We are interested in new forms of writing and in sensitive works of art: video art, multimedia installations, performances, documentaries of creation. Every year in November, we organize an international festival.
We welcome all the forms of audiovisual and multimedia art, a large field continually in the move, in prey with thematic variations, formal and technological. Our screenings reflect this mobility, go beyond the traditional limits between artistic disciplines and media and pay attention to intermediate spaces: cinema, television, media arts and plastic arts. Film, video, audio, installation and performance meet and interfere all through a large variety of works, French and international.
We do not organize any competition. We aim to be a space of encounters, of discoveries, of confrontations, of experimentations, of production of thought and friendship.
We like the works of art they show and the artists they welcome. We discovered, fostered and promoted young artists.
We do not give a theme, but every year we give a title to our manifestation like one does for a collection of poems: “Burn your own patience”, “Resistance my sweet concern”, “(Seize) The image round the waist”, “Under the sign of the Quetzal”….
Each one of the artists can take it into account or not.
We pay attention to the audiences they welcome. They are regarded as specta(c)tors of their destiny, sovereign assemblies: the glance creates the works of art. Thus, since our creation in 1988, we have been developing strategies in order to allow a diversity of publics to have access to video and multimedia art, having regard to the quick development of technologies in the production and diffusion process.
In the beginning of our manifestation, video and multimedia creation didn’t hold much interest from the institutions and not a close attention from the audience. This is why, when we decided to organize each year an international event in the region PACA (Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur), we also started to lead activities to initiate the audiences: artistic workshop in schools and associations, regular screenings in the Region PACA, development of our partnership with the schools of Arts, with Contemporary Art museums, with cultural structures.
Nomad, we travel the world in quest of encounters that will transform us and we strongly developed our local, national and international network of partners (screenings, workshops, conferences…).
We are interested in the History of Arts provided that it lead to think the present and the future, providing that it will stimulate the contemporary creation. We like wandering memories.
We is a manifestation always on the move. We create our route on our way, according to our desires, our encounters and also technological mutations. We are in the mean time, resolute in our commitment in favour of new artistic writings, and open to influences that can transform us.
Broadcasting or how to be a go-between
The broadcasting function usually given to festivals is obsolete if one doesn’t consider in the same time, all the links in the chain: artist-machines-production-artwork-broadcast-audiences…Otherwise, the festivals will have to reduce their activities and become only a shop window of contemporary art (as it is for fashion), a market or a cultural leisure park. Our role should be:
– to facilitate the access to historic works of video art, to unknown works (Middle East, South America, Balkans, Africa…), and produce a critical reflection on them.-
– to support the artists from the emergence of their desire of creation of a work of art, to help in the research of financial support for production, to generate a critical reflection on their project and then on the object produced
– to convince distributors to present the works in their catalogues or to become the intermediary between artists and potential broadcasters.
– to find the maximal conditions of projection or exposition of the works of art, in France and abroad
– to set up the conditions of availability of the eyes and attention of the audiences (we want to insist on the plural of the word audiences, because our aim is indeed to allow publics that are generally excluded from the artistic sphere to discover this field of contemporary imagination).
By refusing to specialise our manifestation as a shop window of electronic and numeric arts, we imply that Les Instants Vidéo is a “committed” manifestation, a commitment that aims to something else than transforming the artists in vassals of an aesthetic or technologic fashion.
On the contrary, we believe that our duty lies in the listening of sensitive and fragile experimentations. The commitment also signifies that our association is not only an accountancy organisation, a mechanic to select presentable works of art, but also a strength force of production: production of critical texts, of diversified experimentations, of workshops of artistic practices.