21.10 > 11.11.2020 | Common Ground Project vol. 1 @ Now&After festival 2020

The Common Ground Project vol. 1, directed by Kika Nicolela (BR / BE), will be presented at the international video art festival “Now & After” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). Annual event in Moscow, organized by the Media Art Center “Now & After” which pursues activities in the field of culture, development of national interregional and international communications in the field of media arts.

The project is created by the Belgium based Brazilian artist/curator Kika Nicolela. Volume 1 combines a selection of video and sound pieces from40 artists, most of them made specially for the project. Nicolela takes a role in-between programmer and artist – while respecting the original pieces, she creates transitions and combinations between pieces, fusing for example certain sound and video works. Without credits, the pieces flow one after another, weaving a strange but captivating narrative, that reflects well the multiplicity of thoughts, sensations and paradoxes prompted by this world crisis.

Artists : Adrianne Little (US) | Aline Yasmin & Alex Cepile (BE) | Anna Berndtson (DE) | Carlosmagno Rodrigues (BR) | Christophe Litou (FR) | Craca (BR) | Davi Cavalcante (BR) | Fumiharu Sato & Hiroko Haraguchi (JP) | Gauthier Keyaerts (BE) | Gerard Chauvin (FR) | Gustavo Marcasse v(BR) | Isa Belle + Paradise Now (BE) | Ivelina Ivanova (BG) | Jan Kather (US) | John Sanborn (US) | Jorge Lozano (CAN) | Liliana Velez (CO) | Luana Lacerda (BR) | Marcia Beatriz Granero (BR) | Marina Fomenko (RU) | Mike Hoolboom (CAN) | Nia Pushkarova (BG) | Nung-Hsin Hu (US) | Philippe Boisnard (FR) | Phyllis Baldino (US) | Rejani Cantoni + Mirella Brandi + Muep Etmo (BR) | Samuel Bester (FR) | Sara Não Tem Nome (BR) | Simon Dumas (CN) | Simon Guiochet (FR) | Sonia Guggisberg (BR) | Susana Lopez (ES) | Ulf Kristiansen (NO).

The Common Ground Project

The Common Ground project was initiated by Brazilian artist/curator (based in Belgium) Kika Nicolela during confinement, as part of the NoLA – No Lockdown Art (# NoLA2020) initiative launched in spring 2020 by Transcultures et les European Pepinieres of Creation.

It’s the beginning of a new decade, and the human species faces an invisible, faceless,brainless yet highly efficient enemy: a virus that menaces our lives and our way of life.The tendency is to attempt to return to “normality” as quickly as possible, and to forget this period. Alternatively, we see the COVID-19 crisis and all that it triggered,asan opportunity to reflect on some essential political, economic, ethical and metaphysical questions.

The Common Ground Project proposes a creation of a growing database, with the collaboration of artists around the world, sharing video, sound and/or text based pieces. The main immediate goal is to collect a large and varied snapshot of the impact of this crisis from various corners of the planet, to realize how people are coping with the lockdown and the post-lockdown, but above all, how we can use this crisis as an opportunity to reshape the world.

Kika Nicolela

Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator, living between Brussels and São Paulo. Having Graduated in Film and Video at the University of São Paulo, Nicolela has also completed a Master of Fine Arts, at the Zurich University of the Arts. Kika Nicolela is interested in the encounter with the other, mediated by the camera – mostly, the video camera. The camera is a tool for her, to investigate representation and self-representation, identity and otherness, portrait and self-portrait, and create a space of fluctuation between these poles.

She is interested in making videos and video-installations that allow the spectator to have a larger role in the production of meaning; that is, works in which the meaning is reached through the constant negotiation between the spectator and the elements – often multiple and ambiguous. This ambivalence in the moving image is what she is searching for: pieces that produce a heightened experience in the very ambiguity of our own subjectivity, and of the real.