by ANNE MARIE MARKO

At the tender age of three, Montreal media arts collective Volatile Works have already seen their films screened at 140 festivals in 28 countries and received six awards. Not too shabby for such relative newbies. But who are these prolific DIY go-getters?

“Basically,” explains Volatile’s Tamara Vukov, “we’re five friends who were doing our own films and media/art work, and, because so many artists work in an isolated or hyper-competitive way, we wanted to try something different.” Vukov says the initial idea to start up Volatile Works was conceived over beer at a Mile-End bar the night before she left for Europe. While overseas, she encountered a “more collective ethic in the art and political culture,” which inspired her and confirmed for her that Volatile Works was a viable enterprise.

“We all have different genres and styles that we work in,” Vukov explains. “I do documentary and experimental stuff, Glenn [Gear] does animation, Allan [Brown] does this really quirky surrealist stuff and Mario [DeGiglio-Bellemare] expresses himself most often through the horror genre. We’re embracing different ways of trying to get our work out there so it communicates with a variety of audiences.”

Vukov says that, for 2007, Volatile Works projects include a feature-length documentary on life in post-war Serbia, an animation piece based on settler-Inuit relations in Labrador, as well as films on heroin addiction and a troupe of circus freaks. “We want to do work that’s politically and socially engaged but still retains a sense of fun,” she notes.

Come March, the group will be attending a retrospective screening of their films at Tank, an arts centre in New York City, as well as premiering their most recent collective work, A Volatile Exquisite Corpse at an as-yet unconfirmed venue. “For that particular project,” says Vukov, “we each produced one minute of film revolving around the theme of the body and passed on the last three seconds to the next person to take from there. It promises to be very interesting.” And if the eclectic nature of their previous efforts is anything to go by, she’s dead on with that point.