TYPE Symposium and movie screening of Flatform: History of a Tree
DATE 4-6 November 2021
LOCATION Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan, Pawilon
Jonna Hoffmann, Chair of Art & Science Node participated in the symposium and movie screening of Flatform: History of a Tree, organised by Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan, Pawilon, under the curatorial services of Marek S. Bochniarz
History of a tree is a project which won the 6th edition of the Italian Council, an Award by the Italian Ministery of Culture. The project has 2 versions: a single-channel film and a robotized videoinstallation. History of a Tree is a portrait and the subject is both a living non-human organism and the territory that it has lived in for a long time. The work has the ambition of becoming part of the field of portraiture, a fundamental component of the course of the whole history of art, rewriting, however, the nature of the subject, the methods of development and the technique of expression of the portrait. In fact, in this project the subject is a non-human living organism that is portrayed through moving images and sounds that have been localized in space, which then show the portrayed subject as an ideal witness to almost a thousand years of the history of an entire territory.
The tree at the center of the project is an oak born about 900 years ago, also known as the Oak of the Hundred Knights, and the place is an area around the town of Tricase. This vegetal organism, marked both by a life in continuous growth and by an immovable fixed entity, is a perennial witness to the development of a place, that of its relevance, of the stories that have crossed its path in almost a thousand years and of cultures and languages that followed each other and that still coexist. It was produced by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin and it’s supported by the Italian Council. The film has dialogues in Arbëresh, Romani, Griko, Byzantine Greek, Albanian, Yiddish, Turkish, Spanish, French and Salentino dialect. All the musics were unpublished and were recorded expressly for this film. The dialogues are by Flatform.
The digital images, the flow of the seasons, of the repetition which in Flatform’s view is the seed of the narration, offer us a new filmic grammar, extended across digital creativity, cinema, art and memory. Four elements on which the National Museum of Cinema, twenty years after its founding, now relies to begin to write its upcoming decades
Domenico De Gaetano, director of Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin.
Flatform is a group of artists founded in 2006 and based in Milan and Berlin. The group works on video, video installations and mobile installations. Works by Flatform have been featured in several film festivals all over the world such as Cannes Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Nouveau Cinema Montreal, Venice Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival and in many exhibitions in museums and institutions including, among others, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus Ohio and the Centre Pompidou, Paris
Program:
4.11
Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan
B Building, 23 Lutego 20, Poznan
History of a Tree: symposium and promotion of the book Flatform. Storia di un albero. History of a Tree (Silvana Editoriale 2020)
17.00: History of a Tree. Film screening (24 min.)
17.30: Daniele Poccia: A portrait of a tree as a young being
18.00: Joanna Hoffmann-Dietrich: Tree as a network
18.30: Marek S. Bochniarz: A History of a Tree and a tree in the history of cinema
19.00: discussion with Flatform and scholars
5.11
Pawilon
Ewangelicka 1, Poznan
18.00 History of a Tree film screening (24 min.) + Q&A with Flatform
18.50 Retrospective screenings of Flatform video works (100 min.) + Q&A with Flatform
Program:
- Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. (2008, 6 min.)
- 57.600 seconds of invisible night and light (2009, 5 min.)
- Cannot be anything against the wind (2010, 6 min.)
- A place to come (2011, 7 min.)
- Movements of an impossible time (2011, 8 min.)
- Trento Symphonia (2014, 20 min.)
- Quantum (2015, 8 min.)
- Eleven Trails (2018, 13 min.)
- That which is to come is just a promise (2019, 22 min.)