European Souvenirs departs from the convention of the traditional audiovisual memoir: the (media) archive. The show is a collective exploration by five young media artists featuring media found at archives in their countries and existing imagery of Europe and its travellers.
Universal concepts such as ‘family’, ‘travel’, ‘borders’ and ‘memory’ are the starting point for their expedition. They explore personal, local and common meanings of the footage and sounds from the archives, as well as creating their own productions and fieldworks. Inspired by their personal memories, they offer us a journey down our own memory lane.
They bring us precious European Souvenirs – sounds and images from different pasts and European contexts. They invite us to make new connections between different European landscapes, identities, imaginations – and to draw new borders in our own memory map.
In this experimental live-cinema performance, audio, photography and film is gently, sometimes provocatively, remixed into a new context and given a new meaning. This new narrative is also blended together with music composed by the artists.
European Souvenirs is a homage to memories and travellers, no matter where they are coming to (and from). At the same time, it creates new memories, new borders, shifting borders. It contributes to a common European archive with a fresh compilation of images and sounds. A treasure to be discovered, ready for further exploration and further meaning.
#
In four workshops in four cities (Seville, Istanbul, Warsaw and Amsterdam), the 5 creators will be challenged by an artistic team to create a new imagery and a derivative work with the archive material. They will create and perform a live- cinema show, which will be designed collectively.
This creative process will be a hard labour of mix and remix, not only what are concerned to the different archives we are going to treat like main sources of material to work with but to the different artists involved, places where we are going to visit and techniques required to create a live-cinema experience.
Remix Europe implies to build a sort of Frankenstein made up of different cultural baggages. We are going to assemble a puzzle of experiences, we are going to live and work in four different places with the only goal to make this creature comes alive.
