- SCREENING PROGRAMME14 October 2017
BRIDGIT and LHB, with other videos
Charlotte ProdgerFilmtheater Cinebergen and Bergen aan Zee, The Netherlands× Charlotte Prodger, 'BRIDGIT' (2016), video still. Courtesy the artist.
- Tickets: €15,–
Reservations: Ticket with free bus service (sold out) / Ticket without free bus service As part of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s introductions to the artists and researchers of VII (2017–2018), Social Movement, we are pleased to present a screening programme by the artist Charlotte Prodger. The event will take place at Filmtheater Cinebergen, located at Eeuwigelaan 7 in Bergen, the Netherlands and will commence at 2pm. A walk in the surrounding nature reserve will follow the screening.
For the programme Prodger’s videos BRIDGIT (2016) and LHB (2017), will be shown alongside two works by contemporaries—Dani Leventhal and Jared Buckhiester’s Hard As Opal (2015) and Jonathan Rattner’s The Interior (2016)—that have been influential to her practice and current thinking around ‘queer wildernesses’. Together the works will introduce Prodger’s exploration of the intertwining of landscape, bodies, technology and language, and her open enquiry into how queer lives can be lived outwith the densely-populated urban contexts that dominate popular LGBTQI narratives. This enquiry will be further developed in her commission with If I Can’t Dance.
Following the screening, the audience is invited to join the artist and If I Can’t Dance on a sunset walk through Bergen aan Zee’s dune landscape to the North Sea.
Bergen is one-hour north of Amsterdam via car or public transport. For the event a complimentary bus will depart from the If I Can’t Dance offices at Westerdok 606-608, Amsterdam at 12.30pm sharp and will return to this location from Bergen aan Zee at 6.30 pm.
Tickets for the day are €15,– and can be booked with the free return bus service or without.
With thanks to Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and Video Data Bank.
Programme of the day
12:30pm – Bus departs Westerdok 606-608, Amsterdam
1.30pm – Bus arrives at Cinebergen, Eeuwigelaan 7, Bergen
2.00pm – Screening programme commences
4.30pm – Screening programme concludes
5.00pm – Sunset walk through nature reserve and beach at Bergen aan Zee
6.30pm – Bus departs from the Zeehuis, Verspyckweg 5, Bergen aan Zee for Amsterdam
7.30pm – Estimated time of return to Amsterdam- Details of screening programmeCharlotte ProdgerBRIDGIT (2016), duration 32:00
BRIDGIT takes its title from the eponymous Neolithic deity, whose name has numerous iterations depending on life stage, locality and point in history. BRIDGIT explores the shifting temporal interrelations of name, body, and landscape through the work’s narratives where “... the force of time is not just a contingent characteristic of living, but is the dynamic impetus that enables life to become, to always be in the process of becoming, something other than it was” (Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power by Elizabeth Grosz).In this new work Prodger focuses on female attachments—a process of identification that includes friends and shape-shifting deities amongst other figures of admiration. Prodger habitually names her hard drives after personally influential older figures she wants to have in her daily working orbit. At one point during BRIDGIT, her panning camera reveals the icon of a flash drive she has named after a set of recordings by musician Alice Coltrane under the moniker Turiya. Later, in quoting the virtual systems theorist and pioneer of transgender studies Sandy Stone, Prodger cites her different names (Sandy Stone, Allucquére Rosanne Stone, Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone) as extended embodiments and multiple subjectivities spanning time and space.One of the many myths surrounding Bridgit is of her birth—which is said to have taken place in a doorway, the threshold of inside and out—a transitional space that in Neolithic terms represented the moment of shift from nomadic existence to domesticated agriculture. The footage moves between the domestic interior of Prodger’s home in Glasgow to various locations in the Scottish Highlands where Prodger has worked, as well as transit between. Alongside the film’s voices, the diegetic soundtrack spans these locations with rural soundscapes and incidental background music indoors.BRIDGIT is shot entirely on Prodger’s iPhone, which she uses as part of day-to-day life, accumulating an ongoing archive. This work utilises some of that archive of footage, just as past works such as Stonymollan Trail (2015) have done. By utilising the device prosthetically, the technology becomes an extension of the nervous system whilst also providing an intimate connection to global social interaction and work—dissolving the threshold between day to day life and the conventions of production.For Prodger the iPhone presents a set of rigorous formal parameters not unlike her previous explorations in 16mm. Where 16mm film has a fixed length (e.g. 100ft rolls), the iPhone has data storage limitations that constrain her shots to roughly 4 minutes in length and under, just slightly longer than a roll of film. Through image and interweaving narratives the film explores multiple registers of bodily time: the arc of Prodger’s own life; the period of a year she took to make the piece; the real time of industrial and civic transportation; the clockwork rhythm of the medical institution; the temporality of socio-political movements that bridge between individual lives and generations, and the vast time of prehistory.Charlotte ProdgerLHB (2017), duration 20:00Charlotte Prodger’s recent 6-month artist residency in Berwick-Upon-Tweed—a small town in Northumberland, 3 miles south of the Scottish border—has marked the beginning of an open-ended period of research into an idea of ‘queer rurality’; how queer lives are lived beyond the densely-populated urban contexts that generally dominate LBGTQI narratives, and what happens to the contingent coded signifiers of queer bodies within wildernesses.Throughout LHB Prodger recounts her fixation with the Pacific Crest Trail; a 6-month, 2,663 mile long, narrow hiking path stretching from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada that traverses some of the most uninhabited wilderness in the US.
Simultaneously, she repurposes the Northumberland flag—which marks the turbulent and patriarchal history involving territory, borders and identity of England’s most sparsely populated region—as a rectilinear framing device for her footage. Prodger uses this formal template to tessellate a personal camera-phone archive she has accumulated of urinating in various rural landscapes—an intimate queer territoriality outwith the gender-delineated spaces within which bodies are and are not allowed to piss.Fluctuating between the macro of geopolitical land use and the micro of the personal-political body, LHB continues Prodger's ongoing exploration into the complex relationships between bodies, identity, technology and time.Dani Leventhal and Jared BuckhiestHard As Opal (2015), duration 29:23“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.” – Brett PriceJonathan RattnerThe Interior (2016), duration 24:00Using 16mm film and digital video, The Interior weaves an intricate visual, sonic, and physical exploration of a dog-musher’s remote homestead in Eureka, Alaska, where four humans live and work year-round with a community of 56 sled dogs. - The programme of If I Can’t Dance is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), and Ammodo. If I Can’t Dance is a member of Corpus and Performance Platform.
