Trafik Festival 2019: collaborative audiovisual creation event

A high level cultural event, based on the creativity of the participants: making films from commented photographs, broadcast at the time, which invite the spectators to contribute to it..

The project

In November 2019, as part of the Festival of theatre and interdisciplinary Trafik at the Gare Mondiale in Bergerac, the association Lucid eye (Jenny Saastamoinen) met there with its event “Meeting reality #7”, proposing, around the theme Babel ville-monde, this action that we co-constructed, of collaborative audiovisual creation of quality.

Course of action

Jenny Saastamoinen had done a great deal of preparatory work in selecting photographs around the theme. First of all, people took the time to choose photos that evoked their own lives, around the theme of habitat. Then they thought about an order and a text. And finally, they would shoot their film, placing the photos one by one in front of the camera while telling the life story they had chosen to share. The accompaniment of the participants was built in benevolence, listening and artistic exigency.

The first day was dedicated to workshops for groups (high school students, social centres, migrants, CIDFF...), and the second day was in public, producing, in terms of cultural event, a very strong moment: the discovery of each other’s worlds, thanks to these films of a high quality, combined with the possibility of creating oneself.

Creativity is the most powerful tool for the appropriation of one’s identity and of the world. Even those who have not made a film have been enriched by the depth of it. Thus, moving from the posture of spectator to that of full-fledged actor in the cultural apparatus allows art to be anchored even better in its social function. It is in no way a question of devaluing the work of the artist, but of encouraging encounters. In this case, Jenny Saastamoinen’s choice of photographs and Benoît Labourdette’s creative process constituted their artistic contribution, fully open, producing a place of encounter and artistic and civic elaboration rather than a place of cultural consumption.

Appropriation

And finally, the participants received on their mobile phones the link to all the films made, allowing them, in the same movement, to view them personally and also to be able to broadcast them outside. And, of course, to be then rich in terms of heritage appropriation, which is the condition to be able to make history, an essential component of humanity as a value.

So all the films are here: www.benoitlabourdette.com/_docs/?dir=projets/2019/2019_rencontres_du_reel_7_trafik

Some of the movies