New podcast: <
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula> *The
Italian artist Mitra Azar *talks about points of view and the disembodiment
of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives, processes,
the “artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground for creative
practices.
Link:
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula
<
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula>
*Music samples by Filastine*
Mitra Azar is not the real name of the artist known as Mitra Azar. It is a
pseudonym he took refuge in after being arrested in Iran in 2009 in the
middle of an artistic project, which became one of the few records of the
Iranian grassroots movement and the violent repression by the Ahmadinejad
government in the lead up to his re-election.
Azar is a self-proclaimed “eclectic-schizo-creative-nomadic-sponge”, a
description that provides some clues as to his work. His practice moves
between a range of very different formats including live cinema and
documentary. He readily mixes activist protest with theory and philosophy,
generating an infinite, networked (an)archive activated through live
cinema.
Azar explores personal, aesthetic, and geopolitical boundaries as part of
his practice-based mutant research. In his work, borders, censorship,
geological eras, personal comfort zones and humanitarian crises interact
with ideas based on the symbolic limits of images and the disembodiment of
the gaze. His activism is based on field work in the most literal sense: a
direct immersion in conflict zones that has led him into what he says are
“some of the strangest places on the planet”. This fatal attraction for the
aesthetics of crisis has taken him from Fukushima to the Gaza Strip and
from Lebanon to China as a way of bringing the border – “a space that has
had to forsake creativity” – back into the centre of artistic production.
SON[I]A talks to Mitra Azar about points of view and the disembodiment of
the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives, processes, the
“artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground for creative
practices.
*Timeline*
*02:35* From thoughts to actions
*03:40* Videoteppisti
*04:12* Scars and borders
*08:06* Live cinema: images resisting the will of the artist
*11:52* Movie making as a live form and the archive as a trace
*12:50* Artchaeology
*14:00* The impossibility of finishing an art piece
*14:32* Neologisms: words are missing
*15:05* Making the archive visible: street screenings
*18:16* An open archive
*20:35* Art is about reacting, conflict and dissensus
*22:30* An art producing the audience, le poble manque
*23:00* Methodology: performativity, relationality, politicality,
liminality, processuality and hapticity
*24:42* Observation of uprises and revolutions
*27:40* Gaze disembodiment
*29:40* Selfies: the first step of disembodiment
*31:00* P.O.V., F.P.V,, drones, CCTV.... Is it possible to inject agency
into a disembodied image?