22.10 > 31.10.2020 | Common Ground Project – Visions Of Inside @ Biennial of the Moving Image

The Common Ground Project (Vision of Inside), directed by Kika Nicolela (BR / BE),  will be presented at the Biennial of the Moving Image (BIM), an artistic event that since 2012 celebrates video art and experimental cinema in the city of Buenos Areas. It is a CONTINENTE project produced by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. It is a free event, a polyhedral space for audiovisual expression, a prism that refracts and decomposes the multiple languages of the moving image. It is a place for the exhibition and the projection of the main works of video art and experimental cinema that characterize our contemporaneity and, at the same time, it is a meeting and training space for those who love the audiovisual arts. This year the Biennial of the Moving Image reaches its fifth edition that will take place virtually.

Visions Of Inside E is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project (CGP). The CGP was initiated by Kika Nicolela in April 2020 in reaction to the covid-19 crisis. It promotes the creation of a shared database of videos, sounds and texts by worldwide artists, reflecting on the multiple issues raised by the crisis and the lockdown. Above all, the Common Ground Project’s goal is to collectively use creation as means of communion and resistance. The CGP is supported by Transcultures and European Pepinieres of Création.

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.