29.04.2023 at 15:00
Cinema Amalie, Narva Art Residency, Joala 18, Narva
Free of charge
Organized by Mia Tamme and Vaim Sarv
Mia Tamme and Vaim Sarv invite the audience to be part of a public rehearsal of a silent film performance. Mia will share videos, texts, and wisdom that she has collected during her residency at NART. Vaim will read poetry and make soft, spatial music using electronics, two portable radios, and a piano. Blending their voices, they will ask: how can we collectively touch social trauma in third places like the cinema? What could we learn about care from the ladies in the Narva Jõesuu sauna? How could one glide like the cats in the Kulgu canals? The event is followed by a communal dinner.
During the NART residency Mia Tamme questioned the role of cultural institutions in socially tense and still recovering areas such as Narva. Mia proposes that activity based or bodily spaces function better as binders of society, as they are not presenting dominant linear narratives that come from the capital/outside/core. Community-run spaces based on bodily practices and informal third places such as community gardens, garages to mend cars, saunas, or beauty salons help people to comfortably process social trauma not only through discussion, but by offering bodily relief and proposed activities in the company of others. Those spaces appear in the social fabric of Narva, but are often not formally recognised and if so almost feared as they hold a much larger power than controlled outsider influences and initiatives. Mia’s aim with the project is not to colonise these spaces, but to find a way to step into dialogue with them through her artistic practice. Furthermore, she sees that formal cultural institutions have a lot to learn from these communities. She finds ways to reembody their values in her own practice of community building.
The undertaken research is compiled into a silent film that will be first presented as an open rehearsal on the 29th of April 2023 in NART. Mia collaborates with Vaim Sarv for the concept and a live performance. The film bring s on stage the texture of informal communities in Narva like Kulgru boat garages and Narva Jõesuu sauna. Vaim Sarv and Mia Tamme will expand the on-screen happening bodily, spatially and sound-ly. The probes for practises that have involved in informally run community spaces and looks for ways to bring that onto the not-so-formal stage.
This event is part of an artistic research into the cinema and cultural institutions in Narva and funded by Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
