The 16th edition of the Simultan Festival takes place between September 11-19, 2021 in Timișoara (European Capital of Culture 2021), with the theme “Unstable state of affairs”.
Simultan is an annual festival dedicated to interdisciplinary arts – emerging media projects, experimental music and audio-visual projects, in order to support new forms of artistic expression. The festival hosts annual live audiovisual performances, video art screenings, exhibitions, conferences and workshops in which some themes and methods are: stylistic eclecticism, the relationship between man and automation, recycling or ecological themes, dry lyricism – digital, fusion acoustic and electronic instruments, expanded cinema, jovial live sound collage, as well as reflection on the political valences of sound.
“It is important to understand not only what is happening, but also what is the potential of this transformation of the world following this crisis. The hardest thing is to tolerate uncertainty and the unknown in a world where we have come to believe that we are in control, but nature proves otherwise. Learning to tolerate insecurity and the unknown brings us closer to our human condition, fragile and precarious as it is, and the sign is, perhaps, to become human again, that is, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, fragile, dependent on each other. It is a time to look to the future and imagine what we want our lives to look like from now on”.
Life, as we knew it, is changing radically and will probably take a different form someday, providing a good opportunity to test ourselves and develop our ability to adapt to reality.
Transcultures presents a video selection in connection with the No Lockdown Art initiative (initiated in spring 2020, during the first confinement, in partnership with the European Pepinires of Creation), as well as Sonic Dreams by Régis Cotentin
Régis Cotentin (Fr) | Sonic Dreams
Audio-visual projection
On phantasmagorical, sumptuous and vaporous images he created and edited, French videographer / director Régis Cotentin composed an electronic – sometimes ambient and enigmatic, sometimes celestial and groovy – soundtrack to complete this dreamlike special journey.
Duration : 45 min
Partnership with European Pepinieres of Creation and with Transcultures.
Régis Cotentin
Exhibition curator, in charge of the contemporary programming of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, Régis Cotentin has been developing, for the past twenty years, a phantasmagorical and dreamlike visual work selected in numerous international events, which favors the link between contemporary image and open electronic and contemporary music.
Sélection No Lockdown Art
As part of the No Lockdown Art ongoing project initiated by Transcultures and the European Pepinieres of Creation during the first lockdown linked to the Covid-19 to support contemporary artistic projects likely to be broadcast online, several videos have been produced by artists (visual, sound, multimedia…) integrating the sonic and experimental dimensions in creations of various aesthetics, which escape traditional classifications and offer a poetic and alternative look on our mutant world.
L'incertitude (No Lockdown Drift 2), Pastoral, BE/FR, 2020, 5’09’’’
The Pastoral duo (Christophe Bailleau and Philippe Franck) offers a second part to their audio-visual correspondence started with the ‘Lockdown Drift’ video during the first containment of the Covid-19. During winter 2020-21 (second lockdown), each sent to the other images shot (real and imaginary) in their immediate environment (cities of Mons and Huy, in Wallonia-Belgium) then the common instrumental composition came in a soundtrack mixing languid guitars, sinuous bass, electronic granular flow, primitive flutes and percussions.
At first enigmatic and hazy, these sonic images / iconic sounds take us on a chiaroscuro route. In the abandoned streets and forests, strangely enchanted gardens and non-urban places, a magical presence and fleeting shadows seem to indicate to us in a space-time hesitating between night and day, signs allowing us to get out of the labyrinth of greyness and to advance towards a possible light.
Production: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Flux & Densités, Alain Wergifosse, BE, 2020, 5’
In a set of prisms, filters and mirrors, Alain Wergifosse offers some fragments of opto-mechanical treatments on pure light and on some digital images put into video feedback.
These images and sounds come from a multi-channel video installation project in work in progress for the Vice Versa 2020-21 residency/exchange between Transcultures (BE) and La Chambre Blanche (QBC).
Production : Transcultures, La Chambre Blanche, European Pepinieres of Creation
Panacée - Maja Jantar, PL-NL, 2021, 10'56''
Panacée/pænəˈsiːə/ du latin panacēa, du grec ancien πανάκεια (panákeia), de πανακής (panakḗs, “tout-guérison”), de πᾶν (pân, “tout”) (équivalent à l’anglais pan-) + ἄκος (ákos , “guérir”). Panacea est une vision, celle de la guérison à travers les traditions – devenir soleil – sur les noms du pissenlit. Panacea est un rituel de passage, une recherche d’un lieu d’appartenance à travers une connexion avec des systèmes écologiques.
Avec le soutien de Transcultures et des Pépinières européennes de Création
Visions of inside (Common Ground Project) – Kika Nicolela, BR, 2020, 8’51
Visions of inside is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project initiated by Kika Nicolela in April 2020 in reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. It promotes the creation of a shared database of videos, sounds and texts by worldwide artists, reflecting on the multiple issues raised by the crisis and the lockdown. Above all, the Common Ground Project’s goal is to collectively use creation as means of communion and resistance.
Kika Nicolela edited videos, sounds and texts by
Aline Yasmin & Alex Cepile, Anna Berndtson & Yingmei Duan, Anthony Siarkiewicz, Carlos Landaeta, Carlosmagno Rodrigues, Cecilia Dougherty, Christophe Litou, CRACA, Daniel Silvo, Davi Cavalcante, Gauthier Keyaerts, Gerard Chauvin,Gustavo Marcasse, Ivelina Ivanova,Isa Belle + Paradise Now, Jan Kather, John Sanborn, Jorge Lozano, Junebum Park, Katia Maciel, Kika Nicolela, Luana Lacerda, Marcia Beatriz Granero, Marina Fomenko, Mateusz Vianna, Mike Hoolboom, Mirella Brandi & Muep Etmo Nia Pushkarova, Nung-Hsin Hu, Philippe Boisnard, Phyllis Baldino, Rejane Cantoni, Samuel Bester, Sara Não Tem Nome, Simon Dumas, Simon Guiochet, Sonia Guggisberg, Susana Lopez, Ulf Kristiansen.
Coproduction : Transcultures, In progress asbl, European Pepinieres of Creation
Triptyque Prototype, Thomas Israël, BE, 2020, 2’50’’
Triptyque Prototype is an enigma with an exploded temporality which allows cross readings, associative. Its protagonist (the dancer Marilyn Daoust on a choreography by Manon Oligny) is in tension between the doll or the android and the woman of flesh.
This video filmed in Montreal in 2015, as part of the interdisciplinary performance project Les Oracles (initiated by Productions Rhizome-Quebec in partnership with Transcultures-Belgium) was finalized in Brussels in Spring 2020 with a minimalist soundtrack by Paradise Now.
With the support: Transcultures, des European Pepinieres of Creation, Productions Rhizome
Ces riens essentiels #4, Gauthier Keyaerts, BE, 3’19’’
Ces riens essentiels is an infinite work-in-progress, initiated during the lockdown. The journey actually started in 2018 when Gauthier Keyaerts was in Brittany, shooting images from the Ocean, the shore, lichens…
He brought back this particular energy and feeling of spirituality (felt by André Breton).
It helped since March to focus on the essentials: family, body, nature (insects, trees, flowers…), love… this sublime chaos.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
After Covid_19, Philippe Boisnard, FR, 2020, 7’
After Covid_19 is part of the research on disaster landscapes carried out by Philippe Boisnard in recent years. This creation, achieved during the first global confinement, was made live from pure-data (graphic programming software for musical and multimedia creation in real time) in both sound and image.
This landscape and its evolution attempts to aesthetically show the emergence of the vertigo of the epidemic. Like a metaphorical vision, its crescendo is that of the psychic panic of man in the face of the surge of the pandemic.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Renata K in Transonic Second Life - Glasz DeCuir (ES) - 2021 - 5'57''
Glasz DeCuir is the identity as machinima (= Computer Generated Imagery) director and screenwriter of a multi-media visual artist from San Sebastian who explores, in various ways, the art of new media and digital cinema.
Glasz DeCuir filmed and edited the images of the performance of Renata K (the experimental project of classical flutist Renata Kambarova, from Uzbekhistan) during the first edition of the Transonic Second Life Festival which took place in February 2021 at the Cat’s Club .
A dive into cyber dunes where Renata K’s avatar wanders, in the sonic sirocco, under a cosmic firmament, to meet other intriguing creatures …
With the support of Transcultures and European Pepinieres of Creation
Cosmic Invertebrate Mindfuck – A Limb BE, 2020, 5'03
A Limb (BE) electronic cinematic music interacts with SaveMe Oh (NL) visuals in the Second Life open space.
All was recorded live, during a streamed event, scheduled for Transcultures (as part of its ‘No Lockdown Art’ initiative), and organized by A Limb. It is a criticism of sex messages present on medias so often, and even more often during pandemic times. We are shooted more than ever with consumerist sex fucking our mind.
Related links “Coronavirus Pandemia” serial by Glasz DeCuir (ES) : First Wave – “Wash Your Hands” – Second Wave – “Superspreader”
Music : A Limb [soundcloud.com/a-limb]
Visual artist : SaveMe Oh [savemeoh.wordpress.com]
Filmed and edited by Glasz DeCuir [glaszdecuir.wordpress.com]
i-REAL - Monde_04_ALICE - Marc Veyrat, FR, 2021, 3’05
This World 04 in VR, included in the artwork XR i-REAL, imagined, programmed by Jonathan Juste and whose soundtrack is signed Paradise Now, is “architextured“ (-! Henri Lefebvre !-) around the totality of the words used in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, famous novel published by Lewis Carroll in 1865.
Inside this Obscure World, “ob-scene” of the text (-! Georges Bataille !-), the words ®-CONSTITUTE as we progress walls of blinding texts/images progressively revealing passages, “Entre-eSPACES” (-! Carole Brandon !-) through which we can progress… The electro-rythmic-organic music of Paradise Now (BE/FR) roams the floating walls of this Lettrist maze as if looking for a mutant prey.
Informations
- Simultan Festival
- Corneliu Miklosi Museum
- Bulevardul Take Ionescu 56, Timișoara, Roumanie
- simultan.org
Production
- Simultaneous association supported by the administration of the National Cultural Fund / Town Hall and City Council of Timisoara
- With the support of Transcultures and European Pepinieres of Création
