GPC STREAMS (#1) The beginning is the end is the beginning
■ DATE:
■ LOCATION:
GPC Online Screen
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During a guided tour at the Monte Titano, it was explained to me that if humans were to understand geology from another temporal perspective, we (humans) could experience a mountain as a wave, always in movement. A similar revelation might occur while observing a place in ruins, a site that suggests endless instability between what has been, what is and what will be. The ruin is a proof of material flux, like memory itself—not what remains but what is remaining (in present continuous). And, in the present moment, which is characterized by planned obsolescence and collapse, ruination is indeed the new normal.
"The beginning is the end is the beginning" is a collection of audiovisual works that interact with the ruin in contrasting locations (a Soviet residential building in Oleksandriwka, the now demolished National Theater in Tirana, and Glory’s nightclub in Ibiza). Conceived from different personal perspectives, these interactions enable the collapse of linear time: past, present or future become uncertain, perhaps occurring simultaneously. Far from romantic melancholy, they manifest reality, with its processes of gentrification, tourist massification and dispossession of the commons. In these works, as in the world itself, rubble and debris is just a part of a continuum that never ceases to start, or end.
Program
■ OLENA NEWKRYTA: RUINS IN REVERSE
AT, UA, 2020, 24:55 min.
Shot in the steppe-like landscape of southern Ukraine, the short film follows the transformation process of a vacant Soviet residential building. Built according to a standardized Soviet master plan, its layout is slowly being dismantled by individuals, who create new architectures from the extracted modules. Thus, the traces of private biographies and vestiges of past ideologies inscribed into the physical remnants continue to circulate in the community and find their ways into new constructions. "Ruins in Reverse" addresses this process of appropriation and utilization as a form of material engagement with the past as well as an act of self-empowerment in the present.
■ MILLONALIU (KLODIANA MILLONA & YUAN CHUN LIU) & ENDI TUPJA: EARTHMOVERS
AL, 2020, 06:34 min.
"Earthmovers" is a film essay reflecting on progress, urban development and the dispossession of commons through the lens of extractive violence. Taking the event of the brutal demolition of the National Theater of Tirana and using the bulldozer as a primary object of inquiry, this film essay further reflects how under the grand narrative of (the western constructed notion of) modernity, colonial definitions and practices are still implemented and domesticized in the exploitation of commons.
■ IRENE DE ANDRÉS: GLORY'S. DONDE NADA OCURRE
ES, 2016, 12:38 min.
The project "Donde nada ocurre (Where Nothing Happens)" compiles the history of abandoned or temporarily disused nightclubs in Ibiza, Irene de Andrés’ birthplace. One of the five video works from this series has Glory’s as its protagonist: one of Ibiza’s first nightclubs. Its architecture reflected Ibiza’s countless other leisure temples, many of which did not survive the growth of the island’s rampant, money-soaked mass tourist business. In a poetical gesture of resurrection, de Andrés records how techno beats resound amongst the ruins, making the surroundings dance to Nano Vergel’s DJ set.