March Chronicle by Mia Tamme and Anna Anna Buyvid

We reconvened and gathered ourselves in questions: What does collective working mean? How to collect our work? How could we distribute tasks, if so? What are we working towards? What do we care about? What does a militant art practice mean? What methodologies do we use? Read below of our rehearsals of thought in PAF and baby steps towards a communal filmic project ->>>

Day 1

Exquisite Corpse & the birth of vampires 

We had assembled our ideas between the confluences through a collective writing exercise of Exquisite Corpse. Snippets of daily life landed on a messy table and a story unfolded itself. Nada picked us up and cleared our minds with a structured writing drill: 5 min switch, 10 minutes switch, 15 min switch! Words flowed from one pen to another. By the end of the day we were left with images and worked them into a dialogue. Dreamt characters — please meet Baklava who is eaten on a picnic cloth, vampires called Cinema and Land and the mysterious Meteorite E.

We met again after dinner for a screening of Eyal Sivan's IZKOR, slaves of memory 1990 film. And sat into the late hours discussing what does an education mean.

Day 2

The four and a half hours of content

Day with Israeli-Palestinian film-maker Eyal Sivan. He introduced us to his practice-driven-theory of film, the concept of progress and perpetrator. “As image makers we need to brush against the grain. We can choose our point of view to propose a counter narrative to the dominant one.” We ended the day with Eyal’s film Jaffa, the Orange's Clockwork, about oranges and the change of their meaning in the midst of colonization. We asked him about  the role of women in his films, in orange fields and in oppression. And considered the rethorics of possessing a land and a woman. Building up from the films we had seen of our tutor Mawra, the classic Leila and the Wolves… Reflecting on the idea of Eyal that only a colonizer could torture land like this. Belonging to land or possessing land are totally different attitudes we concluded.

(image of tanks on orange fields)

Day 3

Can we start with the embroidery already?!?

In the morning Mia led a session exploring our own voices and we discussed how to incluse performance to the final film presentation in Morocco. Then, Cristelle encouraged us to explore locations in PAF, first ideas of scenes began to show their faces…

Paus! Confusion! What are we doing, where are we going? We need a plan! We are tireeeed!

We took up the textiles we had brought from home and embroidered our ideas, potential scenes and drafted fictional histories of the fabrics. We talked while threading the needle and found commoninterests, directions for the future.

Day 4

Magic cards

The textiles dripped into scenes and Cristelle’s location hunting gave a backdrop. We filmed! We gave the lead to the dreamer of the scene, stepped down and wrapped ourselves into clothes in front of the eye of the camera.

And in the evening we laid cards to calm our nerves, built our dear characters Meteorite E, Vampires, Cristelle and country girl (who likes to write sonnets, but works the land, RESPECT!). They had been growing with us through the week and now spoke to us through magical cards. How to communicate with them fully we don't know yet… but hope to find out in the next sequence… in Morocco where we want to go further with the exploration of textiles, women, land, possession, being possessed, vampires, the relation between cinema and soil. 

XOXO,

Mia and Anna