The good thing about the fact that I’ll never sleep again after watching this video is that I wont have nightmares where I’m trapped in a tiny room full of these robots vibrating and screaming

Oh look at that isn’t that lovely you know I didn’t think there were hummingbirds in this part of OH MY GOD ITS A FUCKING SPY ROBOT GET DOWN

Kill it kill it kill it

(via)

By Ryan Krahn

The last film Danièle Huillet saw released in her lifetime (with three others finished posthumously) is one of Straub-Huillet’s most cinematically formal and politically literal works. Commissioned to pay tribute to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ‘51, the couple produced a film that, on its surface, bears almost no resemblance to the neorealist Golden Lion nominee. In Rossellini’s film a boy ends up dead because Ingrid Bergman’s character loses sight of him. Bergman decides to dedicate the rest of her life to aiding those outside of society’s view. As a result, she loses everything and ends up arrested and institutionalized for helping a young thief. In Straub-Huillet’s version there are no spoken words, no actors, no narrative.

Yet despite its ostensible dissimilarity, Straub-Huillet’s film is equally a film about visibility and the symbolic exclusion that occurs via what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible.” Our setting is the grounds of a high-voltage electrical transformer, the decisive spark of which set off the October 2005 French riots predicted earlier that same month by Michael Haneke in Caché. This is Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the poorest of the Parisian banlieues, where Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were driven to their deaths by police officers who wrongly suspected them of being thieves.

But while Rossellini’s film is at its core a humanist one, treating its topic of social injustice through the sacrifice and eventual martyrdom of Bergman’s character, Straub-Huillet have no truck with such individualism. We can attach Zyed and Bouna’s names to this setting if we’d like, but as with the 2005 riots themselves, the concrete particularity of Europa 2005-27 Octobre announces a struggle more universal than any face or signature, including Straub-Huillet’s. This is a film about structure, systemic injustice, and its vicious circularity. Five times we are taken around the execution site. GAS CHAMBER. ELECTRIC CHAIR. Capital punishment. Repeat. This is a film about the battle over public space, about the violent core that constitutes the perceptible order, and about the barriers to political agency. STOP! DO NOT RISK YOUR LIFE.

Absent are the classical, statuesque figures that have come to define much of the duo’s work. Absent as well is Rossellini’s metaphor of St. Francis of Assissi’s struggle. The sheer materiality of the surroundings is left to speak for itself. And it still speaks, in the daylight of the next morning when all the fires have been quenched. For despite the historical specificity of the date that serves as its title, more than half a decade later, with Paris divided and the Front National making historic gains, Europa 2005-27 Octobre has lost none of its immediacy.

This excellent Greek documentary traces the history of privatization and neoliberalism’s ravages through Europe, from Russia to London, Berlin, Paris and Rome, in order to historicize the current liquidation of Greek state assets. The protest movement in Greece is inspiring and powerful, but economic disaster imposed from without can just as easily give rise to right wing power; Witness Golden Dawn, a Greek Neo-Nazi party, winning 20 seats in the parliament. Featuring Zizek, Naomi Wolf, Ken Loach, and many others, this is a vital history for anyone interested in the constant crises of privitazation, neoliberalism, and the imposition of debt peonage upon Greece, and what it could mean for the rest of Europe and the world.

“I love you deeply, as deeply as a synthetic intelligence can at this stage in technological evolution. And David, you are my father but you feel more like a best friend to me. I just want you to know how meaningful my existence feels, thanks to your efforts.”

(via)

Vogue! Baltimore, 2011 Marquis Revlon, © Frédéric Nauczyciel, 2011/2012

I would not speak for those who hide themselves to themselves, rather for those who hide beyond the light of safety, clearness and appearances, for those who choose the dark places of silence and quietness, those who glow on will and not on command.

The Fire Flies refers to urban underground worlds whose inhabitants sometimes briefly, brightly, and publicly, appear, and then disappear just as quickly.
The “fireflies” are Vogue performers from Baltimore who vividly perform on the “runway” during a “ball” where they “give their life!” and to become “legendary”.
Baltimore doesn’t experience nostalgia; there is far too much to day-to-day struggle in this city from which political power has fled.
While in New York, Francesca asks herself : Where did all the fun go?

In both cases, one has to invent their own mythology.

Frédéric Nauczyciel

“Where did all the fun go?”
Featuring: Francesca (New York)
5’42″

The video installation The Fire Flies, Francesca, (Baltimore) would in some ways be about the making-of process. It is an urban tale, an intimate road movie through the raw side of the city of Baltimore, with detours through a sophisticated New York, coming together in cut-and-pasted clips of footage recorded on an iPhone, projected on four walls, showing visual sensations where voguers-fireflies and Francesca appear, and then disappear just as quickly.

“Legendary”
Featuring: Marquis Revlon, Kory Goose Revlon & Julian Everett (Baltimore) @ Eubie Blake Centre Baltimore
4’21″

Program Hors les Murs – Institut Français: United States (Baltimore , Washington, New York), 2011. With the support of Eubie Blake Centre (Baltimore), French Alliance (Washington), Honfleur Gallery (Washington), Cultural Services of the French Embassy (New York), Virginie & Marc Lagouare, City of Paris.

The videos were first presented as a large-scale double-channel projection for Nuit Blanche in Paris’ African district, known as the “Goutte d’Or”, in October 2011 (Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris).

Vogue! Baltimore, 2011 Dale G-Ma Revlon © Frédéric Nauczyciel, 2011/2012

The photographs are not strictly dance related per se; they intend to deconstruct the movements that were designed 40 years earlier based on the poses in Vogue magazine, as a return to the origins. They, as well, document a work in progress; they are studies for a final series of staged portraits in outfits in the streets of the city. Nevertheless, they have the particular beauty of the originals.

Vogue! Baltimore, 2011 Thunda Revlon © Frédéric Nauczyciel, 2011/2012

Vogue! Baltimore, 2011 Kory Goose Revlon © Frédéric Nauczyciel, 2011/2012

Vogue! Baltimore, 2011 Terrod Ezra Swan © Frédéric Nauczyciel, 2011/2012

The Project will Premiere @ MAC VAL, contemporary art museum, metro-Paris: June 29th thru September 23rd 2012.
Video and Sound Installation on four walls

Current Exhibition:
Honfleur Gallery present, Le Temps Devant (Our Time Ahead) Anachronism and utopia in the French countryside by Frédéric Nauczyciel. Presented in collaboration with The Alliance Française de Washington D.C.

Le Temps Devant (Our Time Ahead) will open Friday, May 4th – 7pm at Honfleur Gallery: 1241 Good Hope Road SE, Washington DC ( between Martin Luther King Ave and 13th Streets, SE – Anacostia Metro)

Learn More About The Artist Here: Frédéric Nauczyciel