Crossing Over : Ostranenie, November 1997

ISSN 1462-0426

The Crossing Over programme included:-

Odiliya Yankova I,RNG Bulgaria , 1997 (00.53 mins)

My experience of video before the Crossing Over workshop was limited. My approach to modern art started with a short course in conceptual art at the Art Akademie in Budapest in 1993 where I was studying sculpture. This was only a short period after the big change which we all had to get through. It was time of confusion for me because my point of view was completely disordered and my values were changing fast. Before this period we had a very defined area of art and were able act within it and then everything changed. And it was very strange because there were many things existing simultaneously which we didn't know about - a very big area of artistic life - and at once this came to us and we had to learn to live with it and to make our art with it and to learn new terms, and a mew way of living. Conceptual art was very comfortable for me because its essence really closed the philosophy which is basic human knowledge so it could be transformed into any situation. I think it was a good start. I always had this desire to come closer to the moving image, the moving reality. So to me the cinema was something very close to me and at once I understood that I could stay an artist and make movies at the same time. So video art was a saving. I was happy that I changed to explore these things more.

The first thing I made was a video documentation as this was more clear to me as it was based on facts just transformed into the moving media. After that I started thinking how I could express a concept into these ways of expression. So the second thing I made was a ten minute video without sound a performance in video. That was how I first appeared in front of the camera.

After that I dared to take the camera in my own hands and tried to advance the other point of view, the point of the viewer. The world consists not only of 2 sides but even more. Making video gave me more possibility to change my place. When you can easily move your point of view it cam be moving to any topic, you learn to be flexible. I, RNG is based on a concept. The world goes on about the problem of identity which is a very basic problem for me. An internal problem. Every person born in Eastern Europe has to cope with this change and this is well known. I've never been into the political side of things so to me the problem of identity was always very personal and I tried somehow to enlarge it and this is how I came to the philosophical understanding of identity. The title is an abbreviation of the computer term, random number generation and this film puts the question of difference between our desire to be something that we wish and the facts of outer reality, the facts of our bodies and our minds as the medium of our person because actually we live first inside our bodies and our brains and them we live inside the world. These are two spheres in communication all the time but it is not a simple process.

I chose about 20-25 people I know and shot their faces turning around and at the end of the sequence I shot my own face because you always have to find a point to stop. It's easy for everyone to find the end point inside themselves. There is the area where you put all your questions inside your heard. The possibility that others are within you is implied but the sequence tells you I might be anyone and everyone but I'm not a separate different thing, why do I have to be?

Branka Milicic-Davic Dream Yugoslavia, 1997 (3.53mins)

Branka Milicic-Davic : This was my first video and I made it from film I shot with my performance group, Group Baza. I actually planned to make a long documentary of the performance we did last year which dealt with the situation in Yugoslavia on two levels : 1) how a person meets their own limits in work and in communication and 2) how a person feels about the borders around the country or society in which they live. As you realised in the video we are dealing with the body, no words are spoken, neither in the video nor in the performance. I used the sound of my own breathing as the only possible sound. I had quite a lot of material but I just decided to make a short film, partly because of time and partly because I wanted to make a dream/nightmare where you cannot realise quite what is going on.

Katy Deepwell : The people appear as if they are asleep because of the breathing sound but as the camera slowly moves around the images turn into what they are dreaming about and the piece takes on a very dark atmosphere of a nightmare.

Branka Milicic-Davic : The conception is done in such a way that you cannot realise whether this is a dream or a reality. My personal experience in the last few years living in Yugoslavia is that you cannot realise it as a bad dream or as a reality. You just cannot understand why just simple things cannot be realised and you cannot find any reason for this. Everything is just somehow surrealistic. The film captures this and is also surrealistic. There is nothing happening in the film, but everything is happening at the same time. You never see the whole body. Sometimes you do not even recognise parts of the body. It's just a kind of colour. You cannot see which is male or which is female. There is also an attempt to show what you see or realise in a performance - in the performance I shot, I am on the floor and I see it from another perspective to the audience. I see things which the audience cannot see -sweating - small pieces of the body which maybe do not tell much to the audience but it's like when you see your friends or someone in front of you, you realise small things which tell you something about the person and that's what I like.

Katy Deepwell: There is a poignant moment in the film where a bandaged arm drops against a larger mass of body. The images appear like an adult and child.

Branka Milicic-Davic : No, there is no child but its interesting you see it. Maybe its unconscious but I never planned it that way. The performance '4',which is what was filmed, played at several international festivals. 4 is a symbol of women's energy and at the same time the four walls of a cage/room. The fifth wall which you cannot see is the ceiling - it is that which you are trying to reach your whole life, reaching higher and higher.

Copyright © : N.Paradoxa , 1997

N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5 ,November 1997