ItIsOnlyAStareOfMind

Studio:
VAZAHA – Young Film Art from Madagascar

presented by Rudolf Herz and Julia Wahren
Opening: Friday, May 16 / 7 p.m.
Exhibition from May 16 until August 3, 2014

Dancing lemurs, crazy New York zoo animals, pepper and vanilla. And the unique nature. Absolutely worth seeing and massively under threat. What do we know about Madagascar? Usually no more than that. The great unknown island. And off its shores, as the German folk song goes, we have “the plague on board”. Step onto dry land there today, and you'll find a diverse culture which, despite political despondency and utmost poverty, is constantly in motion. Madagascan film art is no exception. A glimpse at the current creativity of young film-makers is provided by the exhibition “VAZAHA”.

Rudolf Herz and Julia Wahren met the film-makers in the summer of 2013, when they recreated the expedition of the Madagascar researcher Joseph Peter Audebert. In around 1880, Audebert conducted research on the island's fauna and published reports about the country and its inhabitants: rare ethnological sources from a period before the island became a French colony. Audebert was a “Vazaha”, a “white foreigner”: his gaze is full of curiosity and the spirit of research – but also Eurocentric and arrogant. Herz and Wahren wanted to know how today's Madagascans artistically comment on Audebert's reports. In conversation with the film-makers there commenced an exciting inter-cultural discourse, which is set to lead in 2015 to an extensive exhibition at Munich's Museum of Anthropology.

The studio exhibition “VAZAHA” at the Heidelberger Kunstverein marks a stage in the project's development and introduces this partnership's directors:

Luck Razanajaona: “Le Zébu de Dadilahy” (2012)

Mamihasina Raminosoa: “La Bulle” (2008)

Sitraka Randriamahaly: “Hazalambo” (2011)

Harimalala Rason: “Traversées du Tunnel” (2012)

Rado Andriamanisa / Colby Gottert: “Raspberry”(2012)

The diversity and idiosyncrasy of the short films are a thrill; they develop their own narrative forms, are powerful, artistically poetic or socio-documentary, and open the gaze onto unknown myths and the still too little-known living conditions in Madagascar.

Rudolf Herz, a freelance artist with a focus on cross-media projects, lives in Munich. Studies in Art and Art History in Munich and Hamburg. 1994 Rome scholarship from the Germany Academy Villa Massimo. Most recent solo exhibition: Marcel Duchamp – Le mystère de Munich, Architekturmuseum München (2012)

Julia Wahren, freelance author, director, and musician, lives in Munich. Studies at the Hanover University of Music and Theatre and at the University of Music in Detmold. 2000 Alexander Award for Journalists.

The research trip was founded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation

Videostill aus Luck Razanajaonas "Le Zébu de Dadilahy" (2012)

Studio: VAZAHA – Young Film Art from Madagascar

Studio:
VAZAHA – Young Film Art from Madagascar