online video
EFFI & AMIR
VIRGILE FRAISSE
programme
The two films Housewarming and Prediction/Production bring forth spoken and sung words for the former, and repeated words in interview conditions filmed in front of the camera for the latter. The sung and spoken texts of Housewarming come from excerpts of interviews conducted by Effi Weiss and Amir Borenstein in Albania in May 2014. The film was shot in different places in Albania where abandoned building sites of houses resemble one another, giving on to the mountainous landscapes round about. From then on, Effi & Amir have been involved in strange housewarming ceremonies. Virgile Fraisse’s film Prediction/Production shot entirely in Marseille, in places representative and significant of the city, refers to a genre, the series, and, to be more precise, Netflix devoted to Marseille. The film borrows from and cites existing discourses and deals with the perception of the three emblematic places in Marseille. In both films the perception of spaces is not immune from the words which are overlaid on it.
Effi & Amir
Housewarming
2016, 34 mn
Production: La chose à trois jambes, co-production: ORAFILM, CBA-Centre de l’audiovisuel à Bruxelles
Avec le soutien de: Centre du cinéma et de l'audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Vlaams Audiovisuel Fonds, Ostrovsky Family Fund, ARGOS - Centre for Art & Media
Housewarming is a proposition of an inverse immigration, from the full to the empty, from excess to lack. It evolves around these and other oppositional terms - inside/outside, host/guest - examining the threshold, the transitory space between these (artificial) dichotomies. The work is shot in abandoned private houses in ex-communist Albania. The artists invade the houses, occupy their emptiness and 3 missing furniture: chair, table, bed, while the local community comments in song and speech on the new arrivals and their enterprise.
The work’s text - sung and spoken - is based on a series of interviews we held in Albania, regarding our plan to immigrate to this country (a real plan, at that stage). The 4 songs, written by a poet from Tirana, were then interpreted by an iso-polyphony choir, in an attempt to create a contemporary mythology of an immigration in the opposite direction. E&A
Virgile Fraisse
Prediction/Production
2016, 9 mn
In the manner of an anthropological study, Prediction/Production focuses on the new Netflix series, Marseille (2016). Written and produced in the short period between the announcement of the series and the distribution of the first season, this science-fiction film analyses the geopolitical implications underlying the production of the series. Shot in three strategic places in the city of Marseille, the film is structured through borrowing of discourses and quotations from different actors, connected with the problem. From Hillary Clinton’s neo-colonial discourse, 21st Century Statecraft, to the declaration by Reed Hastings, director of Netflix, claiming that his series are produced with the help of algorithms, to an interview with one of the supporting role actors in the series. How can one measure the possibilities of countering the colonization of the image-circulation flow? VF