Check out Empire: Migrants on the big screen this June 29th in Amsterdam. Filmtheater Kriterion is showing the 3-channel video installation together with two documentaries films: Traces of the Trade by Katrina Browne and Wij Slaven van Suriname by Frank Zichem.
More information in Dutch about the screening here.
Los Angeles is the place where dreams come true
…and Norman DeBuck has always dreamed of being a star. Transfixed by Roy Rogers as a child in Indonesia and the Netherlands, he came to California in the 1960’s with the goal of becoming a cowboy in the movies.
Reality has a way of altering the fabric of dreams. In Norman’s case, the reality of his appearance gave him an entry point into the film industry, but also taught him hard truths about Hollywood’s hierarchy. Despite his mixed-race, Dutch-Indonesian heritage, Norman often plays small roles as Mexicans, and those roles often embody the stereotypes—of the bandido, of the gang member—that are the currency of mainstream filmmaking.
Empire: Periphery investigates the rift between desire and reality, and examines that role that outward appearance plays in self-definition. When people constantly tell you who or what you are, do you automatically and unintentionally become that thing that people see in you?
Click through the images above to see Norman’s dreams, and to experience his reality.
Principle photography for Empire: Periphery in California concluded on June 8th, 2013.
Break time with Ferdinand Verbiest
Last Sunday was our 6-year wedding anniversary. Eline put on a beautiful dress, I put on my cleanest shirt, and we spent the day together at the Getty, having a picnic and wandering through the pavilions. The exhibition that captured our imagination was Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter With Asia, which sounds like it should be a snoozefest, but is actually quite stunning.
The exhibition’s standout piece is a copy of Ferdinand Verbiest’s wall-sized, two-panel map of the world called the Kunyu Quantu. Verbiest was a 17th century badass, a Flemish Jesuit missionary who eluded execution at the hands of Chinese captors, brought Western astronomy to the East, and even invented the first proto-automobile. His Kunyu Quantu may not be entirely correct—notice the unicorn in the map’s bestiary—but what it lacks in cartographic accuracy it makes up in ambition, and ambition ought to count for something.
Verbiest’s map makes me proud to be human. It crystallizes and preserves a precious moment in our development as a species, when the scales were finally tipping away from ignorance about our surroundings, and towards a greater knowledge of our world. Verbiest was there to capture this moment, unicorns and all. “Look at all this,” his Kunyu Quantu seems to say. “Look at it, then venture into it and make a map of your own.”
Challenge accepted.
—Kel O’Neill, Brooklyn 2013
Coming up: new images from the latest (and last) installation in the Empire series.
The fun part of filming b-roll.
Cowboys and Indonesians
A first look at Empire: Periphery!
Going back to Cali
We’ve gotten used to shooting without permits or work visas in foreign countries, but you never get used to the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get a thick line of questioning from the customs officer. Where are you going, what are you doing, how long will you be here, what’s this, a hard drive?
So we were pretty psyched to start shootingthe latest (and last) Empire installation in the US, a country where we need no permits or work visas to do our work. Nothing to be afraid of at the airport, no reason to worry.
Except, of course, for the TSA. The picture we wanted to post here was one of Kel getting his customary pat down—fuck body scanners—but when Eline tried to snap a quick pic she got shut down by a screaming lug of a TSA “Agent” whose previous job was probably organizing the naked pyramids at Abu Ghraib. So instead of Kel getting his civil rights stretched, you get this picture of JFK’s hall of flags. You’re in the USA, boy. Don’t forget it.
Principle photography on Empire: Periphery begins tomorrow. Keep your eyes here.
Empire is coming to America
And guess what? We won’t be making anything about the Henry Hudson-led VOC mission that brought New York City into existence. Instead, we’re headed to the West Coast to learn about Southern California’s twice-displaced “Indo” community.
In the 1940’s, 50’s, and even 60’s, some 300,000 people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent left behind the conflicts of their newly independent tropical homeland and relocated to The Netherlands. Not all of these new immigrants felt comfortable with the cold winds of Northern Europe, and so a small number immigrated to the States and settled in warm climates like Florida and California.
Despite encountering some early setbacks—including various straight up racist, quota-driven immigration policies—the US’s Indo population integrated and assimilated rather seamlessly into American culture. In the US, as in The Netherlands, they were considered to be a “model” immigrant population, with all of the baggage that that label implies.
For the new Empire story in California we’ll be investigating how multi-generational families in the Indo community resolve the friction between the congruent Dutch, Indonesian and American parts of their identity. With any luck, we may even meet the most American of Indos, Mr. Zack Morris himself, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (pictured above after a blond dye job).
EMPIRE & MÜÜRILEHT
This article by the independent Estonian culture publication MÜÜRILEHT starts with a review of IDFA and is then followed by an interview with the EMPIRE team. The translation goes something like this:
Q: How this kind of experimental multi-screen work has been received so far?
A: We started producing and exhibiting EMPIRE in 2010 and we’re now almost 3 years later, so the project has been very successful so far. Young people across the world are extremely receptive. They have grown up in globalized world, so they understand the subject matter intuitively. They also accept the multi-screen format easily. Older generations seem to gravitate mostly to the historical element of EMPIRE, which is great as well because EMPIRE uncovers ‘hidden’ histories and unknown subcultures.
Q: Why did you choose your way of storytelling and what has been your experience with the outcome?
A: We chose to structure EMPIRE as a series of video installations that are exhibited simultaneously in one room. We refer to it as an ‘exploded’ feature film: viewers wander from installation to installation, from story to story. As a viewer, you create your own narrative and come to your own conclusions about what it all means. We want viewers to pick up on the thematic threads that exist in several installations. Themes like the sense of dislocation that comes from having a mixed Asian/European or African/European background run through many of the pieces, and there are also strong threads about labor, power and the exploitation of natural resources—it’s not a coincidence that we have one story about gold mining in Suriname and another about granite quarrying in India. So there are a lot of recurring elements, but there are also situations that are unique to one country/piece, which contributes to this feeling that EMPIRE is more than the sum of its parts. A frayed history asks for a frayed way of telling the story.
Q: And more general to inspire and encourage (or the opposite) Estonian young people interested in film -what are the possible channels to market this kind of documentary?
A: The EMPIRE video installations themselves can travel physically via the regular channels. However, in order to show the full scope of the project: platforms for this kind of work are currently being invented. EMPIRE cross-references several disciplines: documentary film, video art, journalism, transmedia. There is no fixed model out there, so it’s really going to depend on technological inventions to get the work out there in its intended form. We’ve just been invited to participate in the POV Hackathon, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that.
Q: Does the experimenting with the form so much actually makes sense?
A: Ha ha ha! What DOES make sense? We believe that this way of working and combining media is still in its infancy. People are trying to figure out how to communicate information, stories, visuals, data, etc, while using new technologies wisely. It’s exciting. We’re in a Wild West period, which is good, because our heroes have always been cowboys. And Indians.
Q: You worked in so many different cultural contexts, which all had something that connected them, but still totally different cultures. What was the most enlightening and most devastating experience of all these travels and series of mini-projects in each country?
A: Well, we worked in every country in the context of EMPIRE, so that already limits your scope. For the first four installations, we collaborated with local arts organizations in the countries that we visited. That way we could have a small safety net and meet incredible people. That was definitely one of the highlights. You can file witnessing the environmental destruction in the gold camps of Suriname under devastating.
Q: How did you cope with adjusting with so many totally different cultures within relatively short period of time?
A: We didn’t. You can’t. You just try to roll with it and focus on the work that you’re doing.
Q: What did you learn?
A: That the world is so incredibly small and the people in it are connected in more ways than they know. But you can find that out on Facebook as well.
(by Terje Toomistu, published in February 2013)
Calling, Career and Commitment:
EMPIRE presentation at The New School
On Thursday March 14th we will be presenting EMPIRE at the inaugural event of the annual The New School/Eugene Lang College religious studies series “Calling, Career, and Commitment,” presented by Prof. Katherine Kurs.
This presentation will mark the first EMPIRE event in New York, so be sure not to miss it!
Address The New School: 66 West 12th Street, New York. The presentation is in ROOM 404. Please bring ID.
From 6:45 PM until 8:30 PM (EST)
Open to the public and free of charge.
Space Colonialism is a thing now
“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”
With these words, spoken on the campaign trail in 2012, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich pulled off a hat-trick of self-sabotage. The line is a model of rhetorical economy: rarely have hubris, ignorance and jingoism sat so comfortably together in a single sentence.
Gingrich’s ideas about space exploration are not only deluded, but are also outmoded. His words appeal to a conception of Manifest Destiny that is rooted in idealism rather than economics. Despite his hollow talk of the lucrative scientific discoveries and tourist revenue dangling above the stratosphere, Gingrich is clearly a man who wants to boldly go where no man has gone before just ‘cause. This sense of adventure may be laudable, but it is unrealistic. Now, as in the 17th century, we expand into new frontiers in pursuit of resources, not knowledge.
Enter Deep Space Industries. In January of 2013, almost exactly one year after Gingrich’s comments, DSI declared that it would become the first deep space mining company. DSI will focus on mining asteroids, which are chalk full of minerals like platinum, gold and in-demand elements like Iridium and Palladium.
DSI’s underlying business model of finding scarce resources in inhospitable places isn’t particularly original, but it does bring the international scramble for resources to a whole new level. Throw a few interstellar rockets into the mix and China’s mineral-grabbing efforts in Africa and South America seem positively quaint. Admittedly, DSI’s efforts are still in their infancy, but the company already has its a strategy laid out. In its first years, DSI will focus on unmanned, robotic mining. Manned missions come later, presumably after the earth becomes so thoroughly depleted of resources that space miners become a viable economic option. When that happens, colonies are sure to follow. By the end of our lifetimes, we may even see Gingrich’s prophecy of a moon base come true. But we seriously doubt that it will be American.
Image by Brian Versteeg Studios from the DSI website.
NEW AMSTERDAM & AMERICA’S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
So we’ve just landed in New York (aka New Amsterdam), and we’re catching up on all the things that make the city special to us. Last Sunday that meant taking a walk through Brooklyn from Carroll Gardens to Fort Greene, and sitting for a while by this grimly beautiful monument in Fort Greene Park.
The Prison Ship Martyrs’ monument wasn’t built until 1908, but the bones of the 11,000 bodies stuffed in its foundation are much, much older. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, get off our blog immediately and read the wikipedia page on the subject.
Back? Pretty jaw-dropping, right?
People sometimes forget that the United States is a post-colonial society. While we all know that settlers fought a bloody war against their British colonial overlords between 1775 and 1783, this struggle has since been rebranded as a bloodless folktale. In reality, both the violence and the geopolitical machinations behind the struggle were thoroughly modern: The Netherlands, along with the French (Britain’s arch-enemy at that time) and the Spanish (France’s ally) supplied arms and other supplies to the revolutionaries, in many cases using their colonies in the Caribbean as a base of operations. Imagine Iran-Contra or the US’s 1980’s Afghanistan policy, but with more tri-corner hats.
There are several connections between the American Revolution and the Netherlands, explains our friend Tristan Mostert, junior curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: “Benjamin Franklin corresponded with the leader of the ‘Patriotten’, Joan Derk van der Capellen. John Quincy Adams studied here for a bit. Before the French would have their Revolution a few years later, the Netherlands were the only functional Republic in Europe and the US looked at them for inspiration in these years. The Dutch loaned a lot of money to the US in the first years of its existence.”
So the Dutch had their reasons for backing the revolution—and had they not, there may be even more bones entombed forever in Fort Greene Park. We do wonder, though, if the Dutch just wanted to get a belated revenge against the British for taking the New Amsterdam colony. Colonial empires can be petty like that.
We are proud to report that the EMPIRE prototype we made during the POV Hackathon was selected as the Participants’ Choice winner!
Try the prototype here (NOTE: optimized for Chrome, may not work on other browsers and won’t work on mobile devices).
Also, read about it in our third blogpost for The Creators Project, Hacking the shit out of everything part 3.
Submarine Channel’s EMPIRE video report
Have you ever wondered what the hell the Empire project actually is? This video should clear that all up.
Silent predator.
Came across with a different spider while I was talking a morning walk on Bogor Arboretum. This one is about 13 cm in length and...
