Havarie Follow Your Values – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Havarie

subtitles: English, Polish

• Havarie is an experimental documentary that stands in radical opposition to earlier ways of representing issues regarding refugees. The picture is extremely simple, but at the same time, greatly expressive. The director stretched a short video, which was made by a tourist from a cruiser and posted on YouTube, into a 93 minute long film – a recording of a drifting boat in the distance with refugees aboard. The film does not bore – the action is in the sound; we hear recordings from the rescue as well as many stories of the emigrants, their families, and tourists, which in turn gives one of the strongest voices on the migration crisis in Europe.

Follow Your Values

subtitles: English, Polish

• Lady Bantu is the first woman in Cameroon to incorporate hip-hop into her work. She raps about everyday problems, fidelity to one's own values,and breaks the silence on violence against women in Africa. In 2013, she was invited to the Crossing-boundaries-of-doubt.net project, which is a platform aiding in understanding the complex relationships of the Global South and Global North. The result of this collaboration is Follow Your Values – a brief but potent poetry slam.

  • Crossing-boundaries-of-doubt.net is an online platform and poetic,critical collection. As an ongoing transnational project dealing with relations between the Global South and the Global North, the collection is continually growing and thematically expanded through new contributions by artists invited to participate. The multilingual online platform can be used by the authors as a poetic space of agency outside of an institutional context. Live events, participatory formats,and research on site accompany the project. They tie into narrative digital space by way of direct physical encounters and facilitate a process of reciprocal investigation. The project arose through artistic research conducted in Cameroon and Germany in 2012–14. The questions and themes that evolved over the course of this first production period can be found in the nine chapters of the online platform. As part of the ongoing process, they will unfold transnationally in future. Using the mediums of text, image, sound, and performance, the artists explore their complex worlds, which are influenced by colonial history, violence, phantasms of consumption,and the fragility of social structures. They speak about prevailing conditions, reflect the realities of human and non-human life, and the everyday entanglement and boundaries within their societies, which are immersed in radical social and economic upheaval. They describe rituals of violence and the act of capitalizing on human relations. They are questing for new languages, for new utopian places, and they speak of a need for self-determination, artistic spaces of agency, and shared moments of collectivity.

• http://crossing-boundaries-of-doubt.net/