[illegal_cinema] is conceived as an open (self-) educational project of exchange and contextualization of the auteur, documentary, political, activist, queer, anarchist, censored and other marginalized and in the local context hardly accessible films. The project is open to everyone interested to propose films, with obligation to speak about them, to open up discussion, or to invite guests – wherewith we try to erase the boundaries between the editor (curator) and audience and to perform a long-term process of (collective) self-education. During its realization the project is constantly developing and expanding its original framework, generating different program-lines and trying to explore new modes of facilitating art and culture as a space for diverse knowledge production.

CALL FOR DEMONSTRATION :: Annika Ström :: 2006

Posted: March 20th, 2009 | Author: marta.popivoda | Filed under: texts | Tags: anika_strom, demontsration, performance |

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, a Swedish artist sings and frequently uses the soundtracks, mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

Claire Staebler