Collapsible Fictions. Workshop with Jørgen Leth and Dan Holmberg

Coordination: Olatz González, Iñaki Imaz, Asier Mendizabal

Collapsible Fictions is a project co-produced by Arteleku-Gipuzkoa Regional Government and Donostia Kultura-San Sebastian City Council, which includes the workshop itself as well as a series of film projections.


This attitude could be summed up as a simultaneous attempt to understand the world on the one hand, and to attain personal expression on the other, but without showing excessive faith in documental objectivity and without praising in any way the subjective inner world. Much on the contrary, it shows a certain distrust towards the outside as well as towards one’s “self”. That is probably why he works from self-censorship, from the self-imposition of a series of rules –perhaps absurd or banal- which demarcate a very specific field of action and avoid concessions to conventional intelligibility. This self-censorship generates peculiar techniques and aesthetics, which, lacking a more precise definition, are close to what could be called “oneiric objectivity”, “fictitious reality” or something similar.
Workshop


7th-11th of May at Arteleku
Timetable: Monday to Friday, morning and afternoon sessions.
Registration fee: 60 €
Number of participants: maximum 15
During the workshop simultaneous translation from English into Spanish will be available.


The workshop is shaped as a week of work with Jørgen Leth and with Dan Holmberg –the usual cameraman in his films since his first collaboration in Stars and Watercarries, 1973-, during which the selected persons will discuss his methodology and the ideas and aesthetic strategies driving his work. Initially conceived as a reflective workshop, Dan Holmberg’s presence opens up the possibility of carrying out practical exercises arising from the issues opened by the dialogue. The aim is to create a working context which brings about the need to carry debate beyond the spoken word, so as to set in motion actions or processes, in principle of a cinematographic nature, which do not have to necessarily materialise in a final work. It is about getting back the issues that keep recurring during the debate in order to see in which way they materialise at the moment of being carried out, of taking action.

During the workshop the guests will expose the topics assisted by documentary material, and they will open the debate among those present a debate sustained on the basis (and therefore conditioned by it) that what is said could lead to a cinematographic action. Thus word and action question each other and are submitted to each other’s judgement.

The programming will be open to the requests of the process on which - by the mere fact of getting together - these 20 people (guests, coordinators and those attending the workshop) have embarked. Each session, of about 4 hours, will be dedicated to reflective work or practical work.

The selection of participants will be carried out according with the workshop approach of making a heterogeneous team of people who for different reasons are interested in Jørgen Leth and/or Dan Holmberg and want to get actively involved in a work process with them.
Registration for the workshop

Registrations for the workshop will be carried out by sending to Arteleku, before 14:00 on April 27th, 2007, the registration sheet, CV, and a letter explaining the reasons for participation and whatever material the applicant might find fit/appropriate. The selection will be made by those in charge of the workshop, and those having been selected will be personally informed on April 30th.

Payment: On the first day of the workshop the participants will have to show the receipt slip of the deposit made with Kutxa, account number 2101/0381/07/0001329473.
Archive

As a complement to the workshop, from mid-April a documentary archive will be available, with videos, books and other materials giving an account of the guests’ work. Those having been selected to participate in the workshop will be duly informed about the date of the opening of this archive, so that they can have access to it prior to the workshop if they wish so. Film projections


7th-11th of May at Teatro Principal, San Sebastián
Sessions: 20:00 h
Tickets: 3,60 € each
Season tickets for all sessions: 9 €
Films will be shown in original version with Spanish subtitles.


Monday, 7th of May
Pelota (1983)
Motion Picture (1970)

Tuesday, 8th of May
Notater om kærligheden/Notes on Love (1989).

Wednesday, 9th of May
Notater fra kina/Notebook from China (1986) (1986).

Thursday, 10th of May
Udenrigskorrespondenten/Haiti Express (1983).

Friday, 11th of May
Det perfekte menneske/The Perfect Human (1968).
Fem benspaend/ The Five Obstructions de Lars von Trier, Jørgen Leth (2003).
Biographies

Jørgen Leth. Aarhus, Denmark, 1937. He is a film director and producer, a poet and a television commentator. In the sixties he was a founding member of the avant-garde filmmakers’ Abcinéma group. He has published ten poem collections and four essays. He taught at the National Film School in Copenhagen and at the Studies Centre in Oslo. He has also taught at Berkeley, UCLA (Los Angeles) and Harvard Universities. He has lived in Haiti since 1991.

Dan Holmberg. Stockholm, Sweden, 1944. He studied photography and started as an assistant to fashion and advertising photographers. In 1969 he started working as a cameraman for Swedish television, for which he filmed newsreels, sports...In 1973 he moved to New York as a freelance photographer. He has worked with numerous film directors, amongst them Jørgen Leth, in whose films he has been a regular cameraman since 1973.


Olatz González Abrisketa. Bilbao, 1973. Graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Doctor in Political Science and Sociology, she teaches Anthropology at the Social Sciences School at the University of the Basque Country. She is the author of the doctoral thesis La pelota vasca: un ritual, una estética (Ediciones Muelle de Uribitarte, 2005).

Iñaki Imaz. San Sebastian, 1965. He is a painter and has been teaching Painting at the Fine Arts School at the University of the Basque Country since 1992. His work has been shown in many exhibitions, amongst which the following could be highlighted: Lo Mío (Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, 2007), Montaña (Egia Culture Centre, San Sebastian, 2004), No te separes de nosotros (Arteleku, San Sebastian and Conde Duque Culture Centre, Madrid, 2003).

Asier Mendizabal. Ordizia, 1973. He is an artist and lives in Bilbao. He took part in Manifesta 5, San Sebastian. He filmed Goierri Konpeti together with Iñaki Garmendia. He is the author of Smaller than a Mass (Coop., Peio Aguirre, 2006).