MyCreativity – Opening Night Screenings
Some visitors of MyCreativity’s opening night might have been a bit surprised when they found out where it took place. The contrast between the friendly squat named Chequepoint at Damrak 16 and the overly capitalist surroundings could hardly have been bigger. The fact that the building used to be a bank might compensate for that.
As the rain came pouring down all different kinds of people, students, academics, professionals, artists and squatters, started mingling upstairs in a gezellige atmosphere entertained by a DJ and free drinks.
The screenings started off with Imbattibili, a 2006 short by Chainworkers showing a report of a protest for better social security held in Milan in 2005. Several demonstrators are asked how they cope with their poverty due to the harsh system in Berlusconi’s Italy suffering from an economic depression. These questions are asked not in a conventional way though, but rather in an inspiring manner; “if you’re able to manage having a decent life under these circumstances”, the protestors are told, “you can’t be less than a superhero!”.
This new context brings a smile to everybody’s face every time, and it gets even more funny when a little cape is given for the superheroes to fly away, making the image complete. You must give some credit to the filmmakers for giving these people some self-respect again, considering the bad social-economic position they’re in.
The second screening, Talent Community: IO Design Office, is also a short report from Lars Nilsson on a system in Sweden in which freelancers get together in a company to benefit from each others creativity, a common brand name and a network, but to avoid the classical hierarchical system of a company. Lars has a quite unconventional way of filming and editing which gives the film a bit of a amateurist feel. But of course I might just be mistaking Swedish dogma-style documentary making with incompetence.
The story is very inspiring though. Who likes to work for a boss anyway? Isn’t this system, which became popular during the industrial revolution, a bit out of date? People tend to work harder if they know they’re solely responsible for their own income, and don’t have somebody else telling them what to do. Still though, they might need the social surroundings offered by a company and the (creative) input of fellow people to get inspiration over a cup of coffee or a game of table tennis. Next to this the collective has one brand name and an extended network which creates better opportunities for everyone involved. This system of a collective of individual CEO’s might turn out to be a good option for the future of the creative industries (in Western Europe anyway).
The last screening, On Blood and Wings, is according to the official description
“about the multitude battling capitalism. Giving a vampire twist to Marx in unveiling the crucial mechanism of capitalism (“to make more and more blood out of blood”), it shows the problems of the Multitude fighting the vampires to conquer capitalism towards a free and just society. The video is put together from found footage out of a dozen different vampire movies. A voice over reads the political text. The video is published under the GNU public license.”
Blatantly anti-capitalist and pro-communist this movie might have fitted in the squat where it was showed, but could hardly be taken serious. The voiceover made the story feel like a production sponsored by Stalin himself. Comparing capitalism with vicious vampires craving for blood is a funny metaphor, and I hope that was all it was; a joke. The idea behind it is interesting, but the way the voice over mentions the “war between capitalism and the Multitude” made me laugh out loud.
On Blood and Wings is available as a MP4 (80MB) download
