Project for a Revolution

Still from Project for a Revolution (2000), 3'14 loop - a film by Johanna Billing, cinematography by Johan Phillips & Henry Moore Selder, and sound by Mario Adamsson. Courtesy of the artist and Filmform.

As a time-reflecting inspiration to the video stands the opening scene in Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point from 1970 – a students meeting. In Johanna Billing´s Project for a Revolution a crowd of young people are waiting for something indefinable to happen. Is it possible to be revolutionary today? The collective solution as a positive and possible lifestyle, in opposition to a lifestyle marked by individualism, the artist suggests.

In Project for a Revolution, a film made in Stockholm in the beginning of 2000, a photocopier produces a pile of white pages while a group of students silently gather in a classroom, looking at each other, waiting for any move and avoiding eye contact. Billing’s piece is made in reference to the introductory sequence of Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point that shows revolutionary debate among students and a ‘call to arms’ in a university. With this reference Billing stages a comparison between the expressive turmoil of opposition to military violence in the USA during the Vietnam war period and the safe haven of the Scandinavian welfare state of the late 1990s; between the interior of two educational institutions – one close to clashes of violence, the other infused with security and between two international groups of students – one that is boiling with the search for arguments, accusations and reconciliations, while the other is submerged in lethargic consensual silence. Inspired by the Latin root of the word revolution, revolutio, meaning to turn around or roll back, Billing employs the format of the loop, placing the film in a historical timeline, but at the same time keeping it in a constant and ongoing present, highlighting the feeling of being stuck in a cycle, or of not being able to break out of a preconceived or nostalgic image of how revolutionary engagement should appear. The situation might look passive/apathetic at first glance, but the room is full of tension and unrest and an underlying energetic - but still introverted - activity. In this way, the film could be seen as a catalyst, implying that actual discussion perhaps does no longer use already tested formats but is in the process of finding a different set up or system.

Johanna Billing x 2

The screening is part of a program curated by Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman at Filmform. The Filmform program will be screened throughout the fall at SSE, and it is a program showing two films by the same artist during the same month - one on the big screen in the atrium and one on lill-skärmen in the north corridor on the groundfloor. First out is Johanna Billing x 2. Find her film Where she is at (2001) on the big screen in the atrium.

Johanna Billing was born 1973 i Jönköping, Sweden and she lives and works in Stockholm. Billing has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, the films often focus on aspects of learning and how time plays a key role in that process. Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole. Billing often addresses political climates and cultural specificities. She transforms through a documentary method, her filmmaking in a fictive space to examine actual and contrived events and how that filmed compression illuminates their overlap. Billing's videos often feature modified scores and music composed by the artist or in close dialogue with participants, using sound as an essential device for collaboration and communication. 

Filmform
Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes. Filmform is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Arts Grants Committee.