Video presentation with Peter Downsbrough, Kurt D'Haeseleer, Ken Kobland, selected and introduced by Mira Sanders. In collaboration with ARGOS, a Brussels based audio-visual arts center, Els Hanappe Underground will present a program of three short films in which special attention has been given to the photographic quality of individual stills.

'Mobility in the city (or between cities) is approached in a very different way by the three films of this program. If in 'Occupied' Peter Downsbrough controls the space and breaks it up into axes by slow travelling shots, bringing forward clear perspectives and black and white images with an almost photographic clearness, Kurt D'Haeseleer with 'File' dissolves space and explodes it into abstract images, playing with speed and distortion. As for 'Foto Roman' by the American filmmaker Ken Kobland it's an account of a journey. The camera stays in the background, supporting the text read in voice off, recording the small events, the banal and everyday images that punctuate the displacement of the narrator. Three different ways also to treat the presence/absence of characters in the city; desert space with Downsbrough where the voices and words almost belong to the image, anonymous characters with D'Haeseleer and Kobland, couples waiting, (love-) stories begun and given up.

Peter Downsbrough OCCUPIED 35mm, 18'37'', English spoken, 2000
'Occupied' is shot entirely within the site of the Cite Administrative in Brussels. In an interview during the early stages of this project, Peter Downsbrough said: " I use film to introduce time within my observation. Its very unfolding makes film the ideal means to do this." Rosselini underlined that " something happens in film because of time, of the specific duration constructed by the film itself". In his work 'Going Around The Corner Piece' Bruce Nauman, inspired by camera surveillance systems, produced a delayed image of the spectator going through the work. Peter Downsbrough's image reflects and leads us to construct a simultaneous recollection of the past, present and / or future existence of a multitude of successive propositions.

Kurt D'Haeseleer FILE Video, 28', non spoken, 2000
'File' scrutinises the bandwidth between representation and immersion and shows a world of complexity. The tape is trying to be a lot at the same time: video clip, essay, action movie, sociological study, documentary, soap, commercial, but above all a hermetic collection of sensations. A dated relation goes off the road and two people lose each other in overdrive.

Ken Kobland FOTO-ROMAN Betacam SP, colour, 26min, 1990 English spoken
Road-video, video-poem, fugue like daydream. Those are three of the characteristics with which 'Foto Roman' can be described. This associative and fragmentary video is a real stream of consciousness. Most of the material was shot on 8mm video and comprises pictures collected in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, Milan and New York. The camera recorded what any tourist gets to see: landscape shooting past seen from the train or car, the gangway in the plane, the street seen from the hotel room or one's own feet in a hotel bath. But the tourist never records these images. Foto-roman in turn avoids the compulsory tourist shots. (…), a layering of voyeuristic atmospheres; a Borgesian enigma of "Who dreams and who is dreamt". A prologue to a possible 'thriller', or maybe its synopsis.'



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