Watershed's Digital Projects Coordinator and artist Aikaterini Gegisian, has been invited to a young artists' workshop until the end of May, at the Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece. Aikaterini is keeping a diary recording her experience and work-in-progress leading up to the opening of the Thessaloniki.
The State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Greece, is organizing the 1st Biennale of Contemporary Art which takes place between 21 May - 30 Sept 2007 and aims to place Thessaloniki and the entire country in general, into the Biennale art network. Under the general title of "Heterotopias", the main body of the exhibitions and the artistic activities is accompanied by a series of parallel events, embracing a wide range of the artistic creation. The objective of this project is the public's familiarization and participation with the current art scene, thus providing the audience with a convenient and friendly access to spaces which are not restricted to the museum's walls.
(click on thumbnails to view larger images)
In the context of the Thessaloniki Biennale:1 of Contemporary Art I was invited to participate in a workshop for young artists. The workshop was envisaged as much as a laboratory for the production of work in situ and in response to the city of Thessaloniki, as well as a meeting and an opportunity for a dialogue between artists from around the world. The workshop takes place form the 7 - 20 May with the exhibition opening in the Archaeological Museum of the City on the 22 May.
The first three days of the workshop focused on meeting the 18 artists that one by one arrived from countries such as France, UK, Russia, Armenia, Iran, Palestine, Finland and Greece. We spend time getting to know each other and familiarising ourselves with the empty factory in the outskirts of the city that will be our studio space for the next two weeks. We also got to know the city and its many facets and of course the exhibition spaces in the Archaeological Museum of the city where the exhibition will take place.
Working under the intensity of a short period of time and within the closed microcosmos of an artist group leaves one seeking some private space. Likely enough this is the city where I was born and could easily escape from the family of artists to my own family, which has not made things easier.
However, because of the nature of my project - a visual reflexive documentary on an immigrant community of Greek-Russian dissent that came to Thessaloniki from Kazakhstan in the beginning of the nineties - I left the artists group in search of locations and of my subjects. I have discovered that the community over the years have settled in a self-build shanty town in the northwest area of Thessaloniki that is now called Nicopolis or Euxinoupoli. In parallel looking for images that function as reminders of the different of movement of population I paid a visit to a derelict train site in the industrial area of the city. Over the next two days I am working on storyboarding and locating more sites. In the weekend I will start shoot the interviews with the community.
Over the last 10 years, Greece started receiving its first economic immigrants in its modern history, many of whom settled in the city of Thessaloniki in the north of the country. At the same time the city developed rapidly into an extensive urban network with new areas being built up by specific communities. I spent the weekend filming interviews in one of these new areas inhabited by a community of Russian-Greeks that came from Kazakhstan which was a great experience that turned into a celebratory meal form my self and my assistant and involved most of the community.
Because the city is constantly congested and the temperature has been rising to 32 degrees (very warm even for this part of the world) reaching the different location I was interested to document has been difficult and trying to set a film shoot in the brilliant sun has been quite challenging.
Today, I started the day early hoping to work through the footage I shot yesterday and make decisions on what else I need to shoot over the next few days. And in the mist of a quiet morning disaster struck, one of my tapes got stuck in my camera, which sent into panic land. Realising that I could not do anything until Monday when shops and services are open I decided to take the bus to a close-by beach hoping that the sun and slat of the sea will sooth the anguish of the last week. Since I cannot get any film stills as yet, I am sending an image of the beach.
The second week of the workshop started with me trying to resolve the problem with the tape being stuck in the camera and to arrange equipment, crew and car for the shooting on Tuesday. Tuesday was a long day with locations shoots in different parts of the city that involved very detailed slow tracking shots. I got all the material I wanted and that meant I could start the viewing and editing process.
I have to admit, I spent the first week of the workshop in the locations I was interested in documenting and not much time in the workshop with the other artists. This meant that I had lost touch with what other artists were doing and the connection with the group. So going back to the workshop on Wednesday was quite a strange experience. I was glad to catch up with people and have the chance to work in a concentrated creative environment.
For the last two days I have been watching all the footage shot, around 4 hours, making notes on the parts I want to use and digitising the selected shots. Following Godard’s ideas of ‘montage before, while and after shooting’, I am passing now the second stage of editing out material and preparing for the final and quite complicated layering of images and voices. I am at the moment where the work is almost there but you cannot still grasp it so I will not try to contextualise it or explain its form. The only thing I can say is that I am avoiding using the traditional ‘talking heads’ convention of documentary and want to question how much of what I am doing can be an authentic representation of a perceived reality. On that note I have to eat some breakfast.
Note: Shooting photo credit Rowan Geddis
I have spent the last 3 days almost locked in my hotel room trying to edit the film. This is the first time that I am working on a video that is based on interviewing a particular community and trying to document their experiences and spaces they inhabit. I was always interested in exploring documentary techniques and especially the observational mode but in the past this was expressed in my work as an investigation of the everyday and a search for a personal geography.
In editing this film I concentrated on the stories narrated to me by the community about their experiences of exile within the Soviet Union, about coming to Greece and the difficulties they faced trying to set up a new life. I decided not to use any of the footage from the interviews but rather concentrate on the narration. So in final edit their stories are told as a voice-over that is juxtaposed to tracking shots of deserted derelict trains and tracking shots of the streets of the neighbourhoods they have set-up. The film begins with a static view of the area from above and features a figure of a woman walking in the distance. This image is juxtaposed with my own narration, which is an attempt to reveal the position of the maker and the impossibility of documenting all aspects of a supposed reality.
The film runs to around 14 minutes and I have by now established the rhythm of the edit. I am working late into the night on translating the interviews from Greek to English and then putting subtitles in the film. I have to admit that this was not something that I thought from the beginning and it was in that last stage that I realised that without the subtitles the work will not be accessible to most of the biennale:1 visitors. The tile of the work is ‘Passengers’.
Tonight is the first day of opening of the bienalle:1 so I am having a break from my computer. Our opening is tomorrow. Scary.