“The Coffee Tree and I.”
In “The Coffee Tree and I,” a short film by Konjit Seyoum, we see a coffee tree in its adolescence, not much more than a sapling. A red liquid at its base — is it water colored by fertilizer, or just water as it appears after poured onto the soil? — seeps slowly into the ground around its roots. It’s a chance to take a long, deep breath, to think about how we nourish plants, and how plants, in turn, nourish us. Margaret Hart’s “Poly-Morphosis” is an animated collage that ruminates on the wonders of science in an elliptical, often humorous way. And Daniel Hyatt’s “Escape from the Cage (and Dance)” features just that, as a man first magically finds his way out of a kennel, then dances until he disappears.
The three short films are part of the third installment of the Transart (notso) Short Fest, hosted by the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, that began in December and will run through Feb. 21 both in the gallery on Trumbull Street and online.
In total, the festival will consist of five hours of 77 video shorts created by 72 artists affiliated with the Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA and PhD arts program that, since its founding in 2004, has created a global community of artists. Among them is Transart advisor and faculty member Jean Marie Casbarian, who conceived of, compiled, and curated the film series. Also among them is artist Jeanne Criscola, who also happens to be president of the board of ECOCA.
“Transart is really unique. It’s a completely diverse and global experience,” said Casbarian, who has taught there since 2007. “Critique sessions are amazing because a student from Brazil might put up her film, and then a painter from Iceland responds.” The program has drawn not only from around the world, but across generations. “You have an 18-year-old sitting next to someone in their 60s who is really well established,” Casbarian said. But “everyone is an artist — in the end, we’re all artists — and Transart has been great at breaking down the hierarchy.”
Criscola was among the second year of students to graduate from Transart and remained involved. “Everyone coming from wherever they are is jumping into the deep end of the pool without a mask on, having no idea what is going to happen,” she said. “It opens you up in such a way that the connections are deep and awe-inspiring. I find that being able to listen to someone from Japan or the Isle of Man, who is not normally part of my experience, to be really riveting. To listen to them talk about their work, I get to understand who they are on a level that I wouldn’t understand if I were just listening to them talk.”
“Everybody has a voice and that voice has to be heard,” Casbarian said. As a teacher, she said, “I’m a big believer in failure, and you have to have failure to move forward.” Referring to the jumping in, the risk-taking, that Criscola described, she said, “you have to take the risk to see what happens. That’s kind of where you want to go. Innovation comes from failure.”
One of the workshops Casbarian taught involved making videos with whatever the artists had at hand, whether they were experienced videographers or had little more than their cellphones. Casbarian gave her students a theme — say, the invisible — and gave her students three hours to complete the assignment. “There was this non-thinking making,” Casbarian said, “out of this experimental creative lab” that yielded compelling results.
“Poly-Morphosis.”
In a typical year, the students would meet twice a year, for three weeks in the summer in Berlin and one week to 10 days in the winter in New York. Alumni were also encouraged to take part in these gatherings, further strengthening the Transart community. In this atypical year, at the end of the summer session, and after 16 years of the program, Casbarian thought, “all of these guys have videos. Why don’t I do a celebration? I thought I’d have a dozen videos.”
She ended up instead with 77 videos, over five hours of material.
“Everybody showed up,” Casbarian said.
“Naturally, everyone wanted to be a part of this five-hour fest,” Criscola said. “Everyone came out to take part in this because they wanted to experience that connection” that Transart created when they attended.
“Unbeknownst to me,” Casbarian said.
“Oh, I could have told you,” Criscola said with a laugh.
“And then Jean said, ‘we should bring it to the Ely Center,’” Casbarian said.
“When I brought what Jean Marie was doing at a board meeting” at ECOCA, Criscola said, “I knew we would jump on it. I’ve always been a strong proponent of screenings,” including the documentary the center screened in the fall, School’s Out, about alternative schooling. Criscola said she is always looking “to broaden the media that is presented at the center.”
In putting the series together, Casbarian said, “I was doing this in the spirit of Jonas Mekas,” a conceptual artist often called the godfather of experimental cinema. “He basically started anthology films way back in the day,” Casbarian said. At his screenings, “he was a total rebel. He would set up a screen. Nothing was censored. Anybody could show anything. People would kick the screen down. The police would raid the place. He was adamant about not censoring. And that was important.”
“Escape from the Cage (and Dance).”
That said, she said, “it’s curated in the sense that I try to find pacing from video to video. It’s more to me about looking at it like a piece of music. I treat the visual components like I would a piece of sound.” She was humble about her own work as a curator in the same way that she was encouraging to her students about taking risks. “This video project is my own artwork in a way,” she said. “It has its own bumps and series of failures. But it’s this beautiful compilation of minds.”
The film festival is thus another way artists have found to connect with one another during the Covid-19 pandemic — and is emblematic of how the move toward more online work has in some ways made collaborations easier. Though “I’m finding artists are reaching out in more analog ways also,” Casbarian added. “One of the video artists lives on 80 acres in Saskatchewan. She lives on this land where she’s discovered there’s a lot of endangered species of plants and animals.” In another project, that artist is sending people postcards of what happens on her property. Technology is huge for us, and a lifeline. But then I see other artists who are quite hungry for the tactility of presence — a postcard. People are wanting to draw all of a sudden. We’re on the screen so much that there’s this desire to come back.” The virtual world, for Casbarian, is “a disembodied space and time is suspended. I hear from a lot of artists, including myself, that ‘I’m so distracted.’ Coming into more analog processes is bringing us back into the body.”
Covid-19 or no Covid-19, however, hosting the work of an international organization of artists is also part of ECOCA’s ongoing mission. “The Ely Center is committed to not only diversity and inclusion, but also to building a global community, that can provide a more global view for artists and audiences,” Criscola said. And “The Trans Art Institute embodies that,” Casbarian said. “We’ve been doing that for 16 years, and we have been technologically connected through all of those years. It’s a very natural process.”
The Transart (notso) Short Fest runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 21. Visit ECOCA’s website for hours and more information. ECOCA is also organizing panel discussions, international artists talks, studio visits, and other live events during the festival’s run. Visit the fest’s website to sign up.
