User guide for the 23rd Instants Vidéo

The 23rd Instants Vidéo - exhibitions, performances, screenings and debates- will take place in various venues in Marseilles from Friday 5th Nov. to Sunday 14th : The Friche Belle de Mai of course, but also La traverse, Espace Culture, la Fosse, la Compagnie, Les Grands Terrains, Art/Position, Galerie HO, Où, Antonin Artaud High School (Artothèque Gallery), the A.D.P.E.I. and Radio Grenouille
The Friche Belle de Mai will be hosting The International Poetronic Encounters of the 23rd Instants Vidéo from Wednesday 10th to Sunday 14th Nov. : every year more and more people come to this venue, which we're trying to make as cozy as we can, for this important milestone in this year's event.
Opening night for this frichetroniques -literally: wastelandtronics- event, made possible through a partnership with Les Rencontres d'Averroès and scheduled for Wednesday 10th Nov., will show the exceptional screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il Vangelo secondo Matteo -aka Location Hunting in Palestine for The Gospel According to St. Matthew- (Italy, 1963, 52', Italian subtitled in French), followed by a discussion with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, who's the author of Pasolini, Portrait of a poet as a film-maker, among other works.

We're also repeating last year's pert experience of exp(l)ositions -i.e exploded exhibitions, whereby an artist, along with a few abetters, exhibits or stages performances in several places in Marseilles. This year, it will be artist Giney Ayme's turn  (who's a painter, a video artist, a photographer, as well as a musician) to play this delicious and delicate game of geographical dispersal at the Traverse, Espace Culture, La Compagnie, La Fosse, La Friche Belle de Mai, as well as on Radio Grenouille's waves.
Admission is free because we deem Art as priceless, because we are rather demanding and expect quite a lot from the sensitivity and attention of our guests, because we hold each of our rallying-screenings to be a general assembly of the living, because our compensation is your thoughtful, witty and breathing acts of heedful speech. The people who will be welcoming you, who'll bartend and serve your meals, who'll translate the debates in English (or in French), pick up the artists from the airport, and so on... these people go unpaid for these tasks. They are companions in the poetic project of the Instants Vidéo.

Marseilles : our anchorage ground as well as our runway.
From 3rd September to 19th December, the Nomadic Instants Vidéo, with the help of partner-organisations, organise the festival stopovers :
Within Greater Marseilles :
La Ciotat (September)
Aix-en-Provence (October)
Martigues and Port de Bouc (November)
Nice (November)
And around the world :
Kiev (Ukraine) (September)
Oran (Algeria) (October)
Amsterdam (The Netherlands) (October-December)
Florence and Milan (Italy) (October et November)
Prague (Czech Republic) (November)
Damascus (Syria) (December)
Cairo and Alexandria (Egypt) (December)
All these stops form what we call a poetronic constellation.
The Instants Vidéo is the world's record holder for its length (4 months), as well as for its width (3 continents, 8 countries,15 cities and 31 places). This double athletic record has no more importance than that of egg-throwing or that of the longest travelling in the history of cinema (300m in Godard's Weekend). It is there only to show our disinthralled passion for Dionysiac excessiveness.

A short clarification on the political commitment of the Instants Vidéo : Over the years, the Instants Vidéo have carved a reputation with being a politically concerned festival. Woe betide me, I'm a nuance, said Nietzsche. In consensus-ridden times, contradiction is not in anyone's good graces. Our political commitment aims at holding the Institution and Money off -holding off, as it is taught in combat sports, and poetry is not the least of them. Our duty is to coerce these powers to serve artistic creation in order to unshackle the act of poetry from any social commissioning. This essential autonomy must take into account the fact that one cannot leap over one's time (Hegel)... The difficulty lies with finding in one's era the most incisive mode of intervention. We've chosen electronic poetry because it tackles the crux that confusingly meshes art and communication technology.
Holding the opponent off comes down to inventing an autonomous mode of actions  and reflection. It is also bearing the heavy responsibility of considering the world we live in and thinking up our place in it : "How sweet it is to obey when we can enjoy the happiness... of being conveniently discharged, by sage and worthy leaders, from the pressing responsibility of a general direction of our conduct."

(M)Editorial

Interwoven lands

"There exist interwoven lands, in which species blend together, where roads are indeterminate, where mountains suddenly flatten out and rivers taste of sea-water. These are most often transit places betwixt two landscapes of happiness or two shadows that suddenly recover their own light.”
Édouard Glissant

The time of resistance is drawing to an end. We're stepping into the era of poetic offensives which call for the splendour of our creative acts, for this particular freedom which ceaselessly overflows itself.
We're going to weave together, interweave, blend and meddle in our business as well as in business that isn't our own, in what lies within and without our hold, what we behold and hold in regard, in view, askew.
We're gleefully going to glide  from sounds to sense, from landscapes to inscapes, from ethics to aesthetics, from wit to tragedy, from bodily frailty to raspy disagreement, from fleeting images to long-lasting thoughts.
In Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse, Edouard Glissant writes : "In the current panomara of the world, one of the major issues is the following : how to open up to the other without losing oneself?" This needs a poetic intention: "A poetic intention can help me conceive that in my relation to the other, to the others, to all the others, to the world-totality, I am changing myself by exchanging myself, by remaining myself without any self-denial, without adultering, and in comprehending these very impossibles one needs a whole poetique." 

Boundless love and dignified wrath being our only equipment aboard the hundred-mast vessel  that is taking us to places where the diverse, the insurgent's desire,  where insurrectionary acts of speech luxuriate, come hell or high water.
The purpose we share with the electronic poets and the audiences who walk along the daring paths of the Instants Vidéo is passionately excessive : keeping up the reinvention of delicate dynamics so as to trap the zero-dimension, the heart inside which all these ambiguities and powers are pulsing and where a new pact between understanding and intuition is being sealed. (Gilles Châtelet, The Consensus-Ridden Animals).

The Instants Vidéo have always refused to defend a particular aesthetic school or line : we deem it an artificial process which most often than not conceals genuine submission to institutional, mercantile or ideological dogmas. Neither pontificating, nor clichés tiffing. Hence our utmost distrust of the controlled designation of origin Contemporary Art which, how strange, is very rarely employed in its plural form. Besides, this contemporary, this everlasting present, is by definition something which has no future. Our curiosity is kindled by  the successful or failed attempts to transform languages, with the gently determined and utopian belief that these endeavours will give us access to new ways of seeing and thinking up the world. That is why we welcome the continuous whispering of the languages of the world, the multiple sounds and images, in order to make the poetic flowers of genuine speech blossom despite the progress of the brain-numbing media companies which are advancing on new parcels of humanity every day.
Electronic poetry has absolutely nothing to do with the huge tide of audiovisual products which overflows most of the movie theatres, television and internet networks, as well as other cathodic multipliers of globalised and mercantile mediocrity. The poetic act of speech is the last standing bulwark against the silent assassination of verb and image.

There is a poem by Yannis Ritsos where a madman declares : "This glass shall make me win! And he showed the seventh cask without even knowing  what was inside it nor even whose it was."
We share this crazy, immoderate, persistant and uncertain urge. We feel attracted by the never-ending and unsubmissive task, one that is bent towards overstepping any social contract.
A given culture is even the more coherent as its projects blossom out unstained by any speculation and finality. The poets of verb, sound and image have something to say here in order to put a few grits in the well-oiled flywheel of ready-made thinking. One does not think without inventing his own language. "finding a language", says poet Christian Prigent, "means stretching the fabric of speech, and puncturing it repeatedly so that the real (the impossible, the non-symbolisable) beams through.
Taking the offensive and counterattacking comes down to intertwining impatience and constance, concern and patience of thought cropping up from some self-propelling momentum, without preset boundaries and whose soaring up relies only on its self-imposed rigour.
"Only a gust of wind can make the wave swell," the Chinese say. Electronic poetry is thus a blast which now and then contains a scream or a song.
The reason why the Instants Vidéo have chosen to be at the same time here and elsewhere -Marseilles being our anchorage ground as well as our runway- is the urge to feel in our flesh that we're not isolated, that a cheerful and insubordinate constellation is being sketched in order to uphold the rallying cry  of one of the smaller Resistance networks during World War II : To emancipate and federate our humanities. Here is an unreasonable network : Marseilles, Damascus, La Ciotat, Prague, Nice, Amsterdam, Alexandria, Aix-en-Provence, Oran, Martigues, Port-de-Bouc, Milan, Tlemcen, Kiev, Cairo, Florence. 
We're not fearful of being scorned at in a world which reveres, of all, Hermes, the servile, the slave of Zeus. We, as for ourselves, are on the side of Prometheus who, 25 centuries ago, dared say "I loath all gods", and who went as far as stealing fire from them so as to bestow it to men, taking hence the Western world, and then the entire planet into a perpetual struggle against tyranny.
In spite of the deafening and blinding noise of deceiving rhetorics and of planetary icons, broadcast straight from technocratic and moneymaking transmitters, we're able to sense pockets of resistance which uphold at all cost a certain listening and heeding outwith.
Electronic poetry is the art of showing while concealing, of unveiling and stowing away at the same time. André Bazin used to say "the camera frame comes  down to covering up everything else". "Dig down reality beyond what goes without saying" furthered Bertold Brecht.
In 2013, we'll be celebrating the 50th anniversary in the history of video art of the founding exhibition by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Our only nostalgia will be turned towards inventing a future. Until then, we won't forget to dance. Hopi Indians used to practise a mystical dance called Hoya : "fit to fly the nest". By all odds, we feel closer to quetzals than to fowlers.
Only passionately can we wish you fair winds and following seas.

Ret Marut