Schema (Television) is a process-oriented video that started from...the attempt to categorically index and identify programming themes and cycles from cable and satellite television sources in varying geographic regions and languages. There is a formal potential of the common technique of television viewing shaped by remote control as a device of unpredictable montage. The remote control not only subverts the linear flow of television and its pre-determined programming logic, but it transgresses the very foundation of meaningfulness. Schema (Television) attempts to crystallize and refine the indeterminate process of reordering created by the remote control’s alagoric montage. This video work uses Dziga Vertov’s silent Kino-Pravda newsreels from the 1920s (with subtitles by Rodchenko) as a formal paradigm and editing model and as a paradoxical reference. This reference underscores the futility of both direct propaganda and of any attempts to atribute truthfulness to a moving image. The Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse on suspicion and denaturalization provides a textual commentary on the visual material.
* This work was made in the context of Liminal Spaces.
Liminal Spaces is an international art project which aims at refuting the realities of occupation and its dynamics by examining notions of urban spaces, borders, mental and physical segregation, cultural territories and the possibilities of art within political frameworks. In light of the ever-growing hardship endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation; persistent loss of land, deprivation of freedom of mobility, as well as basic political and civil rights, this international cooperative project takes as its starting point the spatial borders that characterize Israel’s colonial project. Frontier cities like Jerusalem have become laboratories of an urbanism of radical ethnic segregation. Since the Second Intifada and Israel’s unilateral construction of the Wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice at the Hague, this situation has intensified to an alarming degree and the urban fabric has disintegrated into a spatial and mental archipelago. This radical separation affects Palestinians in diverse ways; they suffer the loss of basic freedoms, restrictions on travel and severe surveillance that endanger the future of their society.
Project curators, Galit Eilat, Eyal Danon, Reem Fadda, and Philipp Misselwitz, say, "During the course of this project, we have had to repeatedly reiterate and clarify its aim; we underscored the fact that it is not an attempt at normalisation, and that it is not meant to offer a model for peaceful coexistence between two equal partners. Rather, we reasserted that the main aim of the project was to serve as a platform of resistance and vocal opposition to the ongoing Israeli occupation, and to its direct effects on the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. This project operates in a context in which the distinctions between art and politics are blurred. We wish to examine the possible role of art as a catalyst for political and social change and to trigger a more active form of political engagement within the art world. We feel that the clear political stance of the participants and the curators is the basis for the network that Liminal Spaces has generated."
To read more, visit the project’s website http://liminalspaces.org
Catalogue no. 700
File: Liminal Spaces
Journalism Middle East Found-footage War LIMINAL SPACES Television
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
