Have you seen the horizon, lately ? We’ve been roaming the world through long trips this year. Our only piece of luggage being a question : Have you seen the horizon lately? Which proved quite handy for crossing borders. Customs officers are used to detecting !’s but not ?’s. Electronic poetry conducts its guerillas by means of punctuation too. There’s no such a thing as a second-rate struggle inside the maquis of language, of guerillanguage. Depending on the territory we tread on, the question may assume different (dance) figures. It doesn’t assume the same countenance as it pits itself against the walls that segregate the West Bank from the rest of the world, or alternatively, as it leans over the river Amazon. In Fortaleza, a Brazilian video artist, gazing at the ocean, told me : when you are on the other side, the horizon will then prevent us from seeing each other. The horizon proves here to be obstructing. Then, on quite a different occasion, as we were, with West-Indian artists, discussing this question, as well as that of the Manifesto for products of high necessity published during the fantastic general strike that rocked the French West Indies, the question suddenly reworded itself thus : Have you seen the horizons lately? Oh, islands, only they, can multiply the possible outcomes in a single all-encompassing glimpse. Archipelagos have a wide-ranging view. This singular question -which hence can be plural too- will naggingly work its way through these 22nd Instants Vidéo, whirling across its length, breadth and depth, searching every nook and cranny for every possible meaning that makes sense -and nonsense. The horizons seem thickly clouded because we’re gullible enough to believe that the present economic and political system is unsurpassable : the end of History, they say. When the real story remains, thus far, to be penned. We have to repluck up our courage and devise together a beating and joyous poephony. We’ll be making advances at you, as is commonly said in the language of amorous strategies, for everything that pulls us towards a desirable future is to be apprehended with our eyes, our teeth, our hands. This is what video art, turned into electronic poetry, is about -a sensible and marked advance, with no hit mark. Thierry Kuntzel’s installation La Peau (The Skin) is there to make us understand why the skin is irresolute, why it loves, and how it came to be poetry’s next of kin. (from Oct .9th to Nov.7th at La Compagnie) During this 22nd edition of the Instants Vidéo Festival, splendor will be given more than its share, even if we have to reach into the deep bosom of tragedy. We will summon Pasolini and Aeschylus to sing and jazz an African Oresteia. Why them? All it takes is going through the first lines of The Oresteia. A night watchman is awaiting news from his master, a sign, the glimmer of a torch that would herald Agamemnon’s victory. From the flat roof of the Atreides’ palace, he is supposed to scan the horizon. Yet, he’s lying on his couch, gazing at the stars and by doing so, verticalizes the horizon. He looks away from the very theater of operations so as to see furthest (to televise, so to speak). He anticipated thus the famous remark made by Paik, the inventor of video art, whereby Moon is the oldest TV. We will pay a visit to the beautiful red university of Vincennes, where the scattered weeds of critical thought once sprouted. In the meantime, the mowers of national interest have passed by. Neither past times, nor former loves come back, only weeds remain. Phew! In the same (dis)order of ideas, since Deleuze used to teach the politics of friendship there, we will overturn -with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson- the old concept of exhibition -or exposition- to inaugurate the first exp(l)osition of Art history, by strewing Marseille with Deleuzian moving pictures. Since we love vanishing points, we will bore a hole through the wall that separates Mexico from the United States, with an installation called AmeXica Skin by the Gigacircus collective (from Oct. 10th to 15th ). Indeed, Art leads a geopoetic struggle. A different videopoetaction for a different wall to leap : /SI:N/, the first video art and performance Festival in Palestine (Ramallah, East-Jerusalem and Gaza) which we organised last May along with the A.M. Qattan Foundation. We asked the artists who ‘d been invited there to poetically say something of what they perceived, received and felt : a declar’action by Julien Blaine, an amorous performance by Natacha Muslera, a lesson of philosophical aerobics in Arabic by Pascal Lièvre… (Nov. 13th at La Friche) More than ever do we have to be of an aerial quality to cross the threshold of all closed doors, to unshackle popular imagination, and tackle the merchants of cultural Viagra, while cuddling those airy figures who hover over the hay to cheat gravitation laws, such as the man fluttering over his own image in Reflecting pool by Bill Viola. (from Nov. 10th to 15th ) The 22nd Instants Vidéo will signal a new stage in the creation of a genuine constellation of Mediterranean venues for spreading and creating video art with the welcoming of our Egyptian friends from Alexandria. We are celebrating this year the hundredth anniversary of the first Futurist Manifesto, whose author, Marinetti, was born in Alexandria. We will therefore see if artists here and there are offsprings of this artistic avant-garde movement. Have you seen the horizon lately? Some sniggered at the question and criticised us for having fallen for it, hence waiting for a bright future, the helping hand of some hereafter, or for hoping. We have to admit we’re slow on the uptake. We had to roam the world in order to realise that our critics were right. One has to despair. In other words, we have to get rid of any kind of delusion. On this condition, could we become apprentices in what is imperceptible, namely poets. The future always takes root in present minute details, in the unsealed and indeterminate dimension of life, as well as in its unseen aspects. Howbeit, isn’t it yet another delusion to make frail-shouldered poetry bear the burden of our own becoming ? All it takes to find this out is opening the daily newspaper. The world as it stands doesn’t need any poetry. Yet, as it stands is precisely the point, i.e unbearable. To those nestled in the horizon and those who broke away from it, we extend our vertical welcome. The picaroons’ crew from the Poetic and Digital Instants Vidéo.
