FFF4 | Workshop: "We Refugees, Α Scenario for a Schizoanalytical Seminar"

"The plot for "We Refugees" is minimal, two artists have been asked to organize a seminar relating to the idea of home in the city of Athens circa 2017. Out of this very simple scenario, emerges a powerful document of an epoch matching the force of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's "Chronicle of a Summer". Instead of Paris of the early 60's which Rouch and Morin's film was so richly able to host, we are thrust in the years of turmoil in Athens, in a world of man made crises, on the brink of social, economic, political, existential and ecological catastrophe. We watch a group composed of individuals of various ages, interests, social contexts come together to discuss, cook, share time, texts, their homes, their neighborhoods, their fears and their respective positions toward the world, the city and life. At a time in which history was said to have come to an end and eviction was the shared condition for most life forms on the planet, we find the rumblings of another world about to be born. Rarely is filmmaking so basic and yet so compelling."

Using the above scenario, the artists Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri invite a group of participants to share a period of 5 days together to produce a seminar as a film which will be enacted, "inhabited", collectively documented, and then shared with a public. The scenario for this seminar performed as a film is structured and informed by Felix Guattari's writings on schizoanalysis and Bertolt Brecht's "Verfremdungseffekt" among others.

The basic premise is that by producing a space between an ordinary seminar and ordinary play acting, a very interesting analytic and performative space can be born, one which may be fruitful in creating potent aesthetic, analytic, and political experiences.