You Can't Automate Me
In March 2020 Katarina Jazbec invited me to contribute to her film 'You can’t automate me'.
You can’t automate me is a short film, which takes place in the Port of Rotterdam, about a group of lashers, who do heavy dangerous physical work of fastening and unfastening containers on mega containerships that cannot be automated. During the night shifts, while they wait to be called on the ship, their bodies take a moment to rest and start to speak. In a dreamy sequence that follows they explore the stories their muscles, bones, ears and animals they encounter while working, have to tell us about our society.
The project has been made in a collaboration with Angeliki Diakrousi.
This project is supported by IFFR RTM Pitch and Gemeente Rotterdam, Mondriaan Fund and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (the Summer Sessions Network for Talent Development).
The film will premiere in 2021 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
[from the website of Katarina Jazbec]
The Handbook for Eyes, Bones, Muscles, Skin and Dreams
(A5, booklet, 2020)
Together we developed a series of movements that were introduced to the lashers while they were performing in the film. For that I created a handbook that describes in detail the exercises and was given to the lashers. The exercises we have developed are inspired by different
movement techniques and concepts that we have personally
experienced. Practices that have a long history. Some of the
dancers and practitioners that inspired us are the butoh dancers Masaki Iwana,
Natsu Nakajima and Moeno Wakamatsu, the dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner Mai Tasaka and the composer Pauline Oliveros. The methods come from Feldenkrais, Butoh, Deep Listening, Amerindian multinaturalism and the lashing techniques of the lashers.
The act of performing the scores with lashers became an attempt in rendering each other capable of response. While The Handbook bridged the gap between the language of movement arts and lashers’ context.
It is invisible what guides you along the way
(A3, riso poster, front and back side, 2021)
"This riso poster, designed by Tessa Meeus and published by PrintRoom, gives an insight into The Handbook for Eyes, Bones, Muscles, Skin, and Dreams (2020), a collection of movement scores that we developed together with Angeliki Diakrousi and made into booklets that were given to lashers. Responding to our increasingly automated bodies, the scores address all the workers of the Capitalocene as Haraway puts it nicely. The Handbook emerged from extensive research and desire to understand the experience of human and animal bodies in the harbour of Rotterdam, an engine of our economy, in an embodied manner. In the long period of exploring the harbour, I encountered lashers whose work came incredibly close to my research questions."
[from the website of Katarina Jazbec]
