Event: Blown Up !
Opening Date: 29 November 2009
Location: Mains d’Oeuvres, 1, rue Charles Garnier, 93 400 Saint-Ouen, Paris, France
Duration: 29/11/09 – 18/12/09

If you are in - or happen to go to - Paris between November 29 to December 18 we recommend you visit Blown Up ! at Mains d’Oeuvres, Saint-Ouen.

Blown Up ! is an eventwork by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, two highly creative and talented filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists and researchers (+ nomads and linguists), around the idea of exploded cinema in relation to their recent film Facs of Life.

The couple Graeme (Scottish) and Silvia (Italian) have been making sound and video installations, photo-essays, experimental radio programmes, multimedia performance and seminars across Italy, UK, France and US since their formal and informal studies in literature, cinema, philosophy and music.

Images from Facs of Life

They currently reside in Paris were they wrote, directed and edited Facs of Life, a film of conceptual/poetic ‘dispositifs’ that charts trajectories of those affected by Gilles Deleuze’s laboratory of machinic thought at the Centre Expérimental Universitaire de Paris 8 - Vincennes (1969-1980) today’s Paris VIII in Saint-Denis. From a multiciplity of materials - audio and video footage, fiction, readings, photos and maps - emerge encounters, archives and rushes, and figures in flight around the figure of Deleuze, the students of the new Paris 8 university at St Denis; and “inevitably with the phantoms of revolution that continue to haunt our desires”.

Like Facs of Life, Blown Up ! equally derives from an explosion, recomposing scattered shards of a political moment, a research process, a corpus of images, voices and concepts, within the framework of “a temporary autonomous classroom” that exhorts us to “make rhizomes, not roots, never plant ! Don’t sow grow offshoots ! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities. Run lines, never plot a point !”

Blown up ! is an eventwork turning around two axes :
1. the exhibition/redistribution of elements of the film Facs of Life, a cinematic quest to find students of Deleuze at Vincennes and to uncover traces of the experience in their life practices.

2. the installation/construction of a space for experimental pedagogy, a temporary autonomous classroom for creative questioning of the organization, temporalities and aims of formal education. Between four intense moments of multiple interdisciplinary encounters (Nov. 29, Dec. 5, 11,13) the space will remain ‘open’ for whoever (teachers, researchers, artists) wishes to use it by displacing and exhibiting their activities, courses or ongoing projects to Mains d’Oeuvres, leaving a trace, tracing a trajectory of work or research on its potential blackboard.

The temporary Autonomous Classroom
Sunday 29 november 2009 from 12 to 24
Mille Plateaux Associes ; Thomas Hirschhorn (Deleuze Monument) ; Jean-Jacques Lebel (Monument a Felix Guattari) ; Jochen Dehn, Pascale Criton ; Daniel Deshays ; Dork Zabunyan ; Anne Querrien , Brian Holmes, Anne Sauvagnargues ; Nicolas Gerber ; Genevieve Schwoebel & Les Femmes Assises.

Saturday 5 december 2009 from 16 to 22
Anouck Durand-Gasselin ; Julien Bancilhon ; Bruno Jouhet & Cecile Duval ; Seijiro Murayama ; Le peuple qui manque & Violeta Salvatierra (Min Tanaka a la Borde) ; Olivier Apprill ; Yolande Finkelstajin.

Sunday 13 december 2009 from 12 to 24
Jalal Toufic (Saving Face) ; Societe realiste ; Ali Akay ; Otolith group (Otolith I) ; Walid Raad ; Benjamin Thigpen; Robert Albouker ; Manon De Boer (Resonating Surfaces) ; folksonomy ; terminal beach (FREEZE-OUT).

Read Nicolas Féodoroff’s review on Facs of Life here

Contributions by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni on Cluster:

Paris Mots Emploi (Eng/Ita)
Stitching Memory
The Caretakers of the Self
Une Visite Au Louvre
“Signes de Nuit - Cinéma d’ailleur et de demain”
A few words about L’ATELIER
Dreams of a damaged brain
The Crystal Method
Mission Invisible
Better Read Than Dead: a Visit to the Martha Rosler Library
Sounding the City
Undead Air