€urovisions premiere at 16th ZEMOS98 Festival

A new remix – live cinema- performance by Farah Rahman (the Netherlands), Karol Rakowski (Poland), Noriko Okaku (UK) and Malaventura (Spain).

€urovisions is the second live cinema performance by this international collective of young artists from different European countries with creative media and music backgrounds. Produced in collaboration with Chris Allen and Tim Cowie of the Light Surgeons; coordinated by ZEMOS98 collective.

Does Europe make us dream? In the first instalment of European Souvenirs we raided film archives in different countries and sifted through these celluloid traces in order to revive memories that had been buried, forgotten, dulled by time. On that journey we found that travellers in search of the European colonial dream had full cities, that you could be Asian and not feel English, that the Mediterranean is a sea full of ghosts, and that hymn to freedom with the fall of the Berlin Wall was about the free movement of money, not people…

A national newspaper publishes photos showing the faces of people who come to Europe chasing a dream. We don’t know their names, or their stories, we don’t know where they’re from, we don’t even know what their dreams are. Why don’t the media bother to report on people’s dreams? What reasons drive people to leave their homelands? What rights are infringed in the places where borders become visible? Once the mourning is over, will we be capable of building open spaces that make us dream? In €urovisions, the second leg of this journey, we’ve tried to answer these questions, and we came up with new ones.

Our journey is still an audiovisual one. €urovisions uses live cinema and expanded documentary techniques (multiscreen, live music, audiovisual actionism, sampling and cutups) to create a collective audiovisual performance. Drawing on the material generated in the Remapping Europe workshops, we’ve put together and remixed a mosaic of images, sounds, music and voices that is both fragile and forceful. Fragile because personal memories do not come together in a single story that describes what is happening, and forceful because those images and sounds, woven together, have led us to position ourselves.

European Souvenirs combines diverse cultural expressions and disciplines (music, animation, video art, dramaturgy, photography, film), to take us on a trip through time and history. Travel and migrants, nomads, tourists and souvenirs are the elements that guide us on our journey. Five young media-makers have been delving into audiovisual materials from major European archives as the raw material for a live cinema performance.