SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
LOCATION: Immigrant Movement International, 108-59 Roosevelt Avenue, Corona, NY 11368 (7 train to 111th St) Click here for Directions.
For his participation in Queens International 2012: Three Points Make a Triangle, artist Alejandro Cesarco will be conducting a a workshop focusing on an expanded definition of translation conceived as a creative and generative process. As a starting point, a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Chinoise (1967) and a short film by Claire Denis, Vers Nancy (2002) will be screened and analyzed. These two works will be used as a lens to discuss cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adapt, translate, and appropriate.
With QMA Director of Public Events, Prerana Reddy
About the Artist
Alejandro Cesarco was born in 1975 in Montevideo, Uruguay. His most recent solo exhibitions include “Alejandro Cesarco,” Art Pace, San Antonio, Texas, “Two Films,” Murray Guy, New York (2009), “Three Works,” Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2009), “Now & Then,” Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2009), “Retrospective,” in collaboration with John Baldessari, Murray Guy, New York (2007), and “Margeurite Duras’ India Song,” Art in General, New York (2006). These exhibitions addressed, through different formats and strategies, his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. He has curated exhibitions in the U.S., Uruguay, Argentina and a project for the 6th Mercosur Biennial (2007), in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is director of Art Resources Transfer where he initiated and edits Between Artists, an ongoing series of conversation based books. He lives and works in New York.
About the Films
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Still from “La Chinoise” by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967
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La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967, 96mins)
In an apartment painted brilliant shades of red and blue, five young people-including Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), a philosophy student, and the actor Guillaume (an ardent Léaud)-attempt to live according to the precepts of Chairman Mao, their shortwave tuned to Radio Peking. In an assemblage of skits that bridges Pop and agitprop, Godard portrays the progress of these “petit Maoists” from playing at revolution to making it. It remained for the events of May 1968 to prove La Chinoise prophetic, and the film’s fascination only grows in retrospect
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Still from “Vers Nancy” by Claire Denis, 2002
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Vers Nancy (Claire Denis, France, 2002, 10mins, part of the portmanteau feature 10 Minutes Older: The Cello)
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A train conversation between an immigrant French woman and novelist Jean-Luc Nancy centering on the idea of intrusion within every foreigner (a more philosophical precursor to L’Intrus). Denis’s social commentary on the inherent fallacy – particularly in nations with a strong national identity like the U.S. and France – of the social notion that assimilation and integration embrace cultural differences; rather, it erases them. The idea of intrusion is also present in the creation of the Schengen Zone which allows for free movement of people from European countries within the agreement signatory countries, creating a buffer between Old Europe and the “other” Europe that flouts the idea of globalism and a unified Europe, essentially establishing a segregated European “homogenous zone” where populations from outside the zone become “intruders” within it.
