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PRE-SESSION TEXT
The following is the exchange-conversation that the members of The Ecoversities Audiovisual Lab (AuLab) had by email and whatsapp threads, as an initial input for the 1st 2025 session of the laboratory..
Emilio’s email [27Jan 2025 11.25]:
Dear all,
The second edition of the audiovisual workshop aims to improve the research on the relationship between author and viewer initiated last year.
It also emphasizes the struggle against iconic standards in contemporary film, television and digital media.
After a summary of what was done last year and an introduction to the next activity, we intend to continue to enhance the conversation through images rather than words.
Proposals:
Introduction of the chosen theme (i.e. violence) in all its forms: cynical, psychological, gratuitous, structured as economic and financial expression, as racial expression, etc.
We can also talk about violence without showing it through blood, horrible wounds, torture.
Each person presents a video (max 15 min.)
meeting 1) we screen some of the videos produced
meeting 2) we screen some of the videos produced
meeting 3) we screen some of the videos produced
We are planning to organize some events in which all participants are involved as authors/spectators, using our video camera at the same time and each creating a “zoom window” within the zoom chat.
meeting a: 4) total improvisation
Everyone improvises with images and sounds of all kinds.
meeting b; 5) total structure
We each make a film without sound on a particular theme ( different from the one we have previously used for our videos) that can be chosen and shared. Only one of us makes the soundtrack. duration 30 min.
Camilo’s email [18 March 2025 01.25]:
“violence in a frame” such a transversal idea, a rich frame-perspective to observe our authors/spectator laboratory…
… regarding reproducing violence as audiovisual creators… I was concerned mainly about the amount of violence “everywhere” in audiovisual, even as a predefined thought… and also how audiovisual is “everywhere” in modern times… but perhaps it is not the “quantity” that defines its impact, because according to several indicators it is not a trend or majority on social networks, that is, amateur creators do not always use violence (at least not mainly) as a common thread in their posts. (maybe we will have to define violence also for our proposal)… In this case, it is the “main stream” or large companies that use it more. That’s an economic expression I will take distance as I want to get deeper into its “human experience”…
So, more than the amount of violence, it is what it represents of the human experience: “… through suffering, we relate and unite.” Han Kang wrote about her approach to writing human relationships. It is then that violence, as well as suffering and pain, can perhaps be dimensions that connect us on an equally human level to other “doors” of representation, such as love and happiness. The presence of “violence” even for an instant in many audiovisuals is like life itself, since perhaps all humans can recognize it with some personal stories, as well as “love” and so many other aspects, they are dimensions or emotional “doors” of our existences. Maybe “violence” is not a binary whose opposite is “peace” or “nonviolence”… but rather it is an intertwined perspective of any narrative (even fiction) since it is always told from a human… maybe they are all part of every audiovisual experience, as any life is. So “violence” in audiovisual as a link between author/viewers:
“… I always think about that when I write, how we can establish links. Literature unites people who live in different places, in different historical periods, but who are reading the same book” Han Kang …
*a possible idea-question: Could a human life or any of its experiences, in this case the audiovisual experiences either author´s or viewer’s, completely eliminate violence as a perspective? Do you know any nonviolent audiovisual?
Emilio’s email [19 March 2025 11.22]:
Thanks to Camilo for these words.
Some considerations in the attempt to define what violence means.
Jean Luck Nancy says that the image itself is violent because there is no way to mediate it. It is like a fist, regardless of what it communicates. This is a very elementary level of violence, we could interpret it as an aspect related to our perception. When it happens, it is already there, without any other change being able to alter it. In this perspective, violence is the way of posing things that cannot be mediated by reason or feeling. It is as it is. But something can be done before an image is produced.
In other words, we are violent when we are not in dialogue with ourselves, when we make a decision without considering any of our inner voices or addressing the wrong ones.
When we talk about violence today, we consider some particular aspects.
We speak of torture, massacres, rape, a kind of refined bloody pleasure.
It is a more refined and sophisticated form of superstructural violence. It is an uncontrollable pleasure. Violence is no longer something related to our perception, but is an elaborated form of thought (and feeling). Our interiority is inhabited by forces of a different nature and we must resist the seduction of some of them and at the same time care for the good ones.
Each frame of a video should be seen as the result of this inner dialectic, anticipating the mediation to preserve the appearance of the image itself from being perversely violent.
Some might say that morality cannot override freedom of expression, but I believe that each of us can make our own decisions beyond common moral sense, recognising the different quality of the forces that inhabit us.
Aparna’s email [19 March 2025 16.18]:
Thank you for these thoughts Emilio.
I could not agree more. It is why I have waited since 1995 to work in earnest with film. I sense there is thinking here about a more meta-violence which the image is certainly not all implicated in, and perhaps also complicit with.
Grateful to be in dialogue around these needed understandings and innerstandings around visuality and ‘capture.’
In sensuous solidarity,
Aparna
Camilo’s email [25 March 2025 20.56]:
ok… wow, great wave Emilio…
AULab friends… remember we meet to LAB 1 of this year, to experiment together next thursday March 27th at 8.30am LA, 10.30am Mex/Costa Rica, 11.30am Col, 5.30pm Italy (check your local timing, sometimes it changes because of the season)
we are invited to bring a personal piece, an audiovisual ingredient to expose and explore… I´m right Emilio?
maybe inspired by “… Each frame of a video should be seen as the result of this inner dialectic, anticipating the mediation to preserve the appearance of the image itself from being perversely violent.” or “… recognising the different quality of the forces that inhabit us.” Is there a comment-question-impulse that we might bring in an audiovisual format that weaves (you) with this email-conversation?
Marlene’s email [26 March 2025 15.15]:
Hello all,
Thank you Emilio for having initiated the conversation. I come at last with a memory that comes to me from about ten years ago, when I was working with an artist helping out setting up an exhibition. I was not involved directly in this particular installation but a friend was, her role was to hang up hundreds and hundreds of images taken from the internet that depicted mutilated bodies during wars and uprisings in the Arab countries. After 5 days of that she had nausea and felt really bad, but she kept these feelings silently over the opening days.
Before her, an intern at the studio had the task of looking for these images over 6 months. That was her only task so supposedly that was all she saw during the whole day. I was shocked when I heard that. I was thinking what could have happened to that girl, was she so dedicated to that job to resist all that time? Did she believe in the power of art resulting out of the final piece? Was she crying, broken inside more and more every single day after seeing and selecting all those pictures? Or did she become simply totally numb?
What is the final result of this total exposure to violence in images? Is there a final result or does the exposure keep working? And in which sense? If we don’t want to watch those pictures, do they haunt us anyway? Is it a collective experience? Can we erase, change, modify all those pictures and with that like in a reverse voodoo or sympathetic magic heal those bodies, free the ghosts, end the violence?
We wish. Wouldn’t that be the most powerful ritual.
The problem is that behind those pictures there is a reality that cannot be erased, at least not in our physical world. And also if we analyse only the pure side of the image, to go with Jean Luc Nancy, the process has already been initiated, the fist received. And maybe every single one of them acts as a micro shock, and the totality of fists in the spread out anxiety makes us even more numb.
What would be a way of producing pictures helping us heal from the numbness, to be able to be stronger and have a more consistent action in this horribly violent world?
These are just some thoughts
To be continued.
Luz’ email [26 March 2025 22.31]:
Hello everyone,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation. I’d like to share some ideas that come to mind, also related to education.
I interviewed one teacher that told me that there was violence in the school. “Violence is exercised when the ability to make decisions is taken away.” This concept shocked me because it does not only consider violence in physical way; it can also be exercised when we are deprived of our autonomy. In schools, for example, we are not only imposed rules about how to dress, what to do at each moment, or what to learn, but all of it is designed so that our ability to make decisions is pushed to the background. We even have to ask for permission to go to the toilet (fulfilling a basic human need).
Regarding violence in audiovisuals, it is true that some images are so powerful that they leave no doubt about the message they convey, like a fist, as Jean-Luc Nancy says. However, I also believe that images have the power to incite us to action. In my personal experience, for example, there was an image that changed me profoundly: when I walked along a beach in Mumbai, I saw layers and layers of plastic, as the stratums in geology. Nature was dead or seriously intoxicated. It was really shocking to me and somehow I felt also responsible of that, because I am sure that one of those plastics from the millions was mine. I committed to not consuming plastics anymore. This image made me commit and change my behavior. I guess it is also important that people feel empowered to do something about it, because if it is out of your zone of control, what do you do then? I guess that it just contributes to conform to the world as it is.
This leads me to what Marlene mentioned about how we become desensitized to the thousands of violent images we see every day. Just on a personal note, I am not in contact here in Mexico with news or TV and I live in nature, but I realize that when I’m in Spain and watch TV, the images affect me deeply, even if the movies aren’t particularly violent. I watched the news and my eyes start having leakages, I felt tension in my body, I felt hopeless, I even had nightmares. (This didn’t happen to me before when I was exposed to this everyday). So yes, I feel our senses, our minds, our bodies, … get numb when we are bombarded with violence and we just get used to it. The images stay with us, whether we want it or not.
I am triggered by how to use images to heal. And since we have mirror neurons and we are able to co-regulate our emotions with other people, we can use audiovisuals to trigger emotions and connection and bring people back from a dysregulated space to a peaceful one.
The question that comes to my mind after this reflection is “Can violence inspire compassion? or does violence inspire more violence?”
Thanks for reading 😉
Luz
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ZOOM SESSION NOTES, RECORDINGS AND LINKS
(Next we share the exchange-conversation happened on Thursday March 27th 2025 between the group that assist to this 1st session)
- If you prefer just to listen the Audio Record as a “podcast”
+other audiovisuals shared through the zoom conversation:
- A fragment from Emilio´s documentary.
… and videos by Vanessa:
- underground
- and trailer “Visages du Sahara”
NOTES ON THE ZOOM MEETING
E. Media using violence to get the attention of people. Attention and perversion. Using audiovisuals to make people believe in anything. Used to cancel awareness.
M. Film: The Zone of Interest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vfg3KkV54
Hidden cameras.
Ghost of images from some period of history. (Now we have the ghosts from the images of today)
C. The fist of the image.
Alexandro Jodorowski: Art and anything in life is a weaving between pleasure and suffering.
L. Prostitution of audiovisuals in the capitalist system. Using them to get people. Way of marketing (retreat in a yacht). Link between creator and viewer is a consumption. Give it to me!
Comments on Emilio’s video portraying Christian and his story:
E. He speaks like a chant. Own cosmogony idea of normality. Violent description of the accident but no will on the viewer. Just a description. He has two lives: one before the accident and one when he was born again.
M. Parallel with a subaltern body of the animal, the inside of the body. Not all bodies are treated the same. Believed to be a body on which you can act without a consent (sometimes life is given, sometimes it is removed: parallel with the second kind bodies).
Va. very abstract you can imagine a lot, texture being transmitted. Message about life and gratefulness.
C. Oneiric memories of the moment of violence, how to rebuild it.
E. Christian Is someone else when he describes, he does it in third person.
C. Reference to Trial people in Colombia, people telling about violence.
M. Oniric how he talks he challenges the concept of normality. Safe mental space, no need of such concepts because you can reshape in many ways (violence of normality)
A. Empathy, looking beyond our routines, what is the meaning of life, transcend vanity or is there are deeper sense to life.
Violence expressed in hostile responses in Nigeria.
Comments on Vanessa’s Dance Battle:
Va. On the Dance Battle video & festival.
Gang business instead of guns they use dance. Different dances for different provenances.
On the Desert video: Violence of the circumstances.
V. Testosterone LOVE. Intimacy. Respond completely. Acceptance of the other. Fact balance. Stretch to find balance.
Intention and violence correlated.
E. Scene that we know but that is Assertive. Is this assertion part of an expression of violence or is it a music tool.
Va. transmutation, violence transmuted into art resistance music hip pop. Dance a way to give body to frustration. making violence positive, transmuting it.
M. Collective experience. Transmutation from violence to dance. Changing signs to things that are bad for us. Maybe they want to fight but in the end maybe they become friends. Exorcise violence. Intimacy power of collective moments.
V. Perception of time. Learning what intimidation can mean through dance. Be present in the high intensity a lot from this practice can come into your life.
Closing:
L. The Audiovisual Lab circle last year changed my way of making movies, creating an exchange rather than only sharing whatever I know. Dialogue.
Emilio’s video. Christian could be anyone, face not shown. Thinking about healing through the images. Empathize with the purpose at another level.
Vanessa’s video. People are oppressed because they don’t have a space to express who they are. Dance somatic work to release tension from feeling of oppression and violence.
Va. Exchange of the audiovisual journey. Out of the isolation and loneliness of the work. Give you extra eyes on the video.
What is the Ecoversities AULab?
A space for those who are interested in delving into the art of filmmaking, this unconference generates ideas for analysing paradigms together within the Ecoverse. Each month we propose a new theme related to filmmaking, searching concepts that are the basis for an interpretation of the dynamic image realm. Participants selected short films made by themselves or other authors that were relevant to the proposed themes and share them in the meeting, so that they could speak through images and unlearn, re-think, re-assemble, and discuss together the audiovisual language, coming up with some new ideas and threads to follow!