Hungry Minds Think Alike?
attempt of a self organized cross-cultural co-operation between
artists from Germany, India, Canada, Kazakhstan, Malaysia,
Lebanon, Switzerland, Holland, Egypt and the USA.1)
The following composition is about the impossibility of
cross-cultural representation. It is also about starting a
journey without knowing its destination. It is about
globalization, about cultural production, about the other, about
ourselves, about group dynamics, about home and maybe in the end
everything which has been said to change the world for the better
is only about friendship. But lets first start to outline the
project that embodies all these aspects: "Hungry Minds Think
Alike?".
The Project
Dogfilm, a team of video makers and authors from Berlin
(Germany), initiated the project "Hungry Minds Think Alike?" to
realize a long longed for dream to collaborate with different
film and video makers whom they had met during their previous
projects. Traveling the world and welcoming artists from abroad
for about 10 years, dogfilm got to know a lot of fellow film and
video makers. Knowing that these film and video makers all have
different cultural backgrounds, any co-operation would
immediately mean dealing with cultural differences and
similarities. In the realm of economical globalization dogfilm
questioned if all Hungry Minds, working with cultural production
across cultures, would Think Alike?
Having quite a record concerning group work, dogfilms first step
was to bring all participants together in one place and to create
the conditions that would allow a successful lift of for the
project. After half a year of email and fax correspondence it
became clear that this physical meeting would be necessary to
constitute the genuine Hungry Minds group identity. After all
dogfilm knew all participants but not all participants knew each
other.
From 20th until the 23rd of august 1998, the first Hungry Minds
meeting took place in Berlin. At the Kunstamt Kreuzberg /
Bethanien all participants showed screenings of their work. These
public events were held in the evening and were a means to an
end. The main purpose of the meeting were the internal rallies
during the day. But for the sake of organizing traveling costs it
was much easier to argue with public appearances. However to see
each others work was of course also good for the internal
discussions.
Everybody came to Berlin with a similar guideline, a basis for
discussion. The initial idea was, of course partly based on
pragmatism, to do a video relay race. All participants had to do
a short video which would include documenting his or her own
environment and that of another participant. After the production
phase we would end up having a video sampler and then create a
post hoc thread that would keep the samples together.
On the content level doing a cross-cultural project, everybody
was aware of the fact that you cant escape the burden of
globalization. The concept of globalization is solely based on
monetary standards and free market economy. What would a cultural
concept of globalization look like? Here all participants wanted
to approach the theme out of their subjective perspectives and
try to tie back global questions to their local societal
realities which they live in. This cultural approach has been
labeled "glocalization", a term which was first used by japanese
economic experts at the beginning of the nineties.
The meeting
The morning after the introduction event, we first had to clean
up our space because it had been the victim of a rather stormy
opening the evening before. The smell of empty beer bottles and
cigarette ends tortured our stomachs. After a quick cleaning job
we all gather for breakfast. The first thing we agreed upon,
after astonishing that this meeting is really taking place, was
that we start from scratch. A decision that should give everybody
the feeling of being equal responsible for failure or success of
the project.
Before talking about the agenda of the meeting, we have to
highlight the specific language situation. You cant do a
cross-cultural project without dealing with the language trap. In
our case everybody spoke english, only Vladimir who comes from
Kazakhstan didn't speak english and we had a translator who
organized communication. The translator, Kristin, set the pace
for the show and in the end became a full Hungry Minds member.
That we all besides Vladimir spoke english showed a specific
aspect of globalization that is not limited to the world of big
business. Even the highly appraised communication tool, that is
often being used to illustrate globalization, the internet is
being dominated by the so called "world language". In order to
communicate on a global basis, more and more languages will
disappear and maybe with them their associated cultures. With
some scepticism we asked ourselves if this meeting was a positive
or negative example of globalization. But already the language
situation exemplified that we would discover more things in
common as we probably had expected.
Every group project that incorporates people from different
countries has to pose the question about differences and
similarities. Where are the boundaries, are they national, are
they geographical, are they cultural, are they lingual? It was
easy to find out that for the Hungry Minds they were nor
national, nor geographical and to a lesser extent nor lingual.
When we discovered boundaries than they were rather cultural.
Fishing for similarities we found out that they had to be
localized especially in our social positions. Practically all
could identify with being alienated from their own local context.
We all belong somehow to a privilege class, a class that has the
possibility, to travel, of course some easier than others. But
maybe the most important thing we have in common is that we all
use the power of narrative.
During the 3 days of the meeting we constantly tried to discuss
the theoretical and practical concerns, the topic and the
structure, of the project separately. It is of course not a
surprise that we always would end up mixing them because the
topic and the structure have a dependent relationship. For the
sake of clearness we will treat them successively. Since we
started with a blank sheet we also discussed the process versus
the product dilemma. Especially with group work it is
constructive to declare the process as being the product. By
doing so the group has the possibility of launching a lot of
small entities/sub projects that make the process visible and
never have the pretension of being an end product. The problem
that is inherent for this working method is that the group in the
long run becomes an organization and we all agreed that we
definitely don't need another organization. Soon became clear
that we wanted an end product, we wanted a film/video to be the
output of our efforts.
Talking about theoretical concerns, we first had a brainstorm
round on "globalization" which produced such keywords as: trade
markets, residence, work, language, nationalism vs world order,
traveling, identity, home, movement. "Globalization" as a topic
for all participants had two strong deficits. First it was just
to broad and by being overexposed in the media already loaded
with a strong connotation by global economical conditions. Second
and more important it maybe a topic interesting for
deconstruction in a framework of structural system criticism but
on the other hand a lot of Hungry Minds had difficulties finding
a personal, subjective approach towards "globalization". Having
in mind this personal, subjective perspective we asked ourselves
what kind of effect does "globalization" have on our own life and
every day experience. At this point we got stuck in a long, long
discussion about the concept of "home". The advantage of the
concept of "home seemed the inclusion of a lot of issues the
Hungry Minds stressed. Cultural settings, attachment versus
detachment, community whether it be actual or virtual, story
telling as way of personal expression, social engagement as way
of political expression, contextual alienation just to name a
few. Therefore, after doing some lobby work in the breaks, we all
agreed upon "home".
Talking about the practical concerns and what came out of it can
only be seen as a result of a successful group constitution. We
started with the idea of a film/video relay race. Certainly this
structure was proposed to give all the participants a large
degree of autonomy and to handle the organizational bulk. But
during the discussions it became clear that we had to make
choices about who is going to visit whom and in what order.
Suddenly we found ourselves into a dispute about inclusion and
exclusion of Hungry Minds participants. It also meant that being
interested in everybody's work, the tag team structure wouldn't
allow us to explore the group exchange to the full extent. The
outcome of our structural debate was that we agreed upon
archiving a collective pool of material. This meant the ultimate
group challenge. It meant that everybody would collect material
whether it be audio, video, or text and dump it into this
collective pool and at the next meeting the group would have to
decide upon how to structure this. Somewhere on the road to this
decision someone proposed a very complicated form and was thrown
with pencils, just to illustrate the Hungry Minds decision
method.
The structure we assigned to the project still gave the single
participant a lot of freedom in shooting or writing. The chance
that the material collected would be heterogeneous seemed pretty
large. Therefore we had every now and then talks about the
connective tissue or as we would call them "transition pieces".
These transition pieces would keep the video samples together and
give the main video its dramaturgical thread. The ideas about
this cohesive element in our method ran from filming a meeting in
Davos during the World Economic Forum 2), till finding folk tales
about "home" in everybody's cultures. In the end we didn't find a
solution yet but temporarily declared the meetings, that should
be necessary to structure the material as our connective tissue.
At the last day of our meeting it became obvious that 3 days for
such an enterprise was way to short and the last hours were
marked by hectic and talking all at the same time. With the left
overs of energy we managed to agree on meeting in January 1999 in
Bombay where the first results of collecting material concerning
the topic "home" would be presented. Then everybody took a deep
breathe and went to the party.
The Party
A meeting is not a good meeting without a party. At the party we
had the chance of exchanging more personal anecdotes and, yes,
the more drunk all Hungry Minds got the more personal the stories
became. The party probably accentuated more than anything else
during these 3 days our similarities. But at the same time these
personal stories showed also that we were worlds apart,
differences you can easily hide when talking about globalization
on a rational and intellectual level. The party indicated that
part of the motivation to do this project is friendship and the
real challenge would be to distill the differences out of these
friendships and then capture the impossibility of cross-cultural
representation on a tape. The "Hungry Minds Think Alike?" journey
started but with destination unknown. To be continued...
1) The Hungry Minds who were present at the meeting in Berlin
are: Shelly Silver, Jayce Salloum, Philip Scheffner; Tina
Ellerkamp, Simmin Farkondeh, Urmi Juvekar Chiang, Anirban, Ursula
Biemann, Florian Zeyfang, Vladimir Tyulkin, Kristin Schönfelder,
Merle Kröger, Haytham El Wardeni , Jörg Heitmann, Ed van Megen.
Not present at the meeting but still in the project are: Beate
"Tiger" Stangl, Hanno Baethe, Zaki Omar, Christine Dabaghi
2) The World Economic Forum is an annual private event in Davos
Switzerland, where the most influencial managers of the world
meet in a cosy atmosphere to decide in what direction the global
market should develop. Here political world leaders become
petitioners for investments in their countries. Davos has become
a symbol for globalization and the so called "new world order".
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