Fragmented

Cape Town
Co-director / Poet / Choreographer: Khanyisile Mbongwa
Co-director / Camera / editor: James Tayler
Performers: Zenande Mankayi, Nicole Olsen
4'53’’
2009

In Cape Town, a city divided along race and class lines, two women can't quite meet and can't quite let go. One gay, one straight, one black, one coloured, the spaces they inhabit connect them, and yet become the thing that separates them from each other. "Fragmented" is a dance poem about the physical and psychological identity of women in the city. They dance in urban spaces marked by masculine architecture that denies the organic curves of their bodies. They venture into marginal areas in which they are subject to intimidation or violation, areas marked by gang graffitti where only men walk safely. Their silhouettes become windows into the cityscape, in a film that dreams of a place where, in a line from the hushed internal monologue of the poem, "I forget your sex and your skin colour".

Between

Johannesburg
Artist / poet: Colleen Alborough
Sound artist / voice: João Orecchia
2'51’’
2009

Between is an exploration of Johannesburg city space. It considers how daily movement through exterior city space infiltrates and affects your interior world. Between tracks a turbulent journey along a tarred road. It traces the tarmac and the road-markings along the way. Its pace is fast and creates a disorienting viewing experience, as the road-markings and sounds are animated in sync with the speed of the journey. It explores the pace of Johannesburg and the constant, dizzying speed that embodies our way of being in this city.

This Place Forever (excerpt)

Pretoria
Artist / director: Fabian Oliver Wargau
Composer: Hedley Vincent
2009

This excerpt from This Place Forever is a broken debate between two twenty-somethings about insecurity, love affairs and the environment of the city. The video drastically abbreviates their reflections on the permanence versus non-permanence of life as well as compatibility versus incompatibility between people, becoming in itself something transitory, to be used like the city. The film draws on a combination of poetic visual texts which are displayed as subtitles against the raw sound of passing vehicles and the hushed underlying original score.

To those who belongs the earth shall belong the sky up to the heavens

Pretoria
Artist / director: Maaike Bakker
Sound: Christian Henn
1’46’’
2009

In this stop motion video of sky scenery embedded with text, the sky becomes a new intangible landscape, an extension of the city. In focusing on the constant search for unchartered territory, the video deals with the theme of the cities limitless and constant transformation. It investigates the old roman principle “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad caelum et ad inferos“, which roughly translated states: ”To those who belongs the earth..(shall belong the sky up to the heavens)”. The video refers to the city in terms of its never-ending evolvement, to the extent where the only remaining space for development is above us, in the sky. It addresses and simultaneously satirises the rapid course of society’s progress in terms of spatial development.

The sound for the video was created by Christian Henn, only making use of air driven

instruments, a pedal organ and an accordion.

Jackson 5

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Sean Buch
Camera / editor: Emma Jane Laurence
Sound: DJ Yoji a.k.a Simon Tollman
2’ 50’’
2009

Graffiti artists attempt to create a private space within the city through the act of tagging, writing their pseudonym in public space. Painting is considered by many to be a cloistered process executed in a studio or private space. This video, inspired by hip-hop and graffiti culture, plays on the tensions of the a painter’s public and private identity, and his relationship to the cities of Gauteng. The title Jackson 5 makes reference both to the American Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock and the Pop group of the 60s and 70s.

Player 1.1

Port Elizabeth / Grahamstown
Artist / director: Mark Wilby
Performer: Gary Gordon
4'00''
2008

A man in a desolate warehouse landscape mutters the obsessive rhythms of share prices and stock market reports. It is an accountant’s incantation of shock, the nightmare of a stockbroker, evidence of an addiction that has erased him, adding up to nothing.

Terra Obscura

Cape Town
Artist / programmer / director: Maia Grotepass
02'00''
2009

Terra Obscura displays the joint layered effects of computerised forces and human intervention on two sites on the developing edge of greater Cape Town. Grotepass interprets the data to mirror and highlight processes observable in landscape changes that occur due to “low density sprawl”. Informal human interaction and natural processes are mapped to random-based algorhythms. Geometric algorhythms create visual structures referring to formal planned development of the sites. This video is an exploration of imagery captured from an interactive installation work with the same title.

TV Programs 001: Powerlines / Web of Life

Cape Town
Artist / director: Nileru
03’10''
2007

An abstract photomontage work that engages with the electrical power lines which characterizes our urban environment. The combination of still photography, repetition and Solfreggio sound frequencies produce an audiovisual sensory experience which is at once calming and meditative to some, while excruciatingly irritating to others.

Sam Taylor-Wood. Breach. video installation. 2001.

A video installation by the British artist with a quietly disturbing performance.

Anders Weberg. For Sore Eyes. video. 2008.

A recent work by the Swedish video artist.

Pippilotti Rist. I'm not the girl who misses much. 1985.

The Swiss video artist's famous first video, reworking lyrics by John Lennon, seen at the time as a comment on MTV.