Memory stunning End of May 2005, we wandered the streets of Mar del Plata, Argentina, in our wallets with shells on which were inscribed with poems. Most were inspired by a phrase I once stole a wall of Spain: Tu me quieres virgen, you me quieres santa, you tienes harta me! (You want me virgin, you want me saint, you make me tired!). We find a group of men huddled in front of a shop window, watching a football game on television. We encircle our shells poetry. One of them consult a few, and began to recite a poem: Tu me quieres alba, to me quieres espumas me quieres de Nacar … A text which, although not repeating the same words that we contain the same meaning. The similarity is uncanny. You’re making a tribute to Alfonsina Storni, who also wanted the poetry down into the street so that passers-by can pick like shells, says he. How can you do that here by chance? Alfonsina was deliberately sunk in Mar del Plata in 1938! Alix or the Barrier (an artist with whom I animated this creative workshop poétronique the French Alliance), nor I know this great poet. Poetry is the art of remembering that we never knew! It raises the memory, not as a burden experiences that tells us what happened, but as the effect of an act of creation. Memory is an afterthought of future content in a poem. Those Instants Vidéo 18C is an invitation to think about memory. More than an invitation, it is a call for help. Let me explain: Our association is committed with European partners to develop a platform which should shortly have Internet access to a memory of the video creation. In the process, it seemed appropriate to work on the history of the festival from two questions: What has happened? What was he thinking? During these eighteen years … Yes, but here: remember, scan, store, preserve, conserve, classify, index … What is LinkedIn? How he answers this need? What connection is there between memory, thought and action? Why the memory rather than oblivion? Why conservation rather than the destruction that the poet Mallarmé designated as his muse? Why so many advertisements around the preservation of our cultural heritage (see the announcement effect of the virtual library of Google), while at the same time everything is done to produce social amnesia? How are those who do not act as if we were the “end of history”, that is to say, a time insuperable, an eternal present without revolution possible (future), and therefore without a past? These issues overwhelm us. It is impossible, even indecent, to try to solve alone. Intuitively, and this intuition is the raison d’être of the Instants Vidéo, we turn to artists, poetic, filmmakers, poets electronics, troublemakers thinking around in the cage of digital images. We feel, as noted later Jean-François Neplaz, it is not only for them to resist the juggernaut of oblivion, but re-exist, re-invent a world. But we also look to all those who refuse to become spectators of their own lives, their own history, their own future, to all those who refuse to memory, our historical memory, a domain of specialists who manage based on criteria that serve themselves, to all those who think that art should be a human activity separate from our daily lives. There has always been much more creative acts of re-existence made in their daily lives, by non-artists in the history of art. But these acts are immediately denied, hidden, unmarked until a convergence more or less risky perpetrators door in front of the scene: it’s called a revolution. That these women wind neighborhoods of Buenos Aires who invent an incredible number of actions to jointly fight against domestic violence, poverty (as a tissue napkins made his reappearance), ignorance .. . ? Does mean we speak in our media these plants recovered in Argentina, no boss, and collective decisions, equal pay, integrated cultural center … ? No! Masters of this world know that such knowledge may remain engraved in the memory of the oppressed, and one day or another, be converted into actions. There are memories that take action. That place, I could hear from the mouths of some of these South American players, makes me think, that unlike the old utopianism, which marred arbitrary theories advanced to beyond any practicable (not without fruit though), there are now a host of new practices that seek their theory. This contemporary has the same consistency stunning that I advanced earlier about Alfonsina: memory is a result of the act of creation (which opens towards the future) theory (meaning that the we give a practice) occurs after the action. Here, it seems that I have mis-led the artist, also known as creator, relegating behind social movements and popular imagination. I do not write here a plea for the personality of the artist, but for freedom of creation by all and for all, as said Isidore Ducasse. This freedom will mean the inevitable changes that will far outweigh the only cultural circle. No poem, no work of art has to be at the service of any political project of any cause beyond the. However, no project company can contain the seeds of a true human emancipation, if it is not top priority freedom (and resources that go with it) to create. Policy is at the service of poetry. So here, I believe, the artist rehabilitated. Instants Vidéo Why do they put so hard to fight on the ground of language? Because language is at the heart of every struggle for the abolition or retention of this alienation, we live in language as in the stale air. It “uses” words as “employs” manpower. Words and labor working on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Some even overtime terrorism, Islamism, citizenship, cost, communication, work, merit, memory, digital … Our function is to support the struggles of emancipation and human language. Those Instants Vidéo 18C are new nomads. Such as memory. They are the work of old and new accomplices: Aix-en-Provence, Allex, Die, Fos-sur-Mer, Hérouville St Clair, Istres, Marseille, Martigues, Miramas, Nice, Paris … They are all artists who have trusted again … They benefited from the invaluable help of friends who helped us discover works as Delphine Gros for Lebanon, Ares Marta Graciela Taquini Javier Robledo for Argentina, Bouchra Khalili for Morocco, Exquisite Time for rest the world … One is never enough poet … Marc Mercier
