Video in the spotlight. Notes on curatorship of the San Sebastian Video Festival based on a conversation with Christine Van Assche and Anne-Marie Stein
Historiak, 11 
(2024)
Handwritten postcard from Christina Van Assche to Guadalupe Echevarría during the 1984 Montreal video meetings

A FESTIVAL WITHIN A FESTIVAL

The San Sebastian Video Festival starts with a purple letter. That was the colour of the paper chosen by Guadalupe Echevarria on 2 March 1982 to explain and submit to Luis Gasca, director of the San Sebastian Festival at that time, her proposal of “running a video exhibition within the Festival framework”, telling him that the Cannes and Venice film festivals had already road-tested the experience “with remarkable success”. [1] In addition, the competition would be a completely new type of event in Spain, where the video was starting to appear in shows but still had no event structured in the shape of a festival. The appeal to the big festivals in the so-called “A category” granted by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (a status that San Sebastian was eager to recover after its loss in 1980), the serious approach and the commitment of the proposal and its innovative nature were sufficient arguments to promote the first edition that year, which went on to run parallel to the film festival in a total of 3 editions, from 1982 to 1984.
The first letter, on purple-coloured paper, sent by Guadalupe Echevarria to Luis Gasca with the proposal of the San Sebastian Video Festival. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

Echevarria herself directed the Video Festival during that time, an event that became a fundamental gathering for understanding development of the video medium in Spain. It is “from San Sebastian onwards” that the video became considered by those in positions of political responsibility as the synonym of modernity, and myriad small and medium-sized festivals started to multiply throughout the national geography, many of them accompanied by competitions giving a definitive boost to tapes made in Spain”.[2] The Video Festival was visited by some of the most important figures who were producing their work in this format, coming both from the international scene, such as Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, and the national sphere, led by Esther Ferrer, Eugenia Balcells and Antoni Muntadas. On the other hand, the technical and installation needs of the video meant that the majority of the event was shown in the basement of San Sebastian City Council building, only a short way from the Victoria Eugenia Theatre, hub of the San Sebastian Festival, yet at a symbolic distance, given its unconventional nature as a venue for film screenings. This tension was ubiquitous in the work of Echevarria, who coexisted with a major festival such as that of San Sebastian while endeavouring to lend visibility to a medium which was at that time trying to find its own place in the audiovisual culture.

Although the director personified almost all of the management work involved in the Video Festival, thanks to our research into the San Sebastian Festival we have been able to see how, from the very beginning, Echevarria created an extensive network of collaborators among people who worked at institutions related to the medium. These communications would enable her to generate a panoramic overview of video development in other places, often leading in time to the consolidation of personal correspondence. While in their contribution to Historiak, entitled “El lenguaje del video”, Inés Calero and Sofia Monardo analysed Echevarria’s exchanges with creators, in this third instalment of our research into the Video Festival archive we explore how several of the people with whom the curator maintained a relationship had a direct influence on how the programme was put together, either by sending suggestions regarding the works to be selected or, directly, by curating programmes forming part of the event.

One of these collaborators was Dorine Mignot, curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In this letter we can see Echevarria’s request for works from the Dutch curator and those she recommends in her reply. The tone of Echevarria’s letter, despite referring to a professional matter, is quite casual. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

Two of these people were Anne-Marie Stein and Christine Van Assche. It seems an unlikely coincidence that both were related with institutions mentioned by Guadalupe herself in the already referred to purple letter responsible for the festival taking shape. Anne-Marie Stein was first of all assistant and, later, director of the Center for Media Arts at the American Center in Paris, where Guadalupe had studied video, while Christine Van Assche was responsible for video production at the Pompidou Centre, a place named in Echevarria’s letter as a reference for her idea of a festival. 

On 28 November 2022 we had the opportunity to talk to both of them, in an interview during which we asked about the challenges of video curatorship in the 80s, about their experience as collaborators of the San Sebastian Video Festival, about the sense of community generated by people related to the medium during this period and even about the relationship of this audiovisual system with the strong feminist wave taking place in the years immediately prior to the festival.

THE CHALLENGES OF A MEDIUM IN PROGRESS

Both Stein and Van Assche came across the video format largely by chance. While the former was becoming familiarised with the medium by distributing the videos of North American artists in France, the latter was attracted to video following her fascination for the installation Video Garden presented by the artist Nam June Paik at the Pompidou Centre in 1978 and thanks to a pile of videotapes she found on the shelves in the library of the same museum. 

“We were in the early 80s and nobody was taking care of the videotapes, we didn’t even have a machine to watch them on”, Van Assche told us referring to her early days with a medium which, “at that time”, “wasn’t considered to be a real art”, largely because it was coming from television. We therefore “had to look for creators who would exploit and develop their artistic qualities”. In her case, meetings such as the one she had with Paik, whom she thought was “very different from other artists I had met”, made her realise that this field was “in fact an opportunity to create something new”, whetting her desire to show the tapes in public. The challenge was, therefore, to “put video on the top shelf”, so that “video artists, who were less well known, could reach a wider audience” at an institution like the Pompidou Centre.

Thus, in only a few years, Van Assche went from being assistant curator at the Centre to earning the consideration of video production manager. This change of position, which seems to imply a rising career, was only possible thanks to the disdain displayed towards the format by her colleagues, given that the majority didn’t even “really know what video was”. As she herself tells us, those holding the top positions at the Centre were related to the arts that were considered important at that time, such as “painting, sculpture and, sometimes, cinema”, while “nobody was in charge of the performance or video art”, which led me to think “why don’t I work on these disciplines?”. Although Van Assche considered it to be “a good job, and, it goes without saying, very interesting”, she also says that she wouldn’t describe it as being power job within the structure of the Centre, finally stating that: “I was able to do this job thanks to the lack of interest shown in it by men. At that time all of the important positions were held by men, but this was not a power job”.  

Letter written by Christine Van Assche to Guadalupe Echevarria on 21 November 1983. Van Assche’s enthusiasm for Nam June Paik is obvious, since the installation that the artist would perform by satellite at the Pompidou Centre in January 1984 led her to say that this would be “the hottest month of the year”. Van Assche also mentions that Michel Jaffrenou would produce at the same centre his Electronique Video Circus, a show that the artist would take some months later to the San Sebastian Video Festival. In the last part of the letter we can see how the curator at the Pompidou fears for her job. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

Stein shared the same opinion when referring to the moment she started working with video art. She first came into contact with the medium at university, where she produced videos for the audiovisual services at the Faculty of Arts, an experience that enabled her to land a job in France as a video distributor for Electronic Arts Intermix. There she met Don Foresta, at that time Media Art programme director at the American Center in Paris, who invited her to join said institution, first of all as an assistant and later as director of the programme itself. Stein says that the move was possible thanks to the fact that Foresta “was extraordinarily supportive of women. In life you run into very few men who are, and Don was one of them”. However, the curator says that “we were really kind of on the side” at the Center itself, considered to be an experimental department and that they didn’t really have “a power position”, a claim illustrated by the fact of being a department that started “with no budget”.

Although it would later have its own budget, this initial situation also allowed them to “fly under the radar”, meaning that their work received very little control from the American Center, something that seems to be closely related to the feeling Stein attributes to that time, which consisted of “real idealism” enabling them to make works “outside of the mainstream”. The curator says that video was about the “freedom to take something and figure out what it did, not worrying whether it was art or not”. Lending little importance to this consideration, according to Stein, meant that “there was always this debate” with the “diehard cinephiles” of the moment, “who would talk about how cinema was so much better than video”. However, she says that thanks to the “explorations” being carried out, “like what Bill Viola did with the technology”, the most important thing is that we were “learning what it did” so that we could understand not only the possibilities of the video in “visual” terms, but also with respect to “time” and “space”. At the end of the day, what made Anne-Marie Stein “fall in love with the video”, as she herself told us, was that the “spirit behind that first generation of artists was deeply about democratising the tools” of the medium as a way of becoming an “accessible” version of the TV format. Therefore, in her own words, “the issue around access and equity that everybody talks about today was very much at the heart of what a lot of the artists were doing”.

In the case of both Stein and Van Assche, this desire to turn the video into an accessible medium took shape in the running of workshops, which they had seen for the first time at the Montbéliard Video Festival, where the artists spent short periods at one of the centres to present their work and give a workshop on the format. John Sanborn, Gary Hill and the already-mentioned Nam June Paik and Bill Viola were some of the artists to visit the Pompidou and the American Center and use their facilities to give these workshops. In the case of the Pompidou, the studio that they had “built mostly to shoot documentaries” could be used by artists “who couldn’t afford to pay for the professional material” available in the studio, while the American Center had “a few cameras” and an “editing machine in a closet” which made it possible to “run workshops all the time” and which was also lent out to students who had no other way of accessing the medium. This meant that both those giving the workshops and those attending them were able to benefit from the initiative, something that Stein believes had “a very interesting reach” that they were “not totally aware of” at the time”.

The first document was sent by Christine Van Assche to Guadalupe Echevarria with videos made at the Georges Pompidou Centre, probably tapes produced in the studio mentioned by Van Assche in the interview. The second document corresponds to a workshop given at the American Center by the artist Ron Baladi, and the third to an invitation sent by Anne-Marie Stein to Echevarria asking her to give the workshop with Gary Hill to take place at the same Center. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE VIDEO AND MILITANT FEMINISM

If anything stands out on casting a simple eye over the list of names mentioned until now it is their gender. Despite only having named female video curators to date, the list of artists mentioned is almost exclusively made up of men. This, far from being a norm, seems to contradict numerous theoretical approaches to this format.

Thus, “dissemination” of the video was considered to be “closely” linked to the “height” of the feminist movement in the France” of the 70s. Characteristics such as its “capacity of instant production”, “synchronised sound”, and its “easy use, which didn’t even require a long learning period”[3] or the need for a relatively “small”[4] and “streamlined”[5] “crew” made the video an “ideal medium” both for the militants themselves, who had the opportunity to “document themselves and the community” [6], and for the women who worked with it, who could “direct, edit and control the whole creation process” and, therefore “find their own voice”.[7]

Although Stein assured us that the idea of “freedom” was part of the way video was considered “at that time” like issues such as “equity and accessibility”, for her this was more of an “underlying” than an “overriding” matter, and was not therefore “the topic of conversation”. For her part, Van Assche makes a similar diagnosis when she refers to Les Insoumuses, probably the French feminist collective to lend most importance to video use. Van Assche assured us that the intention of this group was not to “develop the medium”, but to make the most of its “portable” nature to “take action” and “easily” go to other parts of the city to do their “activist” work. They therefore made “militant tapes” that were later shown in contexts other than museums and art galleries, places where the videos could spark “another type of debate”. This occurred as a natural process since, for the curator, neither the artists “were looking to enter the world of art”, because “they didn’t see themselves as artists”, nor the Center at which she worked “screened militant works”, given that at that time “what they were doing wasn’t considered to be art”. However, Van Assche maintains that, “later”, we “changed our mind about their work and how important it was to us”, although it wasn’t until well into the 21st century that their work entered the Pompidou Centre, saying that she finds it “interesting” to see “what history did to this work and attitude”.

AFFIRMING THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VIDEO

The relationship between the Video Festival and the big film festival that hosted it is one of the factors stressed by both Stein and Van Assche when recalling their experience working at and attending the festival. “The San Sebastian Festival”, says Van Assche, “was a great festival, and maybe a little traditional”, lending even more value to the proposal of the Video Festival by affirming that the latter “was not a sub medium”, a consideration apparently shared by other film festivals with a video section, among them Los Angeles and Montreal. If endeavouring to run a video section as part of a film festival was something of an anomaly at that time, “affirming that the video was an important medium and that the artists had to be taken into consideration” was quite a feat. The same impression was shared by Stein who emphasized that the video was an “emerging field” and that it was in “the middle of establishing itself as a medium”, so that the way the video was put in the middle of the San Sebastian Festival was “impressive” and “important”. She recalls that “the festival was amazing” and how things were done “differently” from the other video festivals in Europe or the United States, and that being a film festival everything seemed “more expensive” and “the benefits” they received were the same as the other festival staff, with Stein giving examples of getting “meal tickets” you could use at any “restaurant in town”.

Letters, both dated 3 August 1982, in which Luis Gasca invites Anne-Marie Stein and Christine Van Assche respectively to the first edition of the Video Festival, in which we can see how the director of the San Sebastian Festival informs them that their expenses will be covered during their stay in the city. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

Both also personify the success enjoyed by the festival in the figure of Echevarria. “Guada was an amazing force of nature” proclaims Stein. In her words, Guadalupe “was brilliant and fearless, she had a way of being interested in things and doing her work without calling attention to it, she knew exactly what could be done and how to get it done”. Van Assche, for her part, maintains that “it was fantastically organised; I don’t think anybody criticised the festival, she was great to work with”. In her case, she defines Echevarria as someone who had “the power of conviction” and was a good coordinator, given that “she put people in contact and could convince them to do things”, something she defines as essential for the festival, given that she doesn’t think “convincing the politicians was easy in San Sebastian”.

Regarding the role played by both at the Video Festival, we can make one difference. In the case of Van Assche, the commissions she received were more closely related to “thematic programmes” of “French or European” videos, always to include the “latest” works and often with the French curator receiving numerous “requests” from Echevarria.

Letter from Christine Van Assche to Guadalupe Echevarria dated 27 June 1984, in which she accepts to curate the selection of French and Belgian videos for the third edition of the Video Festival. In the attached document we can see this final selection, which was screened at the same time by both the festival and EITB, in a “world first”. We can also see the selection made by Barbara London (USA), Michael Bock (Berlin) and Kathy Hauffman. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

On the other hand, thanks to her work at the American Center, Stein had connections with the North American artists. At the Center, Stein curated seasons showing works from galleries such as The Kitchen and Buffalo, whereas for the festival her work was more closely related to the connection between museums and institutions working in video format. According to the North American curator, since they couldn’t pay “too much” given the lack of budget, what she tried to do was “coordinate the American Center programme with other programmes, to make it worth their while for artists” to come to Europe. In addition, aiming to try and help the artists, she charged no fee to distribute Electronic Arts Intermix works through the American Center itself, something for which the artists “loved me”. Far from lending importance to this gesture, Stein simply believes that it was part of the “spirit of the time”, when the overriding feeling was that of “working to build a community” around the video, which she felt could almost be considered as “a little guerrilla movement”. A network was therefore built that enabled video creators to travel to festivals and present their work in different places, something which “had a great impact on the programming”, due to sharing recommendations on the works screened at the different shows.

Letters between Anne-Marie Stein and Guadalupe Echevarria. In the first letter, dated 9 August 1982, Echevarria asks Stein for the videos she wants for the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) show. In the second, dated 20 October 1982, Stein writes to Echevarria to try and schedule the dates on which American artists such as Bill Viola or John Sanborn will be in Europe, so that they can come to Spain. She ends the letter in a highly personal tone. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

Van Assche, for her part, thought it was “very interesting” to have “a small group of people who met at festivals”. For her, being able to “meet for a week together with no obligations” represented an opportunity “to discover new artists, but also to talk to other curators, to participate, to discuss with critics”, an experience that brought them together and led them to share “a common goal”.

Correspondence between Guadalupe Echevarria and Barbara London, curator of the video collection at the MoMA in New York, after having met her at Charleroi Festival. In the first letter, Echevarria invites the North American to participate as a jury member and to give an example of work at the MoMA at the 2nd edition of the Video Festival, saying that “it is nice and important that we know other people and interchange experiences and work”. In this letter, as well as asking her for her opinion on North American videos and on the situation of festivals, we can also see how the name of Christine Van Assche appears as Echevarria’s colleague in the prospection for videotapes. In the next letter, the two exchange references of artists and ideas for their corresponding exhibition locations. In the letters we can also see other habitual names in the archive, such as the already mentioned Dorine Mignot or the video theorist Anne-Marie Duguet. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

CONCLUSIONS

According to both Stein and Van Assche, the Video Festival appears to have been in tune with the challenges of the medium in the early 80s. Still considered at that time to be a sub format within the audiovisual panorama, placing it successfully alongside the cinema and attracting some of the most outstanding figures who worked with it seemed to be a good strategy for prompting a change in the way it was received by the audience. Although our work with the San Sebastian Festival Archive reveals no indication of unanimity with respect to this reception, what we have found is a number of press articles expressing enthusiasm for the experience of the video show. This is the case of the Diario Vasco, which at the first edition refers to a “positive reception” of the show, highlighting that “while the intentions and purposes harboured by this first festival are myriad, the overriding idea is that people take the video seriously as a self-standing and self-sufficient means of communication, and that they no longer see it as a household appliance along the lines of an electronic toy”; or Teleradio, which referred to it as “the highlight of San Sebastian”, saying that it had succeeded in awakening “great curiosity in the audience towards the small screen and its alternatives”.

Press clippings showing the articles published by El Diario Vasco (left) and Teleradio (right) quoted in the text. Note how the El Diario Vasco article highlights as outstanding names at the first edition of the Video Festival those of Anne-Marie Stein and Christine Van Assche. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

As pointed out by Van Assche in the interview, to proceed with the festival they needed the public institutions. Although Van Assche stresses Echevarria’s ability to convince the politicians in order to obtain their backing, it is possible that this negotiation may have been easier than we think, given that, as observed by Pablo Maraví, “in the Basque Country the weight of the public institutions in developing the video network was a fundamental factor that largely supported its activity and development throughout the eighties.” At this time, continues Maraví, the “cultural policy” in Spain “was not devoid of institutional – and institutionalising political interests” which in the case of the video “conditioned a unitary and homogeneous version” of the medium. 

As told to us by Stein and Van Assche, at that time their vision of the video did not have the same potential to change reality as it was later clearly shown to possess by the theory on format. This situation was not exclusively the fault of the curators or of the institutions for which they worked, given that, as they confirmed to us, the militant groups were searching for places other than the museums, preferring to take their work to a different kind of space. However, our work at the archive reveals that the Video Festival did not in the majority of cases involve this use of the medium, programming works legitimised by having shown at big museums or cultural centres such as those that employed Stein and Van Assche. Thus, perhaps one of the factors that enabled the Festival to exist was that its natural selection fell into place with the institutional idea of what the video should be, leaving aside those conceptions of the medium that generated more obvious discord in society.

However, affirming that the Video Festival was an experience simply orchestrated by the institutions would be to offer a reductionist point of view. If anything is obvious after our work with the Video Festival archive and our interview is that Echevarria was largely responsible for enabling the show to go on. When referring to the Echevarria, Stein maintains that, today, she is not “sure” that she “totally understood and appreciated the vastness of her knowledge at the time”. This said, the curator maintains that she also feels the same when thinking about the work of the other people involved in video, given that in her case she considered it to be “more of a day-to-day job” than something “conceptual”. Here, perhaps, is the key to understanding how the festival was able to go ahead and, generally speaking, the high spirits enjoyed by the medium in the early 80s, as mentioned by Santos Zunzunegui in his conversation with Claudia Sánchez and Elena Gosálbez in Historiak.

The spirit of collaboration between those related to the video world that characterised this period is determinant in understanding the decisions behind its curatorship and exhibition and making it possible to hold the shows, in many cases with the help of other colleagues dedicated to the format. This wasn’t a field that brought prestige and power, meaning that those who approached it did so to learn and to understand the medium, with their thoughts on its potential applications. Moreover, this “lack of importance” also enabled women to attain positions which in other arts, a priori more significant, had been monopolised by men. We must not ignore the importance of the fact that the longest letters written by the festival director and which we have found in the archive were, precisely, addressed to other women. Over and above her great ability to organise and her working vision, Echevarria’s many skills included the understanding that belonging to this community with a passion for video enriched her knowledge, and that her greatest strength lay in the fact that the people in her extensive network of colleagues could refer to her, simply, as “Guada”.

Postcard sent to “Guada” by Dorine Mignot after the 2nd edition of the Video Festival, an experience she defines with a poem “The week was / full of sun / full of night / full of eating / full of talking / full of video”. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

[1] Guadalupe Echevarria, letter to Luis Gasca. 2 March 1982. San Sebastian Festival Archive.

[2] Manuel Palacio, “Un acercamiento al vídeo de creación en España”, 8 February 2023 http://www.quadernsdigitals.net/datos_web/hemeroteca/r_32/nr_339/a_4327/4327.html

[3] Anne-Marie Duguet, “La vidéo des femmes,” in Vidéo, la mémoire au poing (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 89-111

[4] Murray, Ros and Arantza Santesteban, “Nire Amaren Etxea: Tracing feminist genealogies in La Marche des femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères espagnoles”. Zine: cuadernos de investigación cinematográfica n.º2, Otoño 2021: 8,  https://www.zine-eskola.eus/documentos/files/zine02-es-zdjnqx.pdf.

[5] Duguet, “La vidéo des femmes,” 89-111

[6] Murray and Santesteban, “Nire Amaren Etxea: Tracing feminist genealogies in La Marche des femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères espagnoles”, 8.

[7] Duguet, “La vidéo des femmes,” 89-111