An overcrowded circular hall: people who have been unable to get seats are milling around the makeshift bar. Others, unable to get in, stand outside lobbying the doorman: "Go on, can't you let me in? No sorry, we're completely full". It's an average evening at Lost & Found. While the audience is still wandering about, trying to get a drink, a seat or a place to stand, a video has been projected on the screen at the 'upper end' of the hall. The video now playing is a welcoming leader. Every evening organized by Lost & Found is heralded in this way. Various graphic designers take turns to make both the invitations and the leaders for the monthly programmes. The organizers of Lost & Found describe its activities as evenings for stray sounds and images. It's a poetic formulation, and in its very vagueness it describes precisely the idea behind Lost & Found. All kinds of sounds and images, deriving from different sources, are chosen by an editorial team made up largely of artists for a show that lasts a full evening. The hypno-videos of the artist Matt Mulligan are shown alongside episodes from the German television programme 'Wetten Das'— in which the competitors try to make a clay vase on the hubcaps of moving cars. Old footage of the Amsterdam (cultural) squat scene in the seventies alternates with a stand-up performance by actress Roos Ouwehand — the editors have put together a little background film for the occasion. The relationship between these various expressions of high and low culture is sometimes hard to locate. The evenings are seldom, if ever, built around a particular theme. The rotating teams of editors follow their own interests when putting a programme together, and they make generous allowance for unexpected happenings. Lost & Found have arranged a special programme for the closing night of the World Wide Video Festival which is to take place at an unusual location. The Planetarium at Artis offers space for an extensive collection of films, videos, slide shows, CD-Roms, websites and sound works, accompanied by the experimental music of two deejays. This time the programme is designed around a particular theme. The selected material focuses on the aura and function of the Planetarium and alternates with the programme that is normally shown there. Under the awe-inspiring display of the constellations on the superb domed ceiling of the circular building three different educational programmes — for children, teenagers and adults— will be shown during the day. One of these will be chosen for inclusion in the Lost & Found programme. The sounds that issue from the darkness once the audience is seated are produced by the editors. The synthesized sounds reproduce the 'space' atmosphere of the early sixties. A sf-film by Russian Andrei Ujica occupies an important spot in the evening's programme. This film is constructed from found footage featuring original shots of space. We also see technical material showing F16 pilots in training: the men are in a gravity simulator and the camera records the changing expressions on their faces. Historical material such as the Dutch cinema newsreels and spectacular shots of the explosion of a space shuttle is shown along with clips from sf-films; some well known, others less so. The radio ham amateur Chris van de Berg will be giving a talk about his collections of sound recordings from the MIR space station. With the aid of the powerful aerial at his flat in Tilburg, he manages to receive MIR once a month for five minutes. The recordings are in Russian which he translates into Dutch. Van de Berg's lecture is accompanied by a slide presentation, showing shots of his flat with its aerial. Again, this is a visual contribution from the editors. The latter is perhaps the most important principle behind Lost & Found: because the programme is assembled by a panel of artists the combination of varied sounds and images can also be regarded as a work in its own right.
– Nathalie Zonnenberg |
Lost & Found are: Matthijs de Bruijne, Menno Grootveld, Saskia Janssen, Arnout Killian and Jan Rothuizen
Living and working in Amsterdam (Nederland)
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