Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
we will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass | 2007 | 47:04mins | DV | USA
Julia Meltzer is a media artist and executive director of Clockshop, a non-profit production company based in Los Angeles. Her works are realized in video, installation, and performance presentations. Her video works include State of Emergency: Inside the L.A.P.D. (Elizabeth Canner/ Julia Meltzer, 30 min, 1993), Room Service (15 min, 1994), Conversation Piece (20 min, 1997), and It’s not my memory of it (Speculative Archive, 25 min, 2003). Installations include
Meltzer’s work has been exhibited and broadcast at venues including Creative Time’s Art in the Anchorage, The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Mass MOCA (West Adams, Massachusetts), Forum Stadtpark (Graz, Austria), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) and on selected PBS television stations. She has taught video and digital media at Hampshire College and UC Irvine.
David Thorne lives and works in Los Angeles. His recent work addresses the conditions of so-called globalization; notions of justice shot through with revenge; and memory practices in a moment of excessive rememorations. Current projects include: The Speculative Archive (with Julia Meltzer), an ongoing series of photo-works Men in the News (1991-present), and URL project Boom! (with Oliver Ressler).
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Winner of the Best International On Screen (Video) Award, 2007 Images Festival, Toronto, we will live to see these things… is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot from 2005-2006 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece -the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S. policymaker, and a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls- offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.
Featured in: The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive
