Video Resistance – Works by Oliver Ressler

"Venezuela From Below" and "The Fittest Survive"

Discussions about the current situation in Venezuela will follow, stimulated by Hands Off Venezuela members Ann Robertson and Gabriel Cabrera. Ann is a professor of philosophy at SFSU and Gabriel is a student at the New College.

Oliver Ressler is an artist doing projects on various socio-political themes. Since 1994 he has been concerned with theme specific exhibitions, projects in public space, and videos on issues of racism, migration, genetic engineering, economics, forms of resistance and social alternatives. The films "Venezuela from Below" and "5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela" made with political analyst Dario Azzellini, will be screened on consecutive evenings, with his most recent video "The Fittest Survive", accompanying "Venezuela from Below" on the first night. Discussions will follow.

*Venezuela From Below*
*Video – 2004 – 67 min.*
*Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler*

In the film "Venezuela from Below," the true actors in the social process are able to speak. They are the people of the grassroots and they speak about what they did and what they are doing, how they feel about the Bolivarian process, about their expectations and ideas. They see themselves as part of the process that is underway, but also problematize numerous points. The search for a social and economic model beyond neo-liberalism is no easy terrain; there are currently no successful, tested alternatives. The protagonists in the Bolivarian process have, however, set upon a path from which there is no return.

*The Fittest Survive*
*Video – 2006 – 23 min.*
* Oliver Ressler*

The video "The Fittest Survive" is based on filming the five-day course "Surviving Hostile Regions" done in January 2006 in Wales, Great Britain by the AKE Group. The course instructors are British ex-special force soldiers. The participants are businessmen who are preparing for business in Iraq and other dangerous regions, government officials and mainstream journalists who, with their dishonest discourse of democracy and human rights, help to legitimise and secure the ideology of market-economics expansion.

The video, primarily filmed by hand camera, follows the survival-course participants as they experience the staged reality of live shell bombardments, an assault by armed guerrillas, the rescue of accident victims, and moving through mine fields. Above this training camp in Wales, low-flying British fighter planes hold manoeuvres and foreshadow the real war theatres in which the class participants will soon be.

For more information on Oliver Ressler's work visit http://www.ressler.at/