ON & FOR PRODUCTION: TRYING OUT A PRACTICAL CONTEXT FOR THE PRODUCTION OF ARTISTS’ FILMS.

FRAMEWORK

The pilot edition of On & For production is born out of the intention to “learn in doing” and intends to try out a context aimed at facilitating the collaboration between artists, producers, curators, institutions and collectors for the production of artists’ films.

The core of On & For production are a series of four non-public work- sessions, each one dedicated to a film project in development. In each work- session, the film project will be presented by the artists and producer and discussed with a reduced group of professionals that have been especially invited to attend that specific session on the basis of their potential engagement with the project. The intention behind those sessions is to generate a focused and hands-on environment to imagine collaborative ways to produce the film.

For its pilot edition in 2014, four organisations that stand for different ways of undertaking the production of artists’ films choose an artist each with whom they were already collaborating on a project:

Auguste Orts (BE), Sven Augustijnen (BE), Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Spectre (FR),  Robert Schlicht & Romana Schmalisch (DE),  LUX (GB), Beatrice Gibson (GB), Contour Biennial (BE), An van. Dienderen (BE)

The open workshop is aimed at students, artists and producers working with moving image. The idea is to share the work sessions experience; the logic behind the On & For Production initiative, as well as bringing to discussion different strategies that the artists and producers put in place to produce artists’ films.

The workshop will be chaired by María Palacios Cruz and include the participation of the four participating artists and their producers:

ARTISTS

Sven Augustijnen (BE) (1970, Mechelen, Belgium). His work concentrates on political, historical and social themes while constantly challenging a genre definition that reflects a wider interest in historiography and a predilection for the nature of storytelling: ‘Historiography is by no means a natural phenomenon. The way we use stories, images and fiction to construct reality fascinates me.’ His films have been included in international exhibitions and festivals such as in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Artist Space, Wiels, Kunsthalle Bern etc. In 2007 he participated in documenta 12 and in 2011 he received the Evens Prize for Visual Arts. In 2013 his latest film Spectres was distributed throughout the network of French cinemas of ‘Art et Essai, Recherche et Découverte’. Sven Augustijnen is represented by Jan Mot (www.janmot.com) and is a founding member of Auguste Orts, a Brussels-based platform for the production and distribution of artist films.

Beatrice Gibson (GB)’s films are composite works, collaging together sound, literature and multiple authors to explore the slippery operations of language and difficulties in representation. Born out of interests in improvisation and experimental music, her films blend social modes of working with a diverse range of references, from the compositions of Cornelius Cardew or the musicality of speech found in the operas of Robert Ashley, to the writings of Gertrude Stein and the typographical experiments of BS Johnson. As a result, Gibson's films function as elegiac exquisite corpses, their socially engaged foundations challenging conventional notions of authorship and filmmaking. Recent exhibitions include CAC Bretigny (2013), Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; The Showroom, London (2012) ; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010), The Serpentine Gallery (Sackler Center) (2010). Gibson's films have screened at numerous experimental film venues and film festivals nationally and internationally including Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives NY; LA Film Forum; Rotterdam International Film Festival; London Film Festival; CPH: Dox, and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Gibson has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for short film. She was one of five artists shortlisted for the 2013-15 Whitechapel Max Mara Art Prize for Women and was nominated for the 2013 Jarman Award. She is represented by the Laura Bartlett Gallery. Her films are distributed by LUX.

Robert Schlicht / Romana Schmalisch (DE)
Romana Schmalisch (1974, Berlin, Germany) studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She was a resident artist in several stipend programmes, among others at the Fine Art Department of Jan-Van-Eyck Academy, Maastricht, the Berlin Senate's stipend program in London and currently at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2013- 2014), where she works on a long-term research project “The Choreography of Labour”. Robert Schlicht (1975, Berlin, Germany) studied philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. His recent text “Film as Show Trial” was published in Der Standpunkt der Aufnahme – Point of View: Perspectives of political film and video work (edited by Tobias Hering in collaboration with Arsenal Berlin – Institute for Film and Video Art). Since 2004 Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht have collaborated on several projects at the intersection of theory and film, investigating cinematic representations of history and society. Their films have been shown in exhibitions and film festivals in Berlin, Houston, Paris, Moscow, Yerevan, Madrid, Brest, Essen, Duisburg, Vienna among others.

An Van. Dienderen (1971, Brasschaat, Belgium) is a filmmaker and obtained a PhD in Comparative Cultural Sciences. She made several (inter)nationally awarded films, published in (inter)national journals and directs a small non profit art production company (Elektrischer Schnellseher). She also initiated the international art workspace SoundImageCulture, which helps artists to develop projects in the bordering zone between documentary, anthropology and visual arts. Her work is rooted in cross cultural and interdisciplinary work, relating fields such as film practice and anthropological research, with a focus on cultural identity, multicultural society, visual anthropology and migration. Her films have been awarded in several countries, have been screened in major film festivals worldwide and are distributed through Argos, center for arts and media Brussels and Women make movies (NY).

PRODUCERS

Marie Logie is the director at Auguste Orts, a Brussels-based production and distribution platform founded by four artists/filmmakers - Herman Asselberghs Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and Anouk De Clercq - with the experience to develop, produce and distribute creative projects that are at the intersection of genres and formats : films that are at the crossroads of film, video, visual arts, documentary, experimental cinema... Multimedia? Interdisciplinary? Hybrid? Terms at once vague and in vogue, which are used to describe what has now become an evidence. More than ever, artist films stand at the intersection between genres, medias and disciplines. Consequently, Auguste Orts prefers ideas and sensitivities over genres and formats. We also have a strong preference for self-organisation as a means to reinvent operating protocols. Generating support and production strategies that are specific to each film is what gears our non-profit organisation.

Ben Cook is the director at LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists' working with the moving image. Founded in 2002 as a not-for-profit company and charity it builds on the legacy of its predecessor organisations The Lux Centre, The London Filmmakers Co-operative and London Video Arts with a history stretching back to the 1966. In addition to organising exhibitions, touring, publishing and education LUX represents Europe's largest collection of moving image works produced by visual artists. LUX has commissioned and produced many award-winning artists' moving image works by amongst others; Matt Collishaw, Tracey Emin, Aurélien Froment, Yang Fudong, Jacki Irvine, Amar Kanwar, Miranda July, Mark Leckey, Deimantas Narkevičius, Rosalind Nashashibi, Laure Prouvost Catherine Sullivan, Mika Taanila, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Akram Zaatari.

Mike Sperlinger is a producer, curator and writer based in London and Oslo. For more than a decade he was the assistant director of LUX, a London-based agency which holds the largest collection of artists' film and video in Europe. In that role he was involved in every aspect of film-making by visual artists, as well as working with many other partner organisations internationally such as Artissima, Frieze Projects, Rotterdam Film Festival and cph:dox. He has curated many screenings and exhibitions, both for LUX and independently, and edited a number of publications including Kinomuseum: Towards An Artist Cinema (2008). He currently teaches part-time at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art.

Mathilde Vileneuve is the co-director at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, a place for research and creation, for resources and experimentation, developed in intimate cooperation with its setting (from the most local to the international sense) and with its audiences, and in relationship with the artists. It invents the tools to conceive artistic practices from all fields – visual art, dance, performance, theatre, literature, etc. – viewing them as a process of learning, sharing and experiencing; an intermediary object that is capable of investigating and taking the measure of the most urgent contemporary issues, reinventing ways of being together, while taking a risk and upsetting our approach and our conception of art.

Olivier Marboeuf director of Spectre Productions, a production company dedicated to emerging film practices and innovative audiovisual projects. SPECTRE Productions collaborates with organisations accompanying a artists in their work, active in the intersection between the fields of contemporary art and cinema (festivals, art schools, art centres and art cinemas)

Steven Op de Beeck is the director of Contour Mechelen, an organisation dedicated to art being made in the moving image. Every two years, Contour Mechelen organises the Biennial of Moving Image, also known as 'Contour', the project for which it has become most known. The biennial offers a platform to curators and artists working with different forms of moving image, from film and video to installation. The biennial also stimulates a dialogue between contemporary art and architecture in the city of Mechelen. In between the Biennial, Contour also instigates and produces public projections and installations. SKIN / BLUSH is commissioned by Contour 7.

On & For Production is a project initiated by Auguste Orts (BE) in collaboration with LUX (GB), Contour Mechelen (BE) and Art Brussels (BE) with the support of Argos Center for Art and Media, BAM, the Flanders Audio-visual Fund and Media Desk Flanders.