One of the famous scenes in the series "Mad Men" deals with photography and its philosophical meaning.
In a monologue that has become iconic in the annals of television, Don Draper, a super-advertiser and a man who maintains a complex relationship with his past, refers to the camera as something that is essentially close to a time machine: a device that records an event, captures and freezes a moment in a given time and tells us a story about the subject of the photograph at a specific point in his life.
This evening (Tuesday) names such as Roni Cuban, Korin Kitsis, Shirili Desha, Doron Nesher, Tal Friedman, Efri Kanani and Yossi Tsabari will enter a similar time machine, in an event called "VHS greetings from the past". During the show, creators from different artistic worlds will give commentary staged for videos shot in VHS format, straight from their personal home recordings, buried in the depths of the internet and forgotten with time and changing recording techniques.
The show was inspired by the "Users Manual for Your Past Which I've Never Seen" by Claudia Hartung Wiecek and for the artistic director Nitzan Cohen, who initiated the show together with Renana Raz (herself participating in the evening), it is a "useful guide, like the one that comes With a washing machine, let's say, for a meeting with your past."
"I personally look back and I'm mostly interested in why I remember what I remember and why I forget the rest," he says.
"Photographed memories are the beginning of the evolution of the selfie. There is a lot to learn from watching our own reflection in old photos on VHS tapes from family events. Even now, when there is inflation in the field and every child takes pictures of themselves."
Tal Friedman as a child,
It is interesting to put on such a show as the most documented passage of time in history.
"Everything today is recorded so many times that you can see it from every possible angle. To me, these materials are a potential to see the evolution of this thing. We look back and see how we recorded family events or private and personal moments. And how all of this can describe an experience Collectively, perspective is a subject that preoccupies the world.
"Renana and I talked about the fact that the corona was a fault line and people started to look back in a much deeper way. Basically we stayed stuck at home with recordings, which without awareness or intention became a family archive. Each artist in the show begins to unpack his life, where he is at the moment and what brought him to the place which he is in today. Today we walk around with our full archives. Instagram even has a feature called an archive."
How did you choose the participants?
"We started looking for people we are interested in working with, people whose public persona says something that tempts us to mess with them and we checked what materials they have. This is an evening where the casting is really done with tweezers. Doron (Eagle) is a classic case of tampering with memory, because he actually lost all at once his memory in a stroke. It's a kind of complete embodiment of this thing and the way he actually has to rebuild life and language for himself."
Shirili Desha as a child,
What did you and the participants discover after going back to the old tapes?
"Many times the first thing that comes up is a kind of embarrassment. We look at the initial encounter with the camera and see how much innocence there really was in the way we documented ourselves. This show takes us back to the kind of consciousness we were in. It was not yet full of angle I look the best'. Today we all not only take pictures but also edit ourselves. All content consumption and the way our memory is shaped have changed from end to end. If we do a show like this in 20 years I don't know what it will look like. Maybe like a last vestige of innocence".
The show "VHS - Greetings from the Past" will take place tonight and tomorrow at the Culture Hall in Tel Aviv.
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