[spectre] Old Curtains, New Screens (Amsterdam, June 16-17 2006)

[geert lovink]

Old Curtains, New Screens
Media, Minorities and Politics in Post-Communist Europe
Conference and screenings
June 16-17 2006 in De Balie, Amsterdam (NL)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 formally removed the separation 
that had divided Europe for decades. The post-Wall landscape has been 
quickly transformed by new forms of mediation: changing 
infrastructures, techno-logies, and aesthetic forms that range from 
print to mobile phone to satellite television networks. This media boom 
has linked the post-communist region to the circulation of Europe and 
the globe at large in the last fifteen years. At the same time, new 
lines of separation, new curtains are also visible within policies and 
representations alike. We are particularly interested in how ethnic, 
gender, sexual, and religious minorities have been affected by the 
increased post-Wall attention that has been focused on them, and how 
they have been able to turn new media and social technologies into 
political and representational tools.

This symposium will bring together leading regional and national 
experts in the fields of broadcasting, visual art, new media activism, 
and film production to examine recent East and Central European media 
and political transformations. All panellists are involved in both the 
daily tasks of negotiating policy issues and in the theoretical work of 
understanding new identity formations that are no longer locked into 
national systems but are inevitably hybrid, sustained by and actively 
absorbing transnational affiliations. The event will be constructed as 
an interweaving series of engaging and informative short presentations, 
discussions, as well as film and video screenings.

Xenophobia and the Emergence of New Media Networks

17 june, 10:30 – 11:15

Tomász Kitlinski focuses on how new forms of xenophobia have 
accompanied the emergence of transnational gay, lesbian, and feminist 
media networks in Central and Eastern Europe. In the center of his 
presentation is the “sexual dissident,” whose coming out introduces a 
new voice into post-socialist literature, culture, and activism. The 
discourses of official media often dehumanize women and sexual 
minorities. Kitlinski addresses these forms of exclusion and the ways 
in which the groups involved try to challenge them through mobilizing 
new media networks.

Tomász Kitlinskiis lecturer in philosophy at the Marie Curie 
University, Lublin, Poland. He is the author ofThe Stranger Is Within 
Us (Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy: Reflections on the 
Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and contributed toOur 
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New 
York University Press, 2001). He contributed to‘New Europe, Old 
Monsters’ and other texts on international and Polish new media.

Virtual Space and Internet Media:

Self-Representations of East European Women on the Web

17 june, 11:45 – 12:35

Arturas Tereskinas analyzes the visual strategies articulated by 
Eastern European women in their internet personals. What issues of 
self-representation, gender, body and sexuality do these images raise? 
What representational conventions do they employ? Examining the 
problems of fantasy, pornography and desire, Tereskinas argues that 
through these images women describe and specify not only their 
sexualities but also their longings, insecurities, yearnings and their 
movement towards new possibilities. Iconography and narrative of these 
personals offer imaginary forms of resolution for contradictions that 
exist in both Eastern European cultures and women’s lives.

Arturas Tereskinasis Associate Professor of Sociology at Vytauras 
Magnus University and Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is the author 
ofBodily Signs: Sexuality, Identity and Space in Lithuanian Culture 
(2001) andImperfect Communities: Identity, Discourse and Nation in the 
Seventeenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2005) and the editor 
ofPublic Lives, Intimate Places: Body, Publicity, and Fantasy in 
Contemporary Lithuania (2002) andMen and Fatherhood: New Forms of 
Masculinity in Europe (2005, with Jolanta Reingardiene).

The Role of European Institutions in Support of New Media:

The Case of Roma Media

17 june, 12:30 – 13:15

Valeriu Nicolae will discuss the role that European institutions and 
NGOs play in supporting media-related projects. He will explicitly 
focus on the ways in which Roma media have emerged in post-1989 Europe, 
and how these media have started both to challenge mass media and to 
function as alternative sources of information.

Valeriu Nicolaeis secretary-general of ERGO, the European Roma 
Grassroots Organizations Network, a network of Roma organizations from 
Slovakia, Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, and an OSI 
fellow. From 2003 until March 2006, he was deputy director of ERIO, the 
European Roma Information Office in Brussels. He developed an 
educational project for Roma children in his hometown Craiova, Southern 
Romania.

Ghetto Entertainment:

Mainstream media and Minority Representation

17 June, 14:15 – 15:45

Anikó Imre will address the ways in which films and television programs 
that explicitly deal with minority issues have become central to public 
debates on minorities. In a case study, Imre will present a 
‘close-reading’ of the film Nyócker(Hungary, 2004, 90 min) by the 
Hungarian director Áron Gauder. Nyóckeris an animation movie on the 
conflicts between different Hungarian minorities and the municipality 
in the eight district of Budapest, commonly known as the ‘Roma ghetto’.

Anikó Imreis a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural 
Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She has written extensively on East 
Central European film and media. She is the editor ofEast European 
Cinema (Routledge, 2005).

Governments versus Art? Art as Alternative Media Space

17 June, 16:15 – 17:00

Pawel Leszkowicz will look at the ways in which artistic representation 
functions as an alternative medium that counterbalances the 
one-dimensional gender structure of the official, often still 
state-supported media. The range of images of sexuality and gender 
projected by contemporary art might function as an opening into the 
hidden history of Polish subjectivity and society, supplementing and 
enriching the dominant media sphere.

Pawel Leszkowiczis is lecturer in Contemporary Art and curator at the 
Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland. 
He is the author ofThe Iconography of Subjectivity: Helen Chadwick 
(Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy: Reflections on the 
Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and contributed to Our 
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New 
York University Press, 2001). He contributed to Polish feminist and gay 
collections and magazines, and curated the art exhibitionLove and 
Democracy.
 
Special Evening Program

Timescapes by Angela Melitopoulos

17 June, 20:00 – 22:00

Timescapes is a collective video project based in South-Eastern Europe 
that explores collective memory in video imagery and new forms of 
filmic representation through the possibilities of non-linear editing 
via the Internet. Timescapes’ basis is a database built by five video 
artists/activists from Cologne (Angela Melitopoulos), Berlin (Hito 
Steyerl), Belgrade (Dragana Zarevac), Athens (Freddy Viannelis), and 
Ankara (Videa: media collective) who shaped different subject matters 
on the theme of mobility and migration—and memories thereof—in 
so-called “B-Zone territories” in South-Eastern Europe and Turkey. 
Angela Melitopoulos will discuss and screen her contribution to 
Timescapes, the artistic road movie “Corridor X”.

Angela Melitopoulosis a video artist from Cologne, Germany. She studied 
fine arts at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik. She 
has worked with electronic media since 1986 and has experimented with 
single-channel-tapes, video installations, video essays and 
documentaries. Her video essayPassing Drama (1999) has won several 
prizes, among which the Prize of the Council of Europe 
(2000).Timescapes was exhibited as part of a larger exhibition 
onB-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond at Kunstwerke Berlin earlier this 
year.

Program Saturday 17 June

10:00     Ginette Verstraete, Anikó Imre, Huub van Baar, Welcome

10:30     Tomász Kitlinski, Xenophobia and the Emergence of New Media 
Networks

11:15     Coffee Break

11:45     Arturas Tereskinas, Virtual Space and Internet Media: 
Self-Representations of East European Women on the Web

12:30     Valeriu Nicolae, The Role of European Institutions in Support 
of New Media: The Case of Roma Media

13:15     Lunch Break

14:15     Anikó Imre, Ghetto Entertainment: Mainstream Media and

                    Minority Representation

                    Abridged Screening of Nyóckerby Áron Gauder 
(Animation

                    Movie, Hungary, 2004)

15:45     Coffee Break

16:15     Pawel Leszkowicz, Governments versus Art? Art as Alternative 
Media Space

17:00     Panel Discussion moderated by Huub van Baar

17:45     Dinner Break

 20:00     Ginette Verstraete, Introduction to Angela Melitopoulos’s 
Timescapes

 20:15     Angela Melitopoulos, Timescapes(Video art, Germany, 2005)

Film Program De Balie Cinema– 16 and 17 June

Special event

On 16 and 17 June De Balie Cinemawill show the documentary The Danube 
Exodus by the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács (A Dunai  Exodus, 
Hungary, 1998, 60 min). Time: 20:15.

On 16 June the German film critic Jörg Taszmanwill interview Péter 
Forgács, and moderate a discussion with him and the audience.

Péter Forgácsis a leading practitioner of ‘found footage’ filmmaking. 
Home movies and amateur films in particular serve as the sources from 
which he composes his stories. The Danube Exodusis a travelogue 
documenting the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning 
of the Second World War. In two ships, a group of 900 Slovak and 
Austrian Jews try to reach the Black Sea via the Danube, and from there 
to go to Palestine. Forgács based his film on the amateur films made by 
the captain of one of the ships, Nándor Andrásovits. He filmed his 
passengers while they prayed, slept, and even got married. At the end 
of this journey, it becomes clear that the boat will not return empty: 
in an historical paradox, a reverse exodus takes place, this time the 
repatriation of Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because 
of the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia. A fascinating personal and 
historical document.

Jörg Taszman grew up in East-Berlin and Paris, finished the Budapest 
Film School in 1991 and lives in Berlin. He works as a journalist and 
film critic specialized in East European cinema.

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Old Curtains, New Screens is organized by the NWO Research group 
Globalization and the Transformation of Cultural Identities in Central 
and Eastern Europe(Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University 
of Amsterdam), De Balie, The NetherlandsOrganization for Scientific 
Research (NWO), the Faculty of the Arts at the Vrije Universiteit 
Amsterdam, and Architecturalia.

De Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 (near Leidseplein), Amsterdam.
Entrée fee Symposium, 17 June: 5 € (day progam); 5 € (evening program)
7,50 € (both). Language: English. Reservations: 020 – 5535100
Entrée fee Péter Forgács’s The Danube Exodus, 16 and 17 June: 7 € / 5 €
with reduction. Reservations: 020 – 5535100 or: www.debalie.nl/cinema

Further Information

De Balie: www.debalie.nl
Huub van Baar Huub.van.Baar at uva.nl
Anikó Imre  A.Imre at uva.nl
Ginette Verstraete gee.verstraete at let.vu.nl
John Neubauer  J.Neubauer at uva.nl