IsayUsaySsay

Name   : Chris Westendorp
Time   : 15:00 - 16:00 (Paradiso Hall)
Subject: Trans Local Culture
Date   : Sunday 21 January 1996

The meeting, moderated by Michael Polman, brought together four people from three countries, India, Korea and Brasil, to tell about the ways they use video in their work in local communities.

Sharad Agarwal and Satuajit Sarkar from India told about their organisation Video Root, involved in the empowerment of people. They give fifteen-day workshops on video making to those with no access to any medium at all, as for instance young girls. The main aim of Video Root is to give the trainees confidence. Satuajit told about a training to young girls. The confidence of the girls grew quickly as they started to use video, because they had to think about the whole process of making a product. Because they had to answer questions about what they wanted to tell, why and to whom they wanted to tell something, the girls became aware of the fact that they had a story to tell. Satuajit felt that by making video's, the confidence of the girls grew faster than with any other proces of empowering. "What development workers took years to achieve, happens with the help of video in only fifteen days."

The Korean guest, Myong Joon Kim, told about his organisation, the Labour News Production. The aim of this organisation is the same as that of Video Root, but Labour News Production is also concerned with creating awareness about the distortion by mainstream media. By giving people the oppertunity to make a video, they could experience how easy it is to distort and how a different view on a certain subject makes a completely different video. In Korea it is nowadays prohibited to get on cable TV for any other than the mainstream media. The Labour News Production is as such an illegal organisation. The quick growth of the use of the Internet in Korea can facilitate the access to distribution channels for many people in Korea and can thus become very important in the near future. Kim hopes that the Internet makes people who normally consume media, aware of the fact that they can also make and distribute content themselves.

The Brasil Popular Video Association, ABVP, goes into towns with a van with a big video screen and shows video's to the villagers. Noni Carvalho felt that the most important aspect of the broadcastings is the fact that people get together on the street and have a party there. She stresses that you need to speak the language of entertainment or people will simply zap away - or in the case of ABVP go to th enearest pub and drink beer.

All four people emphasised the importance of video as a tool of empowerment. All were enthousiatic about the opportunities it provides for self-expression and growth. The ideas concerning the importance of the internet were less identical. In Korea the internet can become of great importance in the near future. In India it is not a big issue yet. Agarwal: "Forget about web-sites for the moment. But in India things happen in a strange way. Things can change completely in two years time." During the final debate following this presentation Satyajit Sarkar expressed his dedication to use video for the empowerment of ordinary people in such a large country as India by posing us a question: "We have 900 million people living in India. Now the government has started a project to give at least half of the population an identitycard. To get this done some fiftythousand(!) camcorders and milllions of tapes are used to capture passport photo's. If anyone has ideas for the second use of these camera's and tapes, please let me know." (You can contact Satyajit Sarkar and Sharad Agarwal at satya@unv.ernet.in)

Chris Westendorp