Search

[Cheetah]

Hi everyone!

Now that the new year has begun, I finally have the time to care about the forum again, and wrap up some leftovers from 2007. For those who frequently read BBF's livejournal, this is old news, but I never got around to post an official announcement:



Eurofurence invited to represent Furry Fandom at cultural festival in Paris

"arte" is a publically funded French/German television station dealing mostly with art, culture and history related themes. They have a very good reputation regarding documentaries and cultural magazines, usually not using the usual sensational yellow press type of things, but doing serious journalism most of the time. (I guess, being entirely non-commercial has its advantages.) arte comes in both a French and a German language version, and can be received pretty much all over Europe.

They air a certain magazine on a monthly basis, which is called "Tracks". Tracks portraits subcultures, artists and interesting people in general. In 2002, they did a documentation about furries. They approached Eurofurence. But back then, the bomb crater that MTV's horrible "Sex2k" had left in the Fandom was still smoking, so we politely declined. So they did a segment about the american fandom, having to to with whatever material they were able to get. To everyone's surprise, the report they did was pretty good, given that basically nobody wanted to cooperate with them. It certainly wasn't "CSI" at all.

In December 2007, the magazine "Tracks" was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Rather than doing a "best of" clipshow (like so many other mags do), they decided to go the French way and do a combined two-day festival and art exhibition. They named it "Rassemblement des Mondes Hors-Pistes", which roughly means "Assembly of the Off-Track Worlds". They planned to feature 10 of the most interesting, unusual or unique artists and subcultures they had reported about in the last 10 years.

And they considered the Furry Fandom to be one of them. And to represent the subculture of furries, they invited ... Eurofurence! We were still quite reluctant at first, not knowing what to expect. But what finally convinved us was the great amount of respect that they showed. They took all our concerns absolutely seriously, paid all expenses, fulfilles almost all of our wishes without even flinching, and, the most important part: They literally gave us full control over what we wanted to do.

We would get a "blank" exhibition booth that we were free to fill with whatever we though to represent us in the most authentic way, and a 15 minute stage event slot to present ourselves. No pre-written scripts, no assumptions. All they'd ask in return is that we would represent our culture as good as we can, and give them an interview. Heck, even the contractual affairs were unusually fair. The contract, among other things, containted a clause that arte would be shooting of us during the event, may only be used on non-commercial television. We were impressed.

So we went. BigBlueFox, Nightfox, TaniDaReal, Tioh, o'wolf and I. On location, we were later joined by our good friends and local "parisiens", AOIKitsune, Deoloup, Timduru and Yakeo.

So, behold, the Eurofurence booth at "les mondes hors pistes":



Here's our fursuiters with the arte camera crew:



The kids totally loved us:



Nightfox tending the sales table:



(Pictures courtesy of BigBlueFox)

Of course, we were not the only ones invited. There were finger-skateboard artists. A group manufacturing strange morbidly deformed plush dolls who had their intestines hanging out. A group shooting jackass-style action videos. Independant publishers specialising in subversive literature. The belleville lowriders. And some pretty hardcore stuff also, that made us seem like the most family-friendly act of the world, like extreme body modifications using piercings, implants and other stuff.

I'd like to quote BBF: "All in all, it's a very interesting exhibition. And I have to admit, furries seem to be a rather boring subculture compared to the rest of the exhibition. Imagine that: here you are in a big hall with 10 little booths and a tiny stage. In one booth, you have all those plush thingies that look gory, disgusting and absolutely hideous while on stage, three lesbians are doing an erotic show that beats lots of things I've seen so far while in another booth, someone explains people what kind of body parts can be pierced with steel and metal, parts that I haven't even heard of. At the same time, someone in the furry booth is vacuuming the carpet while someone else is decorating a table with furry literature. It's a freak show, yes, but it's the cool kind of freak show. And we're having a blast. The people like us as well."

Of course we took the liberty to film our own documentary about our presence at Les Mondes Hors Pistes, which can be downloaded directly from bigbluefox-media.com:

• Click here to download (DivX, 165MB, 55mins)

We filled our 15 minute stage slot by doing a public fursuit photoshooting, where everyone from the audience was invited to go on stage, and get photographed with the fursuiters. We then put all the pictures on our website for everyone to download. We were all surprised how little it takes to make some people REALLY REALLY happy. Have a look at the results:

• Fursuit Photoshooting

BBF also live-blogged the whole thing, so for more detailed information and more photos, feel free to check out his corresponding livejournal entries:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10

There's also an article on wikinews about the event:

• http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/News:Furries_at_French_independent_art_festival

Last not but least, here is the link to the festival's official website:

• Rassemblement des Mondes Hors-Pistes

Arte is going to air a special issue of "Tracks" about the festival in march 2008. I really hope the editors of "Tracks" show the same high degree of respect that was shown to us by the organizers of the festival. We never had so much fun presenting furry stuff to complete outsiders. Thank you, arte, for your great support. Now don't mess it up



(Edit: I just realized you can't reply in the announcement forum. So for discussion, please use this thread! Thanks.)