Similar to the engineer in the film, the artist, Romana Schmalisch travels to various places with the “Mobile Cinema” and presents a film archive developed for it. The archive comprises films and filmic research on urban space and urban visions, sequences from feature films, texts and quotations. The various films and also previously unused footage, which the artist regards as an archive, are combined to a cinematographic collage. The film clips address in different ways the changes of urban space and the social changes that come with them.

As a special appearance in Yerevan, Robert Schlicht presented a film-lecture that follows the traces of a ghostly figure of film’s history: the vampire. Delivered with the help of the “Mobile Cinema”, a device resurrected from the archives of film history, the lecture superimposes the history of the cinematographic figure of the vampire with early Soviet utopias that pursued projects of immortalisation and resurrection. The lecture will examine the historical, historiographic, cinematographic and biopolitical implications of these undead vampirist projects of the early 20th century.

The artists conducted research at various sites of urban importance, among them, factory sites of Yerevan and Moush district of Gyumri.

All the research materials will be used in upcoming Mobile Cinema Shows of the artists.

The presentation was conducted on 5 December, at Mekhitar Sebastaci Educational Complex Media Center, Yerevan.

This activity was not initially included in the project. Considering unavailability of other artists in the mentioned period (as reported in the 1st interim report), Utopiana made this modification, considering that the activity was fully relevant to the project theme of the year.

The project was implemented in collaboration with the German Embassy in Armenia.

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Romana Schmalisch, 1974 born and based in Berlin graduated with an MFA from the Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2002. She focuses on the architectonic urban space, its changes and the accompanying social changes. In her film works, she combines sequences shot by herself with image and film quotations and with text fragments in the form of a collage, juxtaposing different layers of times and imagery. Recent exhibitions and screenings include FormContent, London (2009), National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow (2009), Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius (2009), Centre for Contemporary Artat Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2009).

Robert Schlicht, born in Berlin in 1975, has studied philosophy, literature and computer science, and graduated from the Humboldt University Berlin. His thesis with the title “Passage au Cinéma” examined the relations of Walter Benjaminís film theory and his theory of history and historiography. Subsequently, Robert Schlicht was concerned with the interface of theory and film, and collaborated on various film projects with Romana Schmalisch. He currently works on a documentary film project on Walter Benjamin.

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The aim of making this archive is to map some ideas of women art production, examine particular feminist strategies through the years, and discuss how these strategies have been translated into current discourses and projects.

Up to day artists and activists have been interviewed in LA, London, Chicago and N.Y. (USA), in Vienna (Austria), Costa Rica, Mexico, Switzerland, Beirut (Lebanon), Yerevan (Armenia) and Istanbul (Turkey).

During her residencies in Yerevan, Kirsten Dufour has interviewed Armenian female artists and activists, as well as edited and subtitled the interviews shot in Yerevan back in 2005 and in 2009. The interviews of Armenian artists and activists will become part of the overall archive.

During this residencies an important decision was made about further development and institutionalisation of this project. Firstly, Utopiana became a full partner of this project and started undertaking an important role in archiving interviews and further developing the project. For this purpose, a permanent working group was created which includes a technician, a translator and a project coordinator. Now the project is searching for funds in order to continue the archive development.

The project “Let us speak now” (LUSN) has been funded by DCA (Danish contemporary art center) and Danish Art Foundation and the State´s Art Fund.

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Orlow’s projects tackle the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and address the spatial and pictorial conditions of history and memory. He explores the roles of the artist as archivist, researcher and spectrographer.

Spanning locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland Uriel Orlow’s work often employs a double-method of associative (horizontal-lateral) and archival (vertical-in depth) investigation in order to explore blind spots in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Orlow's modular installations comprising video, photography, drawing, sound and text create sensory fields that present us with a re-mix of the real, permeate perception and perform a subtle operation that activates the potential of ruptures and ruins as concerns of the present. Uriel Orlow’s presentation in Yerevan was attended by many local artists as well as visiting curators and critics, 30-35 people. This provided an opportunity for further dialogue and exchange which continued for the rest of his stay in Armenia.

After an initial exploration of Yerevan, a number of trips outside of town were planned. In Gyumri the artist took interest in the Merkurov museum, the suburb of Mush (an unfinished post-earthquake building project) and the former textile factory. He returned to Gyumri for two more times, to carry out filming of the town and Mush district in particular. Armenia was particularly interesting to him with respect to its layers of history and post-Soviet rebuilding. The material Orlow shot in Armenia has since become the foundation of a new body of work Named “Remnants of the Future”, which has been premiered at Laure Genillard gallery in London from January to April 2010.

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Uriel Orlow gained a BA (Hons.) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, followed by post-graduate studies at the University of Geneva and Slade School of Art, London. In 2002 he gained a doctorate in Fine Art from the University of the Arts, London. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in private and public collections. In 2009 he received a Swiss Art Award at Art Basel for the second year running. He is also a senior research fellow in art at University of Westminster, London.

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The first artistic workshop was led by Vanessa Mayoraz and focused on using personal memories and/or a series of events to produce an artifact, which would later be introduced into a pre-existing archive collection.

The second project was led by Andrew Scott Ross on interjecting personal interests into the narratives of the past.

Successful collaboration was established with students of Open University of Yerevan. In addition to the workshops, they have created personal projects which will be published in the annual catalogue.

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Vanessa Mayoraz, artist, lives and works in Geneva and in New York. Participating at the same time in the artistic movement of the installation and in some participative art, Vanessa Mayoraz’s works facilitate the relation to the place and to people. A special attention is drawn to the insertion of the work into a context, mostly outside of institutions dedicated to the art, and to its reception. This represents an important aspect of her work, to which is added, and sometimes conjugated, a haunting interest for memory and its maintenance. Her means of expression are in most cases divided into two categories, installations and interventions in situ, and vary greatly in their choice of mediums. According to the conceptual needs of her projects, she uses sculpture, drawing, video or more unusual mediums such as geographical maps, audio cd or electronic editings.

Andrew Scott Ross, artist, lives and works in Geneva and in New York. He takes over questions in link with biology and archaeology, which he blends with the mythology, primitive or personal, being more particularly interested in the ways to represent natural sciences and culture. He thus shows the delusive frame of our representations, notably by revealing the prevailing aesthetics in institutions intended to display scientific or cultural objects. He works by series and uses drawing as well as sculpture - often cut papers - or even photography or video.

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The first part of the workshop included a seminar which was designed to survey the historical development of the practice. This seminar pointed to certain key figures and lines of development and tried to locate the ethnographic film practice within the larger scope of documentary film. A special focus in this seminar has been made on experimental practices which problematize the modes of representation in the field itself, and “cinema verite” was discussed in this context.

The second part of the workshop covered practical techniques related to ethnographic film production, such as basic camera skills, field work and interviewing techniques, basic editing skills and etc.

The seminars and workshops were attended by people of different backgrounds and ages mainly from the art scene.

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Aras Ozgun is a media artist/scholar living and working in New York. He currently teaches digital media and media theory related graduate courses at the Media Studies Department of the New School University. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Media Studies program of the Sociology Department of New School for Social Research. He writes on the political economy of contemporary cultural production.

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This area is now crowded with refugees, most of them coming from the countries of the former Soviet Union. They are divided into national communities and their common language is Russian. The old Armenian houses and small apartments of Kum Kapi, designed for one or at least two families, are today transformed into warehouses of people renting beds while looking desperately for job opportunities. This photographic project was shown in Yerevan, both in printed photographs and projected images.

Afterwards, master class workshop was conducted, which was focused on main issues of Greek photography. Through analytical presentation of his personal work, the artist discussed major theoretical themes that occupy him.

Participants of the project were mainly art students, as well as young artists and curators, 15 people.

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Georgios Katsangelos is an artist-photographer, born in 1956. He studied photography with scholarship, at the Brooklyn College of New York under Professor’s Walter Rosenblum supervision. He works at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 1987. He is now an Associate Professor at the Fine Art Department. He served as the Director of the Cinema Museum of Thessaloniki (2002-2005). He exhibited his work widely in the USA and Europe. He is the Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from September 2006.

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For the reason of funding restrictions, she stayed in Yerevan for a week instead of the initially planned 3 weeks. In addition to this presentation, Tsantsanoghlu curated “Kup Kapi” artistic project and workshops by Georgios Katsangelos. More about this project is reported in Artistic Lab development component.

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Maria Tsantsanoglu (curator) - born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds a PhD in “Russian Futurism, history and reception”, Lomonosov University, Moscow. She has conducted research and produced numerous publications on Russian Avant-garde, particularly on the subject of visual poetry/verbal art and the Cubofuturistic book as a product of a synthesis of arts. She has organized art exhibitions in Russia, Greece, Germany, Austria. Today she works as curator at the “State Museum of Contemporary Art - Costakis collection” in Thessaloniki and teaches Russian Art of the 19th and 20th c. at the University of Macedonia. In 2007, she co-curated the 1st Biennale of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, together with Catherine David and Jan-Erik Lundstrom.

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