE SUGAR
Francesca Fini, 2013, 13 min 12 s, English

A collage film that unfolds with escalating mayhem. White Sugar is a surreal film that incorporates archival material in the public domain. Female figures are removed from their original contexts and inserted into new tableaux that become increasingly perilous.

LES SOLEILS SE COUCHENT À L’OUEST
Myriam Jacob-Allard, 2014, 7 min 38 s, French
Distribution : the artist

To begin with, I grabbed the word ‘mom’ from approximately fifty country songs from 1940 to the present. Each word was then associated with a particular sunset shot by amateurs and available on the web. The word ‘mom’ (which can reference idealized representations of childhood or the idea of origin) and the sunsets (which can designate time passing, the ideal of The West, disappearance and loss, the end of a cycle) are juxtaposed to create an endless accumulation played continuously.’ – Myriam Jacob-Allard

RUNTIME ERROR
Sandra Araújo, 2013, 4 min 12 s, no dialogue
Distribution : the artist

Video games are emergent systems with their own particular internal relationships. This animation mashes up and deconstructs game spaces taking on a multitude of forms, from scrolling on one axis to presenting several separate screens.

SIGN OFF
Diyan Achjadi, 2010, 1 min 30 s, no dialogue
Distribution : GIV

An animated short that re-imagines a television sign-off montage, common in the by-gone days when TV was not a 24-hour phenomenon. Sign Off takes place in a fictionalized world inhabited only by girls who look and dress alike, playing off the patriotic themes inherent in this now-historic form.

Programming partners :
Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV)