Research team
Expertise
Specialisations and interests: - film history, with specific research interests for the interconnections between film and the visual arts and the cinematic representations of landscapes, cities, and architecture - art history of the 20th and 21st centuries, with specific research interests for photography and late-modernist painting (including the work of Raoul De Keyser)
Fugitive Cinema: Alternative film practices of an Antwerp-based collective in the 1960s and 1970s.
Abstract
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Antwerp-based film collective Fugitive Cinema injected Belgian cinema with a dose of political and social commitment. Fugitive Cinema's critical films, of which the alternative character was often reinforced by formal experiments, regularly caused national controversy and gained international acclaim. Next to its film production activities, Fugitive Cinema also provided an alternative to film culture at large by setting up a distribution system in Belgium and the Netherlands, organizing film screenings and debates all over Flanders, establishing a film club and a cultural centre in Antwerp, publishing its own film magazine and critically contributing to various other publications and public manifestations. While the collective's importance is undisputed, it has never been the subject of critical scrutiny. As Fugitive Cinema's archives have just been preserved by the University of Antwerp and the Felix Archive, this enables the first in-depth investigation of Fugitive Cinema's significance for film history in Belgium and beyond. Thereby, the project situates Fugitive's activities in the context of international political cinema and alternative film cultures. BOF DOCPRO4 project.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Willems Gertjan
- Co-promoter: Jacobs Steven
- Fellow: Baltussen Liesje
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Empty Pages.
Abstract
Today, graphic designers continually diversify their practices by commissioning themselves and taking on other roles. These hybrid designers navigate between functionality (as designers) and autonomy (as commissioners of their own work). Yet hybrid designers do not create hybrid designs. Their practices are autonomous. Their designs are not. Not by definition. The project Empty Pages contrasts the conventional art book, which is functional, represents and discloses art, with the so-called artists' book, which questions its function as a book, presents art and is autonomous as art object. Both the representation as the presentation are realized through design strategies. Can that distinction then also tilt through design? Can the conventional art book stand as a thing between its users, as a shared design tool, as an interface? What is the role of reproductions in this? What are the stylistic and aesthetic possibilities and limitations of reproductions? Can the mechanical reproductions of Walter Benjamin be designed as the digital reproductions of Boris Groys: as original performances of invisible originals? With regard to these questions, the doctoral project proposes a productive and hybrid design practice as research method: the genesis of a publishing house as artistic research into (and an update of) the design of conventional art books. The practice comprises four sections: Papers (catalogue, raisonné), Sheets (catalogue, imaginé), Folds (catalogue, pratiqué) and Pages (catalogue, publié).Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Jacobs Steven
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Marcel Broodthaers and cinema.
Abstract
This project focuses on the multiple relations between Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976 ) and cinema. Apart from surveying and analyzing his many films and film installations, it investigates the numerous references Broodthaers made to the medium of film, its technology, its history, and prehistory in both his works and writings. In addition, this project situates Broodthaers's films in the context of contemporaneous trends in experimental cinema and in the context of the film medium's migration to the space of the museum – an institution that Broodthaers questioned and deconstructed in many of his works. In so doing, this project will connect, compare, and reconceptualize two paradigms that developed quite parallel throughout the late 1960s and 1970s but which have not been connected previously: the artistic practice of so-called "institutional critique" (of which Broodthaers is one of the protagonists) and the "apparatus theory" in film studies. Furthermore, this project demonstrates how Broodthaers, who combined and conflated different artistic media, made explicit many of the key topics of the recent discipline of "media archaeology" such as a fascination for cinema's origins and prehistory, imagining cinema's alternative developments, histories, and futures.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Jacobs Steven
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project