In 2023 the FUSO celebrates its 15th edition testifying the malleability of video as a creative and critical tool. Capable of encompassing and crossing the various contemporary artistic disciplines and evolving into fields of research that allow for new experiments, video art is an accessible and important instrument for reflection on the times we live in.
Urgent issues, such as belonging and the right to freedom, the patterns of inequalities that have been woven through colonialism, the climate emergency, wars and challenges facing the world today are topics that matter. FUSO festival takes place between 22 and 27 august, one of the screening sessions is at the Sinel de Cordes Palace on Friday August 25.
Right of Way
Curated by Benjamin Cook
August 25, 10pm Palace courtyard
A selection of recent commissions and distributed work from LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with the moving image, exploring ideas of belonging, particularly in the English landscape, against the backdrop of the UK government’s antagonistic relationship with its migrant communities.
During the COVID-19 pandemic – as people realised anew the importance of nature and open spaces for our health and mental wellbeing – inequalities of access to rural land were being exposed, revealing the disconnect felt by millions of people towards the English countryside.
A 2019 government review found that many Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people view the countryside as an ‘irrelevant white, middle-class club’, concluding that this divide is only going to widen as society changes and ‘the countryside will end up being irrelevant to the country that actually exists’.
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message
Rhea Storr
Celebration is a protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival.
A look at forms of authority, the film asks who performs and who spectates. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces. The film considers how easy it is to represent oneself culturally as a Mixed-race person in the UK and the ways in which Black bodies become visible, questioning ownership or appropriation of Black culture.
Black Strangers
Dan Guthrie
Dan Guthrie’s Black Strangers seeks a man called ‘Daniel’ recorded on a bishop’s transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, who was buried in Nympsfield in 1719 and described as ‘a black stranger’. Whilst walking, Dan talks directly to Daniel, speculating about the parallels between him and his namesake, and about how his experience in his hometown of Stroud mirrors that of ‘Daniel’.
I Carry It With Me Everywhere
Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah
Informed by interviews with first-generation migrants living in the UK, this short film weaves together the lives of multiple characters as they confront inherited ideas of belonging.
From the severed connection to a motherland following the death of a parent, to the generational experience of displacement, or the feeling of nostalgia for a place and time forever out of reach, I Carry It With Me Everywhere explores how migration results in moments of rupture from which new understandings of home and belonging may emerge.
Pastoral Malaise
Ufuoma Essi
Ufuoma Essi’s Pastoral Malaise explores the absences within the rural pastoral environments that are often framed by romanticism and picturesque conventions, constructed as tourist sites and refuges in rural landscapes across Britain.
Syncopated Green
Arjuna Neuman
Arjuna Neuman’s Syncopated Green reflects on the history of outdoor free parties in the English countryside, using rave music, past and present, to help forget the ‘official’ portrayal of England as picturesque, nostalgic, white, and rural. The film invites rave music into the English landscape – turning imperial history inside out. Somewhere between a music video, a memoir and an essay, it asks: how might our future be different if we had other histories to lean on – and dance with?
About FUSO
The programme of the 15th edition of FUSO (August 22 —27) features works by artists whose practices define contemporary realities and bring attention to the ways in which these complex issues have existed, and still remain, in society - in our institutions, in the media, in our communities and in our thoughts. As usual, the various sessions of the festival take place in outdoor spaces such as the São Jorge Castle, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sinel de Cordes Palace or the cloister of the Puppet Museum.
Created in 2009, FUSO is the only Portuguese video art festival with a program of national and international production that takes place annually in Lisbon and the Azores (FUSO Insular). The programme is as eclectic as the languages that video art embodies. As a medium, it is undoubtedly the one that has greater flexibility, greater ability to encompass and cross contemporary artistic disciplines: the visual arts, performance, dance and theatre, film or literature.
