Margreth Olin • Director

Interview with Norwegian director Margreth Olin for CINEUROPA

by Maud Forsgren

21/12/2012 - In her documentary Nowhere Home (De andre), Norwegian director Margreth Olin tackles a current theme that is controversial in Norway and other European countries: the status of refugees.

How did you choose the young people that we see in your films?
Margreth Olin: I never sought to distribute roles. I met Hassan and his brother Husein from Afghanistan, as well as Khalid, in Salhus, a reception centre for refugees where teenagers aged 15 to 18 had been gathered to be prepared to return once they reached adulthood. Life in these centres is motionless, nothing happens. This is why I'm against a temporary residence permit for youth. They can't develop normally in such conditions, on the margins of society. I met Goli from Kurdistan shortly before his expulsion from Norway, when he came out of the Ila prison where he was being held for assault and battery. (The same prison where Anders Breivik is being held at the moment).

Are there lots of children in this situation in Norway?Since 2009, 149 children have obtained this temporary permit. When they see the fateful date of their 18th birthday approaching, some of them choose to disappear. They lead an underground life, in which they are exposed to all sorts of dangers and temptations. It's a problem that we should really solve, as it's not only a question of these youth's protection and safety, but also ours.

Did you film a lot?An enormous amount. I had to make delicate choices during editing. But for each of the children, I tried to keep a balance, to show different aspects, not necessarily nice ones. I wanted the viewers to identify with me, the narrator, with my feelings, my emotions. But at the same time, I did not want to force the viewers to think like me.

You evoke a dream at the beginning of your film.Yes. I was wondering how to best evoke the violence inflicted on young beings. The Second World War seems far away for most Norwegians. They don't know what it means to suffer. And then the July 22, 2011 tragedy happened, with the massacre we all know about. It was a real trauma for all Norwegians. And on television I saw the eyes, the expressions, of the survivors, the same expressions as those of the young refugees, but with the enormous difference that an important support system was immediately set up for the young Norwegians. Everybody spoke of love, of solidarity... A short while afterwards, I had a striking dream, no doubt in part inspired by the Utøya tragedy. In my dream, I saw youth swimming desperately towards the riverbank, youth who were being saved, all except one young girl everybody refused to save. Discrimination. I find this difference in treatment of Norwegian and non-Norwegian children very hard to accept. Norway did ratify the International Convention on the Rights of the Child on January 8, 1991. I then decided that this dream sequence would open my film, and this is why the film is called De andre (lit. "the others").

From http://cineuropa.org/it.aspx?t=interview&l=en&did=88348#cl

Forum Mare Nostrum VII

The 2013 edition of the European Writers' Council Forum Mare Nostrum VII will be held in Malta on 11 April 2013. It will be co-organised and hosted by the Maltese Language Academy.

Details of the programme will be published in the coming months.

The Mare Nostrum series was created by the European Writers’ Council as a European forum for the dialogue between cultures in the Mediterranean area and the rest of Europe.

The Forum Mare Nostrum VI was held in Turku, the European Capital of Culture 2011, to expand the dialogue to the Nordic Sea region. The previous events were held in Delphi (1999), Barcelona(2001), Cyprus (2004), Trieste (2007), and Marseille (2009).

For more information visit http://www.europeanwriterscouncil.eu/

Absinthe Video of the Week: Pia Tafdrup

We're starting a new regular post at Absinthe Minded featuring a video of the week. The videos that we choose will, of course, be related to European art, literature, film, and culture, and might include movie trailers, interviews, music videos, and readings.

Our video today presents a poetry reading by Pia Tafdrup, who appears in Absinthe 18, our current issue.

euro-scene Leipzig

23rd Festival of contemporary European Theatre

05. – 10. November 2013

Theatre and dance from the old and the new Europe

The euro-scene Leipzig will take place from 05. – 10. November 2013 for the 23rd time. The festival of contemporary European theatre plans to show about 12 guest plays from about 10 countries in approx. 25 presentations and 8 venues. The festival programme comprises dance and spoken theatre, musical stage forms, performances and a play for children. Patron of the festival will be Burkhard Jung, Lord Mayor of the city of Leipzig.

Whether or not the popular competition »Das beste deutsche Tanzsolo« (»Best German dance solo«) can take place depends on the festival's financial situation. (Being a biennial competition, it would normally be organised in 2013 for the 11th time.) An extensive fringe programme including films, interviews and a workshop will complement the guest plays. The programme selection lies in the hands of festival director Ann-Elisabeth Wolff.

The euro-scene Leipzig will be partner for one première within an »Artists in residence« programme for performative artists and collective groups, that will be issued by the Schauspiel Leipzig under the direction of the designated director Enrico Lübbe. From autumn 2013 onwards it will facilitate performative theatre forms at the interface between visual arts and performing arts, installations, sound and visuals in a room of the Baumwollspinnerei (former cotton spinning mill) in the west of Leipzig.

An audience award for the »Most favourite play« was bestowed at the euro-scene Leipzig 2012 for the first time. The winner was Familie Flöz from Berlin with its play »Infinita«. The award includes a fresh invitation for the company to the euro-scene Leipzig again with another production in one of the following years. It is planned to have the audience favourite award bestowed again in 2013.

The festival programme will be available online under www.euro-scene.de as from 01.07.2013.

Ann-Elisabeth Wolff
Festival Director

Leipzig, 04.12.2012

Ticket sale will start on 28.09.2013.

La risa funesta

Enjoy this creative montage by Laboratorium and Rafa Castañer and the delightful music of Standstill:

La risa funesta from Bridge / European Artists on Vimeo.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller – Review

Helen Dunmore acclaims Herta Müller's remarkable tale of suffering and survival

From The Guardian, Wednesday 21 November 2012 03.00 EST


Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk

Language, territory and conflict dominate the work of Nobel prize laureate Herta Müller. She was born in Romania, part of the German minority settled in the Banat region since the 18th century, and the history of her immediate family reflects the turmoils of war and displacement. Like many other Banat Swabians, her father volunteered for the Waffen SS during the second world war. Her mother, like thousands of other ethnic Germans between the ages of 17 and 45, was deported to a forced-labour camp in the Soviet Union after the war. She spent five years there.

1. The Hunger Angel
2. by Herta Müller, translated by Philip Boehm
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Müller grew up under the Ceausescu régime, and her novel The Land of Green Plumsbrilliantly evoked the sordid, even banal nature of this totalitarian society's grasp on its citizens. Her imagery is startlingly distinct and yet nightmarish. Behind every familiar object – a plum, a key, a rope, a single hair – there is, as in a fairytale, a hinterland full of shadows and silence. The weight of what cannot be said drags at the narrative line. The Hunger Angelshares this poetic intensity of focus, shape-shifting language, and a structure of brief chapters that talk to one another indirectly. This hidden rustle of conversation between fragments slowly reveals the enormity of the whole.

When deported Germans returned to their homes, the political climate meant that their story had to be whispered, if told at all. Many thousands had died, among them the friend of Müller's mother, after whom Herta would later be named. As Müller says in her afterword toThe Hunger Angel: "The deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania's fascist past." More than 50 years later, she began to challenge this enforced silence by talking to former deportees from her own village, and through lengthy conversations with the poet Oskar Pastior about his years in a Soviet forced-labour camp. The idea of the two writers collaborating on a book developed, and Müller took extensive notes from Pastior's testimony. After Pastior's death, Müller decided to continue alone and write her book, which was published in German as Atemschaukel (Breath Swing) and now in Britain as The Hunger Angel.

The novel is narrated in the voice of Leo Auberg, a 17-year-old who is just discovering his sexuality as something "strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful". Leo's encounters with men in park pavilions and in the Neptune Baths would land him in prison or a penal colony if he were caught. Instead, because of his German ethnicity, his name is on a list anyway, and he is to be deported to a forced-labour camp. The boy makes a suitcase out of a gramophone case, and fills it with Faust, a volume of poetry, aftershave, socks, a burgundy silk scarf … Every item is scrupulously detailed. Not only will each make a difference to survival, but, as in all Müller's fiction, each object possesses a force that will only slowly disclose itself. What Leo's grandmother gives him are five words:Ich weiss, du kommst wieder – "I know you'll come back."

To be a survivor, however, is a complex and sometimes terrible thing. Leo has been given over to a world that those who remained behind cannot guess at, and neither can they realise his anguish, disconnection and rage when he returns home five years later. In The Land of Green Plums, Georg throws himself from the high window of a transit hostel, six weeks after emigrating from Romania to Frankfurt. Or perhaps he is pushed. At all events, the dream of escape turns out to be an illusion. InThe Hunger Angel, the fact that Leo has come back from the camp is "a stroke of crippled luck" and "a survival top that starts spinning at the least damned thing". He is not free, and he knows it. The telling of his tale in all its intricate and wretched detail is perhaps the only thing that animates him.

The detail is extraordinary, and Müller credits Pastior for her knowledge of the camp's everyday life. However, the novel's inwardness of vision is something Müller owes to her imagination alone. Her portrait of Kati Sentry, "born feebleminded" and with the stature of a child, is overwhelming in its haunting power. Kati is in the camp because someone has substituted her name for another's on the list, or perhaps out of simple sadism. She cannot labour, or understand "what a quota is, or a command, or a punishment". Instead, she flutters her arms and coos like a dove, or sits on an anthill to make herself gloves out of ants. Crucially, the hunger angel cannot climb into Kati's brain and destroy it, because she is already in another world.

This is a remarkable novel, both bleak and chastening. Leo may be at home again, but within him the camp "stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right".

• Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat is published by Hammer.

Call for Submissions

From ÉCU-The European Independent Film Festival's blog:

ÉCU - The European Independent Film Festival is dedicated to the discovery and advancement of the very best independent films from around the world. We are a festival who believes in our independent filmmakers and their artistic talents. ÉCU proudly provides a unique platform that brings together diverse audiences who are hungry for something other than major studio productions and original and innovative filmmakers. 

 

The next and 8th edition of ÉCU - The European Independent Film Festival 
will be held in Paris, France in the early spring of 2013. 

 

For more details regarding the festival, please visit www.ecufilmfestival.com.

For all the independent filmmakers out there; Early bird deadline for submitting your films to ÉCU is set on November 18, 2012! AsBenjamin Franklin once said; 'You may delay, but time will not!' 

Submit your film now on http://www.ecufilmf

estival.com/?page_id=13048&lang=en

Interview with Miško Šuvaković about Art in Serbia

An illuminating interview with the Serbian aestheticist, art theorist and conceptual artist Miško Šuvaković

From www.artmargins.com/:

Photo: http://www.artmargins.com/

Nikola Dedić/Aneta Stojnić/ARTMargins Online:Recently, you have published the first volume of a book entitled The History Of Art in Serbia, XX Century.Radical Artistic Practices, which is the first detailed and historical study of Serbian art in the last century. How would you evaluate the importance of this project within both the local and the international context?

Miško Šuvaković: Your History Of Art In Serbia, XX century- is the first volume of a three volume series that guides the reader through the “long 20th century.” As the editor, I was lucky to gather an extraordinary team of writers and researchers of art: Nevena Daković (film), Vesna Mikić (music), Jelena Novak (music), Aleksandar Ignjatović (architecture), Irena Šentevska (stage design), Ana Vujanović (performing arts), Iva Nenić (pop culture), Ješa Denegri (fine arts), Nikola Dedić (fine arts). The first volume refers to an open history of radical, critical, and subversive artistic practices during the 20th century: the avant-garde, the neo avant-garde, conceptual art, postmodern art, the Yugoslav war; the transition; and finally globalism after 2000. The second volume will include discussions of art from WW II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dominant artistic and cultural practices of so-called “socialist modernism” will also be considered. The third volume will be dedicated to the art of bourgeois realism and modernism at the beginning of the 20th century.

There are three significant innovations implicit in The History of Art In Serbia, XX Century. First of all, this is a history that does not strictly deal with national Serbian art and culture, but with arts and cultures that were present during the 20th century within the territory Serbia occupies today. These cultures include: Croatian, Jewish, Hungarian, German, Slovakian, Albanian and so on. Secondly, this is an interdisciplinary history of art and as such it is not directed only at one discipline, (e.g. fine arts), but offers comparative insights into relationships between different artistic disciplines. Finally, this history of art is not historic, but theoretical. This means that the acts of certain histories of art have been broadened and worked out to enable the study of cultures.

Within the local, regional, even international context this book marks a change in the historicization of art and culture. Local art is not understood only as a simple replica of artistic practices of dominant artistic and cultural centers (Paris, Munich, Vienna, or New York); the planet is the sum of local cultures that exist in complex communicational relationships and exchanges. In other words, there is no longer a narrative about the vertical and the hierarchical history of art, a narrative that was based on identifying national and international works of art. It has also constituted a horizontal, critical narrative, which explains cultural differences, and aesthetic, artistic and political struggles in its time. On the other hand, probably for the first time on both the local and the international level, there now appears an interdisciplinary history of art used to establish relationships between different arts and their positioning within culture and society.

I hope that this methodology will stimulate the development of interpretative discourses regarding modern, postmodern, and avant-garde art and culture.

ND/AS/AMO: This project is based on the methodology of what is called “new art history”; in that sense it occupies a unique position in the local academic context. What is the position of art theory and interdisciplinary cultural studies in Serbia?

MS: If we talk about the Serbian context and about other contexts in Central Europe and South Eastern Europe that are not much different, we notice that there is a very traditional, academic paradigm in the study of art. This is based on two foundations. The first is the national, general history and theory of art. This foundation is hierarchical and it implies a binary opposition between a national culture and international art currents. The second foundation is based on the disciplinary history and theory of art; here the history of fine art is separated from the history and theory of theater, film, music, new media, architecture, and design.

Today, after the experience of post-media artistic and cultural practices, and especially after cultural studies, (i.e. the studies of performance, or the theory of new media), it has become clear that discourses on art should not be limited to narrowly disciplined contexts. This implies the theorizing of every discourse on and in art and culture, as well as the use of theoretical interpretations from different social and humanistic sciences within the field of art and culture. For example, political economy, bio-politics, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, etc., weigh in on the field of artistic work and interdisciplinary artistic practices. By doing so, there arises a new theoretical situation of a permanent, problematic, and critical questioning of dynamic relationships between culture, society, and art.

I’m not speaking in favor of “the new history of art” as the key to all theoretical problems; on the contrary, I see the “new art history” as a starting point needed to get to a fully developed critical theory.

ND/AS/AMO: How do you see the department of Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade, where you teach? It seems that it is almost the only place where interdisciplinary art theory can be taught academically.

MS: The department of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Art in Belgrade is a brave and extraordinary project that started back in 2001. After the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic’s political regime, a change in the leadership and the Board of The University Of Art in Belgrade took place. The new rector, Dr. Milena Dragićević Šešić, enabled the beginning of the reform at the University,(The University consists of 4 faculties: The Faculty of Music, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the Faculty Of Applied Arts), by founding The Center for Interdisciplinary Post Graduate and Master Studies. The Center began to function on the principles of interdisciplinary work and the principles of the Bologna declaration. The newly founded departments were the following: The Theory Of Art And Media, Management In Culture, Multimedia Art, Digital Art and Stage Design. The classes started on the level of Master Studies, in order to move more quickly to Master and PhD scientific and artistic studies.

The goal of these studies was to connect modern artistic and theoretical practices with modern, interdisciplinary education. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between the traditional academic divisions within artistic practices, on the one hand, and academic divisions within scientific practices, on the other. In the last decade, these were the unique studies that tended towards interdisciplinary academic work in the field of art and theory. That’s why these studies provoked numerous resistances within university’s administrations and traditionally committed clans. But the struggle for “the new school” is one of the most significant demands in this modern and transitional culture!

Continue Reading

Dear Readers,

Let me take this opportunity to wish you all a bright and joyful New year and to introduce myself. My name is Jasmina Tacheva, a literary and theatre aficionado from Bulgaria who lives, works and studies in Buffalo, New York. I was lucky enough to have joined the Absinthe Minded team recently as a volunteer blog editor. I want to start by saying thank you for taking the time to stay updated with both Absinthe Minded blog and the print journal, Absinthe: New European Writing. 

I was introduced to Absinthe last year, when I saw an online announcement about the then current issue of the journal (# 17) and was exceptionally pleased to see that its main focus was my own country. I was greatly inspired to discover such a unique and powerful project which, I believe, accomplishes its task in a two-fold manner. First, it successfully remedies the proverbially elephantine rate of cultural exchange between Europe and America, but rather than stopping there, its team goes much further by introducing Absinthe's readers to the largely unexplored and unexposed (even in their own continent) literature and art of countries such as Romania (the focus of the journal's latest issue), Serbia, Slovenia, Hungary, etc. So, naturally, when I was presented with the opportunity to work with the Absinthe Minded team, I jumped at the chance. I am grateful to be welcomed into such an amazing community.

I can’t wait to be able to watch Absinthe Minded grow and continue uncovering the hidden treasures of contemporary European culture! I'd like to seize the occasion and invite you to join us on this exciting journey. Share your discoveries – tell us about the contemporary European writers, artists, filmmakers or events that interest you and become a contributor. Absinthe Minded welcomes any kind of creative culture-related commentaries, including interviews, book or film reviews, articles, award announcements, information about events or festivals, etc. For further information please send an email to j.tacheva@gmail.com.

Let me get the ball rolling by offering you a bouquet of the events that I personally think will be some of the European cultural highlights of 2013:

• The European Prize for Literature: http://www.prixeuropeendelitterature.eu/home.asp
• The European Union Prize for Literature: http://www.euprizeliterature.eu/
• Marseille's Year as European Capital of Culture in 2013: http://marseillecityofculture.eu/capital-of-culture.html
• Košice's Year as European Capital of Culture in 2013: http://www.kosice2013.sk/en
• The international literature festival berlin (ilb): http://www.literaturfestival.com/aktuelles-en?set_language=en
• The Gothenburg Book Fair: http://www.bokmassan.se/en/
• The Istanbul Tanpınar Literature Festival: http://www.itef.com.tr/en/
• The European Border Breakers Awards: http://ec.europa.eu/culture/our-programmes-and-actions/prizes/european-border-breakers-awards_en.htm
• a handy art calendar for 2013: http://art49.com/

In gratitude,

Jasmina Tacheva

Support the work of Absinthe

As you know, Absinthe is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and all donations are tax-deductible. This is a great time to help us continue our work: publishing Absinthe, sponsoring our reading series (Wednesday Night Sessions), and the other literary and film events we present.

Next year we enter our 10th year and it promises to be a big year with the publication of a special issue of Absinthe focused on Turkey, and the publication of our first book, European Trash by Ulf Peter Hallberg.

Please consider making a contribution now. You can do that at our web site here or by sending a check to Absinthe, PO Box 2297, Farmington Hills, MI 48333.

Or you can support us by subscribing to Absinthe, renewing a subscription, or taking out a gift subscription here.

Happy New Year and thank you for your continued support!