Home of the Brave – Archaeology of the Moving Image

“The function of the image, as Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolize it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.”
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Under the roof of the title Home of the Brave, Corner College evolves a series of rather heterogeneous events with lectures, talks, screenings, workshops, performative relations and experiments that de-automate our “experiences of vision” (Vertov), in a multivalent engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the moving image and its creative, analytical, critical and feminist power, rather than to represent certain concepts of trends or schools.

We, borrowing this “WE” from “WE: Variant of a Manifesto’’ by Dziga Vertov, which is actually a collective persona of three: a director, a camera operator, and an editor, we, “a collectivity” of themes, problems and questions, we, with the magnitude and collectivity of the event, “on the wing of hypothesis” and analysis, we contemplate the moving image as a collection and composition of relations of movement and rest, we go with the rhythm of its movements to experience the moment of the direct image and concrete time: “Drawings in motion; Blueprints in motion; Plans for the future;” and beyond.

The main title of this series is appropriated from Laurie Anderson’s 1986 concert film or multimedia ‘talking opera,’ in which one can encounter a hallucinatory world of bizarre magnitudes of composed sequences or lengths, mobilizing all quantity and intensities of disconnected virtual raining drops that come down and go underground and then come back, as they are composing quantities. These dots of ungrounded or groundless smaller and larger pieces are the virtual impregnation of the real with thousands of specters.

See the complete text by Dimitrina Sevova announcing the series: PDF (145 KB).

Deutsch (English below):

Das Medium Video (und Audio) war das ideale Medium für die feministische Künstlerin der 80iger Jahre. Video war damals wie heute künstlerisch nicht festgeschrieben. Das schafft Raum. Es gab schon damals, als wir anfingen, tolle Vorreiterinnen wie Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, Valie Export u.a. auf die wir uns beziehen konnten. Video ist ein „praktisches“ Ding, es ist kompakt, leuchtend und klein und schliesst soviel ein: Bild, Bewegung, Zeitlichkeit, Rhythmus, Abstraktion, Figur, Erzählung, Farbe, Sprache, Musik, Dokument und Fiktion. Video wie Musik impliziert Teamarbeit, das hilft gegen künstlerische Einsamkeit. Das ist schön.

English (Deutsch siehe oben):

The medium of video (and audio) was the ideal medium for the feminist artists of the 1980s. Video was then not artistically determined, and still isn’t. This makes space. Even then, as we started, there were amazing pioneers like Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, Valie Export and others, to which we could refer. Video is a “practical” thing; it is compact, bright and small and includes so much: image, movement, temporality, rhythm, abstraction, figure, narration, color, language, music, document and fiction. Video, like music, implies teamwork; this helps against artistic loneliness. This is beautiful.

Corner College in collaboration with Sonnenstube present:

Alberto Boccardi’s minimalist orchestral piece, Fingers, is an electro-acoustic journey that has been innerved by the contribution of multiple instrumentalists. The result is a contrast between repetitive elements and hypnotic loops with electronic and acoustic layers surfacing before disappearing into the variable and floating element known as time.

The material has been recorded between Kazakhstan, Italy and Iceland, over a period of 8 months: from the field recording materials of the Kazakh winter to the feeble piano notes of the Greenhouse studio in Reykjavik.

Fingers is released via Important Records’ Cassauna series (tape) and Monotype/Catsun (CD).

vimeo.com/100997863 || vimeo.com/100997864

The event is curated by Sébastien Peter of Sonnenstube.

The art of reading fiction is probably one of the most understated intellectual practices of our time – a practice that requires creative artistic passion and invention to re-activate and re-animate the written text through reading. Fiction, it seems, is the secret undercurrent of our desire for other moods and encounters with characters, for a peculiar garden of many times to blossom for a prolonged moment of timelessness in the midst of our everyday. We enter fiction on the train, in the transitions between spaces, when the kids are in bed. We live its intensities, cry with its protagonists, anticipate futures through its signs, and become someone else through fiction.

Writing has always been a collective process, while reading is often a lonely endeavor. For Reading Fiction and Its Theoretical Monster Prodigies we want to begin reading fiction together, discussing it and working with it, a process that occurs in the circulation between the two poles of writing and reading, with its infinity of loops and ripples and leaps in which writing becomes reading, and reading becomes writing. Fiction, we suggest, plunges us into the virtual that constitutes a vital part of our reality. We want to explore fiction’s multiple temporalities while reading, thinking, talking and writing collectively, drawing lines from the power of fiction to our own creative practices. From reading, we might start drawing, scribbling, doodling, writing, typing, reading aloud to one another, co-writing, or (why not?) singing each other’s re-collection of words and their lines and figures. The possibilities are plentiful.

Reading Fiction and Its Theoretical Monster Prodigies arises from an urgency to activate forms of écriture collective, of a new wave of creative encounters with language that becomes the other of itself, a stranger to itself, capable of re-animating the power of fiction to shape the real.

The format is open to your active involvement, aiming at collaborations in and through fiction. Everyone is welcome to add new material and suggest practical experiments. Periodically, we will look back and think of ways to share our investigations with a public.

For the first session of Écriture Collective – Fabulous Fiction we propose to read excerpts of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, pp. 5-23.

Deutsch (English below):

Die wiederkehrende Koexistenz von Videoinstallation, Skulptur und Zeichnung in Zilla Leuteneggers Arbeiten steht auch in der Performance mit dem Titel „Uncanny Likeness“ im Fokus. Es werden zwei essentielle Themen in Zilla Leuteneggers Arbeiten auftauchen: Einerseits die Kombination von Farben und Formen und andererseits der “bewegte Strich im Raum”.

Anders als in den räumlichen Installationen wird hier eine Momentaufnahme stattfinden, die nach der Performance wieder verschwindet. Mit „Uncanny Likeness“, also mit einer frappierenden Ähnlichkeit, soll dieser Versuch, eine Ballerina zu imitieren, ein Rennrad zu fahren oder Gewicht zu stemmen, von ihr mit einer gefühlten Leichtigkeit in bewegte Bildinstallationen in Einklang gebracht werden. Es sind Momentaufnahmen unaufgeregter Alltagssituationen.



English (Deutsch siehe oben):

The recurring coexistence of video installation, sculpture and drawing in Zilla Leutenegger’s works is once again the focus of her performance under the title “Uncanny Likeness”. Two of the essential themes of her work will make their appearance: On the one hand, the combination of colors and forms, and on the other the “moving line in the space”.

Unlike in spatial installations there will now be a snapshot that disappears after the performance. With “Uncanny Likeness” she shall try to reconcile her attempt to imitate a ballerina, to ride a race bicycle or to lift weights, with perceived ease, into moving image installations. These are snapshots of unexciting everyday situations.

Deutsch (English below):

Die chilenisch-schweizerische Künstlerin Ingrid Wildi Merino wurde 1963 in Santiago de Chile geboren und musste wegen der Diktatur mit ihrer Familie 1981 ins politische Exil in die Schweiz emigrieren. Sie verwendet Interviews und Installationen, um einen Bereich der Reflektion herzustellen im Hinblick auf Migration, Deterritorialisierung und den daraus resultierenden Status des Deplaziert-Seins. Ihre Arbeit hinterfragt die Globalisierung, was sie dazu führt, sich mit Migration zu beschäftigen sowie mit anderen Fragestellungen wie soziale, kulturelle und politische Differenzen in Bezug auf die Ökonomie und die globale Entwicklungspolitik, die der Migration entspringen.

Die europäischen Gesellschaften durchlaufen derzeit einen komplexen Prozess der Wiederanpassung der Strukturen und Mechanismen, die seit dem 18. Jahrhundert die Diskurse der Moderne gestützt haben (Kant, Rousseau, Hegel). Dieser Prozess beruht teils auf dem Zusammenbruch der modernen Meta-Geschichten, unter ihnen das sogenannte Ende der Utopien und das Ende der Geschichte. Gleichzeitig haben Mikronarrative zu Migration neue Möglichkeiten aufgezeigt, das Zusammentreffen von kulturellen Räumen, von Menschen und Politiken zu verstehen. Seit den 1960er Jahre gab es eine Massenmigration von Lateinamerikaner_innen, um der komplexen politischen Situation zu entrinnen und bessere wirtschaftliche Bedingungen zu suchen – Beweggründe, die nicht gänzlich voneinander zu trennen sind. Insbesondere in Europa hat dieses Phänomen die Landkarten der Identität in Aufnahmeländern verändert, auch wenn diese Landkarten oft als eine Art Negativität im kollektiven Unterbewussten versteckt bleiben. Desgleichen sind die Gemeinschaft, die sozialen Bindungen und die nationale Identität der Migrant_innen in den neuen veränderten Räumen in stetem Wandel begriffen, verklingen und werden neu strukturiert.

In Ingrid Wildi Merinos Arbeiten geht es um vertriebene Menschen, deren Reisen und Dislozierung in bestimmten europäischen Gesellschaften. Sie produziert Landkarten von Outsidern, die sich nicht integrieren, sondern vielmehr ihrer Distanz und der Schichten, die in einem bestimmten Gesellschaftsgefüge bestehen, gewahr werden. Ihre Arbeit ist besonders relevant in einem europäischen Kontext, da sie über eine Figur nachdenkt, die unsichtbar gemacht oder in subjektive Wahrnehmungen gehüllt wurde. Sie zeigt Geschichten und Erfahrungen von Migrant_innen, die Bedeutung, die sie ihrer Vertreibung, ihren Gegenständen, ihrer Poesie und ihrer mündlichen Überlieferung beimessen.

Die Künstlerin beschreibt ihre Arbeit als Video-Essays, die eine Landkarte und einen kritischen Raum für Reflektion herstellen, in ausreichender Abgrenzung zum Dokumentarischen. Indem sie Interviews in nicht-journalistischer Weise verwendet, als künstlerische Praxis, die Fragmente kombiniert und anordnet, um eine neue Form der Narration zu produzieren, versucht sie, eine andere Lesart und eine unterschiedliche analytische Sichtweise auf die Auflösung sozialer und kultureller Bindungen aufzuzeigen. Ihr künstlerischer Diskurs situiert sich daher inmitten vermischter, migrantischer Identitäten im steten Wandel. Die Künstlerin produziert Installationen mittels unterschiedlicher Medien, Texten, Video-Essays und Photographie.

English (Deutsch siehe oben):

Chilean-Swiss artist Ingrid Wildi Merino was born in Santiago de Chile in 1963 and had to emigrate to Switzerland with her family in 1981 into political exile from the dictatorship. She uses interviews and installations to create an area of reflection, focusing on migration, deterritorialisation and the resulting out-of-place status. Her work questions globalisation, leading her to look at migration and other issues including social, cultural and political differences related to the economy and global development policy resulting from migration.

European societies are currently going through a complex process of re-adapting the structures and mechanisms that have supported discourses on modernity dating from the 18th century (Kant, Rousseau, Hegel). This process is partly due to the collapse of modern meta-stories, including the so-called end of utopias and the end of history. At the same time, migration micro-narratives have established new ways of understanding the meeting of cultural spaces, people and policies. There has been mass migration of Latin Americans since the 1960s, to escape complex political situations and to search for better economic conditions – reasons that are not entirely separate. In Europe in particular, this phenomenon has changed identity maps in host countries, however these maps often remain hidden in the collective subconscious as a form of negativity. Likewise the community, social bonds and national identity of the migrant become diluted and restructured in a fluid way in the new altered spaces.

Ingrid Wildi Merino’s work deals with displaced people, their journeys and their dislocated condition in certain European societies. She creates maps of outsiders who do not integrate, but rather realise their distance and the layers that exist in the fabric of a particular society. This work is particularly relevant in a European context, as it reflects on a figure that has been made invisible or covered in subjective perceptions. It shows migrants’ stories and experiences, the significance that they themselves attach to their displacement, their objects, their poetry and their oral history (Francisco Godoy).

The artist describes her work as video essays, which create a map and a critical space for reflection, sufficiently removed from documentaries. She attempts to establish a different way of reading and a different analytical view of the dissolution of social and cultural bonds by using interviews in a non-journalistic way, as an artistic practice, combining and arranging fragments to create a new form of narration. Her artistic discourse, therefore, situates itself among mixed, migrant and fluid identities. The artist produces installations using various media, texts, video essays and photographs.

Screening of Los Invisibles by Ingrid Wildi Merino



Five Colombian immigrants living clandestinely in Switzerland for many years evoke their situation, their suffering, their fears and the reasons that led them to leave their country. By discontinuous montage and the fragmentation of her interlocutors’ accounts, artist Ingrid Wildi builds up an arborescent address about the inherent problems around the status of clandestinity – identity conflict, issues of cultural and linguistic bond, difficulties with social integration.
In order to preserve their anonymity, only body fragments – torso and arms – of the interviewed persons are shown on screen, a device calling to mind simultaneously the missing part of the filmed subjects and their situation of “invisibility”.

Ingrid Wildi’s video essay paradoxically shows us the unseen, by putting into the spotlight a few of the many “invisible” co-citizens who surround us. Through her interviews, we are not only given the opportunity to see them, but also, and especially, to listen to them. While the facelessness of these clandestine witnesses underscores the difficulty of granting them a social identity, this same facelessness gives their migrant bodies a voice they are usually deprived of.
These voices refer to the very specific and current context of illegal Colombian workers in Switzerland. But this example is emblematic of a situation shared today by many other displaced persons, since, in our globalized world, the invisibility, intrinsic to the ineffable status of illegal workers, has become one of the most widespread side effects of economic growth.

Beyond the social distress they evoke, these testimonies weave also a polyphonic tale of the painful memory of exile. These invisible people, both actors and victims of the economic flows supposed to guarantee a common welfare, tell us here a story about the pursuit of happiness quite different from the one we tend to fantasize about, or the one we are told by those governing us.

Pedro Jiménez Morrás
September 2007

English (Deutsch siehe unten):

Workshop at 17:00h, ending with an apéro and soup at 20:00h

Let’s start with a critical statement : The act of filming induces a power relationship. Some of post ’68 french moviemakers, as Jean-Louis Comolli, see the moving image production as «pensées en acte» (thoughts as act). They question the distinction of fiction and documentary as well as the place of the spectator.

During this workshop, we will produce a diagram based on a selection of my videos and films. My proposal is to start out with the notions social realities, narrative operations and the place of the spectator, and to discuss some new approaches.

Cicero Egli, December 2014

Deutsch (English above):

Workshop um 17:00h, mit anschliessendem Apéro und Suppe um 20:00h

Lasst mich mit einer kritischen Aussage beginnen: Der Akt des Filmens bewirkt eine Machtbeziehung. Einige der französischen Post-1968-Filmer, wie Jean-Louis Comolli, betrachten die Produktion von bewegten Bildern als «pensées en acte» (Gedanken als Akt). Sie hinterfragen die Unterscheidung zwischen Fiktion und Dokumentarischem sowie die Stellung der Zuschauer_in.

Im Verlauf des Workshops werden wir aufgrund einer Auswahl meiner Videos und Filmen ein Diagramm produzieren. Mein Vorschlag ist es, von den Konzepten der sozialen Wirklichkeiten, erzählerischen Operationen und der Stellung der Zuschauer_in zu auszugehen und einige neue Vorgehensweisen anzudenken.

Cicero Egli, Dezember 2014