ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

A different way of making TV
In a screen hanging in a building of The Hague, videos will be screened from July to December.

URTZI URKIZU

Free televisions are being created that are different from the conventional media. One of them is Amatau TV, born recently in the neighbourhood of San Francisco of Bilbao. In the city of The Hague, in a neighbourhood similar to San Francisco, Iratxe Jaio (Markina, 1976) is realizing an innovative project. This week, this girl from Vizcaya has been in Basque Country telling about the free television OpTV.

In a building in the neighbourhood of Transvaal of The Hague, they will hang a huge screen, and the citizens will be able to watch different videos from the 2nd of July to December. This is the starting point of OpTV. “The neighbourhood of Transvaal was built in the beginning of the twentieth century for workers. Slowly immigrants arrived, and at the moment 3 out of 4 inhabitants are immigrants. The neighbourhood is degraded, and the city hall decided to break down 3000 houses, to “renovate” it. In this difficult context, OpTrek was born, an artists initiative, and they asked Klas van Gorkum and me to make the program of OpTV”.

The initiative OpTrek made lots of research in the last months. “To redefined the attitude of being critical as an artist in Holland”. Taking all this into account, Jaio and van Gorkum collected many films, documentaries and videos that have to do with the situation in the neighbourhood. “We have a movie about the social security in the neighbourhood, a propaganda documentary made in America in 1950, movies made by local artists and works made by the inhabitants, among others. The aim of this TV is to analyse issues of the neighbourhood, and also to research the relationship between members of a community”. The building where the screen will be hanging, is going to be broken down in December, and for the moment this will be the end of the path of OpTV. “We would like to use this example in other context, to make use of the analysis about the politics of urban planning. That’s why we would like to use the collected videos also outside the Transvaal”. Jaio and van Gorkum will come to Basque Country in July “through BilbaoArte, we will set up some TV sets with actors in the neighbourhoods of Bilbao”.


(uit Baskische krant Berria, 28 mei 2005)

Klik hier voor de oorspronkelijke Baskische tekst (PDF)
Klik hier voor informatie over het project OpTV

Andere artikelen uit Berria:

Videos in the street for reflection, responding to an urban plan