Interactive Media

POETIC POLITICS
52' Video by Trudi Latour for the Chilean Cultural Platform and Creative Medicine Exchange Project launched at Alphonso Lagos Gallery Universidad Conception Chillan 2005.

Poetic Politics experiments with an interactive, cross-cultural approach to the traditional documentary form. It involves one Australian/German filmmaker, one Australian painter, one Australian/Chilean poet, one Australian and one Australian/Dutch performer and their newborn baby.

It forms one part of the art installation The Placental Poet – a participative portrait with the universal poet and social scientist Antonio Damarko, whose life story and thoughtful analysis of our current world crisis forms one of the structural elements of the video.

Poetic Politics was co-produced by the videographer Trudi Latour and the painter and cultural planner Geoff Buchan. It is a practical manifestation of the principles and methods developed within the Creative Medicine Project.

Shot and edited by the independent videographer, the story was allowed to grow over a whole year, during which the participants met at irregular intervals to work and live together for a few days at a time. There was no clear script, but an attempt to allow for everybody's individual creativity to contribute to the final product.

Improvised performances by Catherine Hassall and Willem Brugman from Culture Lab International Inc. are integrated throughout the video. Another structural element is the poem Little Voice in Full Bloom, written by Antonio Damarko and performed by Willem Brugman.

Another storyline evolved around the "Lotus Birth" of the performers' daughter Maya Thiango. The undisturbed placenta, which was left intact after the birth, becoming one of the symbols forming the subliminal text to this story.

- the continuum of life and death and the connectivity between the biological and the social dimensions of humanity.

Pointing at the trans-dividual philosophy of Antonio Damarko, which is explained within the video, Geoff Buchan called this participative portrait The Placental Poet. He explains aspects of his conceptualisation of the common subject matter, along which we all worked:

- an exploration of the universal human principals and the pervasive role of the artist in society.