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
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