The Joke (fragment / total run time 8:00) - Single channel - 2014
Channel: alejandro ramírez
Date: 2015-04-06

To what extent is one conditioned by the image that is imposed on the self by external factors? What does it mean to face one’s memories, and how much are we ‘played’ by those ‘events’? 

In the Netherlands the influx of foreign workers in the 1960s to the 1990s especially had an effect on the demography of the working-class neighbourhoods in the big cities, which changed from fairly homogenous communities to complex ethnic and religious patchworks. Over time, however, these multifarious communities gathered their own characteristics and nuances. In 2007 the districts that house these communities  were labeled the most unsuccessful places in NL. The Kolenkit was one of the neighborhoods for which the politicians used the word “Leefbaarheid” in order to define living standards that the ‘Kolenkit’ was not able to meet. Plans were formulated, measures were taken.

Representation of ethic minorities has always being a powerful force modelling our perception of people and the built environment. In the ‘Kolenkit’ these representations conditioned the life of inhabitants and became a powerful tools of exclusion and control.

In the piece, researchers from the future tried to reconstruct the conditions present in the second half of the XX century in the area. They created a simulator, taking the “Piggelmee” houses as starting point . These dwellings were designed as part of a functional city, where different sections of the urban fabric were given specific roles in order to construct a whole. In the “Piggelmee” houses, eldery people with a working class background were supposed to have a comfortable retirement. Since the early days these developments failed to fulfill their purpose. Among other issues, they made evident the impossibility of the modernist idea where society could be designed, while strongly controlling the architecture and its role. Nonetheless, behind this the notion of control, however, lies the idea of decent universal quality of life for the general population. While unravelling such layered circumstances the researchers failed to reconstruct a model that described this historical moment. Confronted with their unfortunate attempt, they found shelter in fiction and memory. As they delved in personal stories they came across the liberating power of improvisation as a manner to reconstruct ones environment. As a way to connect historical narratives with life-stories,  but also as a way to deny a pre-stablished ‘scripts’ or representations imposed by external actors.
 
The joke was built around the idea in which context is understood as an scenario added in a “Green-Screen” studio. The world is staged from within using as reference a set of givens. These ‘givens’ once visible, knowable and deconstructed can be affected, rearranged and transformed. 

An empty room changes as times passes. Audio tells a story where news reports and different sounds create a narrative-collage. For moments a voice over gives impressions from the research team in the future. At one point we see a man entering the room. He walks towards a glass door, and gazes outside. After a couple of minutes he leaves. Suddenly we hear a voice shouting “cut”, the room is ‘turned off’, revealing a ‘green screen’ studio. The actor breaks character. The art director approaches him with a new outfit. In the back an assistant places a chair. The actor sits down, he seems tired. The art director walks outside of the frame, the actor calls her back as he starts telling a joke. The joke was inspired in Farhad Foroutanian’s biography: How he left his country arriving in Rotterdam at the beginning of the 1980s. As the joke comes to an end, we hear the voice shouting “action”. The actor executes some warming up exercises. The room is ‘turned on” one more time, the scene continues. Some minutes later the rooms fades out leaving the actor in an undetermined space. He seems content, he speaks on the telephone, he walks around. The cycle continues, starts all over. The sound pervades everything.          
  
The Joke was created as a collaborative effort using the life-story of the political caricaturist, actor and writer Farhad Foroutanian.