witness

“On the Margin of History” is a witness of the destruction of ancient history and the sharp demographic change in Aleppo (Syria), Mohamad Kebbewar’s home town, a city of six million people that lost ninety percent of its residents over the course of six years. It is the witness of the breakdown of former Yugoslavia, Natasha Boskic’s homeland, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia where silence was the only response to events. It is a transdisciplinary project that considers the tensions between personal voice and story and the possibilities of the digital visuals, done by Mary McDonald, to suggest and reinforce false narratives and/or to create understandings through metaphor, playing with all levels of our perception. It attempts to reframe our consciousness to find empathy and closeness, humanity in chaos. The ”Margin” tells the true cost of war — the reverberating loss of the destruction of people and place, family, heritage, traditions, and cultures. These brief fragments of poem and film enhance the experience of the surreal and feelings of displacement. Artistic creation is a kind of healing, and letting go of war and decomposition of life. Even when we chose to leave them behind, they never leave us.

Crossed Lines is a multiform (or multiplot) film telling the stories of nine characters in a way that the viewer can constantly explore and switch between all nine forms, and can simultaneously witness all sides of the characters’ exchanges which are taking place between the nine remote locations. The starting point of the piece was to conceive a series of narratives that could be viewed as individual stories, but would also reference and link to the other stories, as is the case of the multiplot film genre. As McKee has noted ‘multiplot films never develop a central plot; rather they weave together a number of stories of subplot size’. (1998:227) The difference with Crossed Lines is that it is delivered through an interactive interface paradigm, meaning that the viewer has the power to navigate and order the stories themselves, and to create a story of varying complexity depending on the number of different characters which are selected through the interface.