Hosted by Johan Grimonprez, “Every Day Words Disappear” is an indispensable masterclass for exploring the theories and practices that lie at the heart of his films. Defined by a multi-layered and complex de/re/construction of language and the audio-visual medium, these works become pedagogical tools for understanding the intricate ways in which narrative and ideology become inter-defined and codified as Historical memory.
Prefacing the masterclass, Johan Grimonprez writes:
«“There is a mourning for a lost future,” writes Max Haiven, “not for what was, but for what could be.”¹ History and memory don’t merely function as a means to recall the past, but rather as a tool to negotiate the present in order to reshape a shared future. Memory after all, is a form of collective storytelling; the contested site of ideological struggle, where we redeem our forgotten dreams. James Baldwin asserts that “history is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us, we are our history.” In wonderland oddly enough, the Queen rephrases it to Alice as such: “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveler of the imagination? Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what holds us together, – or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. Ironically Maurice Blanchot called language an act of murder, because naming things would be identical to killing them. But novelist Alfred Döblin claims exactly the opposite: language, he says, is a form of loving others, language lets us know why we are together. But maybe a more pertinent depiction is Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s idea of language as a “leaking boat”. A lifeboat we are all stuck on together. It’s the disappearing meeting place, but also the same dire biosphere we all share.
As writers, Rebecca Solnit claims, we owe the “duty of delight”, to find new joyful ways of telling, figuring out how we belong together while choreographing new stories we share. Not as victims of the future paralyzed by dystopian nihilism, but to garner new metaphors and untold stories generated by better questions that can invent new languages, “tools for the amazing wonderful possibilities for the terrible realities we face.”»
¹ Max Haiven, Crisis of Imagination. Crisis of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons, 2014
Johan Grimonprez is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, and curator whose critically acclaimed work moves between theory and practice, art and cinema, beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, self and other, mind and brain, to weave new pathways for perceiving our realities. His film “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo) premiered at documenta X and was named by the Guardian among the “30 greatest works in the history of video art.” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”, his latest feature, is Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature, premiering at Sundance 2024, where it won the Cinematic Innovation Award, and later the Persistence of Vision Award at SFFilm and the Audience Award at Thessaloniki.
