[rohrpost] GENERATIONAL FILMING

[contact at stefanriebel.de]

GENERATIONAL FILMING

Lea and Pekka Kantonen with Goa von Zweygbergk, Finland

exhibition at suomesta gallery, potsdamer strasse 55 E 91 tiergarten berlin
the opening will be saturday 11.6. at 7 PM

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Works

Autobiography of a Friend, Artist at Service



An artist cuts wood naked in her summer villa in the Turku archipelago in
Finland. Another artist sees it and gets and idea for an artwork. A third
artist films it. Their family members and closest friends get together to
discuss the footage and to develop the idea further. The first artist makes a
performance as a comment for the discussion, the performance is then filmed and
again discussed with family members, friends and colleagues. Who is the
legitimate author of this five-channeled video installation Autobiography of a
Friend, Artist at Service?

The protagonist of Autobiography of a Friend, Artist at Service is sculptor Goa
von Zweygbergk, a Finland-Swedish mother of four and a Christian left-wing
artist, a landowner and an entrepreneur. The installation makes fundamental
questions about authorship and ethics of collaborative art. The dialogical
working method Generational Filming is developed by Lea and Pekka Kantonen.

The installation videos are edited as five different narratives about the life
of the protagonist emphasizing different points about her many identities, and
can all be posited somewhere between art and ethnography. The four videos are
placed in the form of a fourfold table where the opposite pairs are
artistic–ethnographic and sequence (simple)–monograph (complex).

The Home as Stage

The series of four videos entitled The Home as Stage consists of events videoed
at home, with people actively organising and altering the space for their own
purposes and performances. The five episodes of the series are Espionage and
Counterespionage, A Dream and Blueberry Soup, Throwing Wetballs, Hot Soup, and
Scolding.

The Dream and Blueberry Soup depicts an everyday domestic situation which
embraces simultaneously the states of dreaming and wakefulness and the states
of being a child, an adult and an animal.

The last video in the series, Scolding, is the first and most extensive work
ever made using generational filming. A video of a child being scolded at a
birthday party puts into motion a long series of events, where the camera,
dubbed baby, begins to compete for attention with other family members, calling
also the father’s authority into question. In the subsequent video generations,
the events are commented upon by other artists as well as a theologian, an
anthropologist and a group of family therapists, all looking at it from their
own perspective. The work comprises seven video generations.

The artists

Since the early 1980s, the artistic practice of Lea and Pekka Kantonen has
involved co-operation with other artists, schools, museums and different
communities both locally and internationally. They are simultaneously working
with various projects dealing with similar issues, combining art with
fieldwork, teaching, research and political action. In these open ended
co-operative projects both mediums and goals are discussed. Exhibitions,
screenings and other presentations provide feedback on the ongoing processes –
a means of continuous methodological revision and conversation.
(www.kantonenart.com)

Generational Filming is a method of watching and commenting on home videos with
different age groups, different specialists, and other viewers with different
cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These discussions are filmed, and added to the
next edition as a new generation of the video to be shown to other audiences.
Viewers are helping the artists in both interpretation and theorization.

Goa von Zweygbergk is sculptor and redesigner behind the Defender brand.
(www.defender.fi)