Image round the body Manosque. City where he lived his last years the ex-situationist Ralph Rumney. Instants Video makes him a tribute by presenting “Piazza”, a plagiarism of Andy Warhol turned on the Place de l’Hotel de Ville. If you have never been to Manosque, you know certainly that niche in this city a House of Culture Youth and quite exceptional. A laboratory where a team leads for years experiences of social and cultural capital. Artists from various disciplines (poets, dancers, painters, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, video …) have stayed. They worked with young people and audiences usually excluded from artistic life. These meetings resulted in productions. But this is perhaps not essential. Hundreds of individuals have found words, sounds, images, gestures to say something about them and their relationship to the world. For 16 years, the MJC organizing an event dedicated to electronic arts: Instants Video. The festival, open to international, showed more than a thousand of video works and multimedia installations, performances. It has hosted hundreds of artists from all continents. The history of Instants Vidéo is also co-founded in 1993 (with the University of Arts Ben Sik) video art festival in Casablanca and VidéoAsis Figuig. These are workshops, lectures, programming in many cities of France (Marseille, Aix, Paris, Nice, Metz, Annecy, Cannes, Toulouse, Montpellier, Lyon …) and abroad (Buenos Aires, Bogota, Montreal , Quebec, Bologna, Wroclaw, Lodz, Fes, Rabat, Oujda, Split, Zagreb …). These are collaborations with newspapers and magazines dedicated to art and thought (Impact, Small, short, it Particolare, The Acharnistes …). These are partnerships with schools of art, libraries, festivals, artists’ studios, schools and colleges, universities, museums of Contemporary Art … These are experiences in prison association Places fictitious … But this is perhaps not essential. When we started in 1988, the Instants Vidéo, we did not really know what we were doing. Intuition. The feeling that a word sensitive and rebellious women and men of this world was going to clear a path, and you had to be there to listen and grow. At the beginning of this adventure, we were a handful in a very small moon. Then strangers joined us, young and old, artists, curious, passionate, students, suspicious, enthusiasts … Today, the moon is multiplied. They travel all over the world. They illuminate a multitude of human landscapes. Who are all these friends? What do they want? Breathe the same air. Taste the forbidden fruits of passion for life. Invent possible. We walked into the night to hear what our bodies had to say. We realized that each of us was a multitude, human, bird, tree, water … and we wanted to meet other multitudes. In 2001, we mobilized to demand the release of a Croatian poet, a friend, tortured. Our call was relayed by a considerable number of artists, associations, friends around the world. We won. The joy, of course. But not only. Torpor too. That we realize that becoming an “army”, a force capable of confronting other forces. So we resumed walking. We planned to become an army disarmed and disarming. Dispossess us to become lighter. Decompartmentalize our knowledge. Share our experiences. Whether you’re an artist, technician, cook or secretary. Each command by obeying. Each is a center and a periphery. “There is a big difference between a fixed space spread between sedentary individuals following terminals or enclosure, and distribute singularities in an open space without enclosure or property,” wrote Gilles Deleuze. We did not know then that we engage our toughest fight. Against ourselves. Against our own habits. Practice our dreams, here and now. Today, we’re going to leave. Because the owners have demanded the departure of the director Chantal Mayor. Because our adventure is hers. Because we do not separate the feathers of a bird. We migrerons. We were not there already existed the forest, we will not be here that still exist. How to become ourselves forest? Our friend Gianni Toti, enraged by the injustice that affects Mayor Chantal said: You have to dedicate these 16C Moments Video Marc Mercier
