In a foray into curating, I ended up with something opposed to how many video art exhibitions work. A real eclectic mix, issue 3 of the Kakofonie is truer in spirit to a journal or a revue than a highly thematised gallery show in which the hand of the curator is clearly seen. In a way, the chaotic madness of the Internet and Youtube is given a frame here. Below is the issue's editorial essay.
Siouxzi Mernagh / Matthew MacKisack / Lauren Moffatt / Gabi Schaffner / Kerstin Cmelka / Gerard Carson / Richard Mosse / Pauline Carnier Jardin / Anna Niedhart
Hating Women
I wouldn’t for the life of me be able to say why history is full of men who hate women. Even if one were to try to answer such a conundrum, they would be left facing the question: why so much hate in history tout court? Let us look at history as a long line of emotions, a scale of feelings, good or bad, disgust or attraction, and we can add here hate and love as two more markers, with the coordinates of events and their repetitions gravitating more toward the former than the later. As soon as you start to plot emotions on a graph you have backed into a dead end.
The Circus
The curious thing about the circus is that one of its features is always to engage the audience; at some point in the evening’s show the ringleader will enter into the tiers and much to the delight of the half-worried, half-self-conscious parents, pick some child already losing the memory of being brought down into the ring to ride the back of some caged horse let loose in a 0 that never ends. The circus is for children but overseen by adults. The circus is an allusion of a trick performed well for an audience adrift in the throes of forced amnesia.
Narrative disjunction
…when the event happens people don’t notice, they don’t notice the State intervening and watching (think of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses) and then well no, it’s just people walking along the street, the city, the Everyday as profane fairyground. WD walked home slowly, thinking to himself about the graffiti, the marks that he respected but somehow feared…
Michel Haneke
‘I always say that not only film, but books too, are like ski jumps. They have to be built in such a way that people can jump properly. But the film is the ski jump and it’s up to the spectator to jump.’ Let’s have love as a ski jump, too. Perhaps.
Self Perception/External Perception
We see ourselves when other people see us. Sartre bends down and puts his unblinking, ruined eye next to the keyhole and looks on with his breath held. Watching. Behind him on the non-creaking stairs another, the Other, creeps up and watches the philosophe watching and being arises on the dark stairwell like rubbish left on the streets after the carnival.
Interpretation
The beast. Let us not say disability instead of aggression. Revolutionary perception is akin to reasons why Big Brother would carry out an archeological dig.
Insurrection
And preserve the dignity of our people. And preserve the dignity of our people. And because you have killed innocent people and destroyed our homes. And because you have besieged this oppressed people. But the result is the same.
It is death.
Death
This cacophony in our ears then is full of death and love and misunderstanding. The circus shows us how to interpret death: cage it and then forget about it until it next rides into town. Occasionally laugh in its face.
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