Real Stories Gallery would like to thank The Twelves for sharing with us their Video Art.  Your fifteen minute piece takes us on a journey and compels us to witness the sand, leaves and sadness encircling the main character’s life.  A young boy whose life should not have been filled with so much despair and hurt.  A young boy who emerges from the senseless brutality reflecting on who he is and exploring who he would like to be.  Your film reminds us to look around and notice the expressions carried on the faces of boys we pass in the street, on the bus, in villages, towns and cities.  What are they saying. What are they experiencing, as a result of our hesitancy and silence.  Once the professional musicians have created a collaborative music-score to merge with your visual imagery, a transformation will occur.  The creative process will chameleon your Video Art piece into  another powerful expression. For now, the power of your film lies in the silences that fill the poetic spaces composed by your imaginations and empathy, and so doing feeds your audiences' imaginations and empathy.  We will watch, and learn, with huge interest, the evolution of your film in this artists' online workshop.

 

"SAND.  LEAVES.  SADNESS" BY THE TWELVES (COMING SOON)

 

Tim Barrus (Founder, Cinémathèque Films; Director, Show Me Your Life)

The lions of Delos are always singing songs to me.

A bright tin moon to strike us down. Sparing us. Sustaining their ancient feline glare with a long instant of still composure.

Take one summer of event horizons.

When I first started writing this piece, I just let all the boring defenses down; go right into the stuff crawling underneath my skin.

I let it sit for about an hour. Then back to it to see if I really need to do what it was I did. I should let it sit for about a year. But this is the Internet. Hopefully, the abusive critics and stalkers (we call them "the haters") won’t have arrived. They can be very quick to pounce, the haters. The haters are all still there. They often send us their obscenities using their pseudonym: ANONYMOUS.  Cowards who just can’t tear their eyes away from from anything I do or write or say and if nothing grabs them, they just make something up.

Why give the people on the Internet who hate my guts more ammunition to hate my guts. Enough. Some stuff has to just stay with me.

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The twelves are the ones most affected by the haters. The twelves would go to war. Flamethrowers. Atomic weapons. They had to put a fight scene in their video. Show Me Your life affects them some. Often, the art they come up with has to be censored. Unfortunately, by me, and I do not resemble in any way, the Smithsonian. But artists complain. It’s just easier to censor the kid than it is to shut up the hater. What is amazing is that, often, too often, the hater turns out to be another writer, or an artist themselves. I would like to thank these vigilant people for pointing out the moral transgressions of twelve-year-old boys who have a few issues, too.

Watching a group of twelve-year-olds make this video was informative.

I love the twelves because no one and nothing can be as dismal or as excited. Twelve can be kinda bipolar.  Usually, the kid grows out of it. There’s no hiding place to being twelve even if you are yourself caught between the morbid and the mystical, the musical, and the misbehaved.

HIV usually means puberty can be delayed.

Try telling a twelve-year-old this.

The entire universe has conspired against them. No black hole can suck them in. The twelve-year-old will not go silently, tastefully into the breach.

What do you MEAN, puberty will be delayed.

I shrug. Blame god. Not me. But puberty will be delayed.

The video you see here only works because after three weeks of arguing over images, they decided to throw the images of the Simpsons out.

It wasn’t working.

They came crawling on their pubescent knees to me for advice.

My response: who are the Simpsons.

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Their world of mash and trash is always one of icons and they are always changing. Lions and cartoons.

The Internet is a cartoon. They do not remember life before the Internet.

They could always be stopped from mashing video. The error of their ways could be pointed out to them. You and whose army of Miss Manners is going to shake their moral fingers at them. The idea of it is ludicrous. Shaking fingers has such dramatic impact.

They can, however, be impressed that the need for change is eminent. They will claim that they will not change. Their denials will be vociferous.

They change daily. Hourly. 

The twelves expect almost nothing to NOT change. Change is everything. They pretend they keep up.

Their video is to be scored in NYC. By real musicians.

They have never made a video before that had almost no audio.

There is a piece of music in the beginning. I could not talk them out of it.

Because it’s about the message. Not the messenger. “It’s not about us,” they insist. Maybe it is only about them to me. Supposedly I made them up. Go ahead, ask a hater. Haters know every intimate detail to a life. Any life. All lives must conform. Or face the hater’s wrath. Birth certificates. Death certificates. All passports are on record at Wikipedia.

What is the Internet, like twelve?

I push them. I push them and I push them. That is quite different from pushing them into a place they will not go.

There’s the music they could not be talked out of. And then there’s some audio around the middle. I am hoping the musicians can work around it. I apologize. I cannot MAKE the boys conform. The boxes just won’t fit.

I confess. I did not fight the boys. Last week, I made them remove the hanging body of a dead boy with erection photo. Save the fighting for the big fights.   

Are there families where everything and everyone just works out well in the end. What end. What beginning.

The twelves were all born with HIV.

They did nothing to get it. Get it.

They want to show us their world. We do not always want to see it. If we can get rid of the photograph, then no one is really hanging themselves while they masturbate.

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I cherry-picked the twelves. They are from an entirely different generation than anything any of us know because we do not know them. We cannot know their world. We only rent it.

We can only pretend to. Know them. They do not know a world without HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS is their world. Does the fact that they did nothing to GET the virus make the virus any different. Not by a single chromosome.

Every now and then I will catch them sitting there in silence and looking (glaring) at the world. It is not one they built. They only live there.

We built it. From various old foundations. I am always extremely amused when Brits dig up anything in the UK. Goodness, gracious; what do they find. Rome.  

Everything you do matters. No one sends you a merit badge at the end. 

I never know what will. Stick. 

Maybe the music. 

They regard me ominously. “

You’re different,” they say. “You know that.”

But I am not. Different. 

I am only trying to hold it all together. So it does not dissolve beneath us. 

They are only twelve and everything they know dissolves beneath their feet.

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Summers of life and death. Crammed into event horizons more real than the Aegean sea on a clear cold day at noon. 

The lions of Delos are always singing songs to me. A bright tin moon to strike us down. 

The lions would spare no one if they were alive.

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Cinémathèque Films

Tim Barrus Founded Cinémathèque Films; a residential 24/7 art program that serves as a safe house protection for adolescent boys with HIV/AIDS, who are also at risk for psychological, neurological, and developmental disabilities due to sexual abuse, gang violence, addiction, human trafficking, and cyclical prostitution. The boys are reached and educated through painting, music, photography, video, film, dance, poetry, mentoring, and intensive counseling. The idea of a safe house is fundamentally based on the dynamics of protection from what brought them here. Witnesses of a time and of a place. While the boys are very connected to the outside world through the interactive use of technology, their contact with that world is monitored in such as way as to prevent contact and/or relationships with abusers, pedophiles, and people from their past who would harm them.

The boys are encouraged to utilize such features as banning within the context of social networks. Communications with the boys that are deemed as sexual invites will be banned immediately. Stalking, either physical or electronic, will not be tolerated and is specifically prohibited by EU law. Stalking is defined by us as seeking contact with boys who have either banned people or have requested that they be left alone. Any subsequent attempt to either arrange to physically meet a boy or continue electronic communication is reported to EU authorities. Attempts to communicate with the boys that involve asking them questions about their personal lives, histories, relationships, legal status, physical whereabouts, private email addresses, or sexual preferences are regarded as stalking and will be dealt with accordingly.

We are a SAFE environment where boys at risk learn to empower themselves through the self-actualization and educational modalities of art.

Arts Education: Students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Representations and facsimiles posted here are presented as teaching tools and instruments employed to instruct students in the techniques and application of mixed media art and collage. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows art-teaching entities the fair use of such materials in classroom and teaching-research applications. 

 

SHOW ME YOUR LIFE

Show Me Your Life is a collaborative initiative with Cinemateque Films; an online international human rights video art workshop for children and adolescents whose lives are affected by HIV /AIDS. Children (those under 18 years old) are particularly susceptible to HIV/AIDS, due to the ease in which their bodies tear and legion during sexual intercourse, and because of their vulnerable developing immune systems. The environments in which they live and survive exacerbate their fight against the retrovirus and  make treating opportunistic infections far more difficult.  The majority of children in the world today live what is commonly termed ‘at risk’ lives, due to poverty & malnutrition, conflicts & refugee status, physical & psychological abuse, trafficking & intergenerational sexual abuse, discrimination & lack of education, homelessness & vastly inadequate or zero healthcare.  Real Stories Gallery believes these children are 'typical' children placed 'at risk' due to the cultural and social perceptions and behaviours of adults.  Show Me Your Life gives small video cameras to children and through the guidance of online peer mentoring program, invites each child to create art videos that express their lives and inner experiences.  The children's work speaks to imagination and empathy, and compels us to feel.  By harnessing humanities' common sense and compassion, and our enormous capacity as human beings to imagine and creatively effect change, we will together redress this huge wrong doing: "It's all about choices; standing up for the Rights of the Child and assisting our neighbours who are struggling to stand up." Contact: http://tim@showmeyourlife.org

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Charter of the United Nations, 1948), an international law reinforcement of the Nuremberg Trial Judgments, has been ratified by 192 Countries.  The Declaration upholds the rights of one nation to intervene in the affairs of another if said nation is abusing its citizens, and arose out of a 1939–1945 World War II Atlantic environment of extreme split between "haves" and "have nots."

Only 2 of the 192 UN Member Countries have NOT ratified The Convention on the Rights of the Child (20 November 1989):  The United States of America and Somalia.

Only 137 of the 192 UN Member Countries have ratified The Convention’s Optional Protocol: The Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.

Only 132 of the 192 UN Member Countries have ratified The Convention’s Optional Protocol: The Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.