Transcultures et les European Pepinieres of Creation presents for this 2021 edition of the Ibrida festival a selection of videos produced as part of their No Lockdown Art project that they initiated during the first global containment linked to Covid-19 (Spring 2020) aimed at support contemporary artistic projects likely to be disseminated online. Several videos have been produced by international visual, sound, multimedia artists… integrating sound and experimental dimensions in creations of various aesthetics, which escape traditional classifications and offer a poetic and alternative look on our mutant world. The artist Kika Nicolela will also present a selection of her videos.
Ibrida is a festival of intermedial arts which started in 2015 for the purpose of investigating and divulging the most recent productions and research carried on in the field of experimental audiovisual (video art, found footage, metacinema, 2D and 3D animation, etc.). The festival naturally includes performance art and electronic music. Ibrida thrives on the seeds planted by Re/Azione (our first event). In 2016 the duration was extended and more venues in the town of Forlì were added to the first one, the Candle Factory, as the festival was very well received by the audience and the professionals.
“The society of showbusiness won. Reality has been ultimately replaced by a mock-up. It’s no use fighting. The virtual facade of simulation has conquered our lives and the objects decorating them. There’s nothing left for us to do but express our disenchantment and our disillusionment by forcing the codes and the clichés available to create works which express a radical and almost desperate nihilism or an ironic warning to let everybody know that people are not being manipulated anymore, instead they are active protagonists of the manipulation. Recent softwares allow all kinds of semantic shuffle as far as language and genres are concerned, thus liberating the artistic vision from every possible categorization. While the Internet has become a shared technological subconscious, the artist still owns the prerogative of inventing new worlds, finding visionary alternatives or make a parody of the existing by focusing on perceptions and human relationships as basic elements of the experience.”
Ibrida Festival is curated by Vertov Project. Its artistic directors are Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo operating with the contribution of Piero Deggiovanni critical awareness.
Philippe Franck - Presentation ofTranscultures, des Pépinières Européennes
For the Ibrida festival, Philippe Franck presents the transversal, relational, contextual and prospective approach of Transcultures (Belgium) as well as that of the network of European Pepinières of Creation (whose coordination is based in Paris) which he also directs and develops in a internationalist spirit.
With these two associated structures, he initiated, in 2020, the ‘No Lockdown Art’ project in order to support contemporary and intermedia creation during the virus lockdown and to offer it an online distribution platform, but also to encourage, more broadly, collaborations between partners and artists as well as the links between creation and reflection. In this perspective, he will comment on the ‘No Lockdown Video’ selection offered to Ibrida, favoring a poetic aspect and the intimate link between moving images and sound flows.
No Lockdown Sonopoetics selection
Dynamic links between poetic visions (both literary and visual), sounds and moving images
Silent Noise, Tamara Lai, BE, 2020, 5’29’’
“What flavors here?” What scents now … “Nostalgia for the days before … Carelessness, freedom of movement, human warmth, nature … which the Coronavirus does not block deprives us cruelly.
This new video-poem by Tamara Laï whose images were filmed in various places and countries (Belgium, China, Scotland, Italy, Netherlands) was finalized in residency at home in Liège in the lockdown period.
Direction, writing, image and sound editing : Tamara Laï – Musique : Caroline Boë
Production : Thalamus Prod avec le soutien de Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Panacée - Maja Jantar, PL-NL, 2021, 10'56''
Panacée/pænəˈsiːə/ du latin panacēa, du grec ancien πανάκεια (panákeia), de πανακής (panakḗs, “tout-guérison”), de πᾶν (pân, “tout”) (équivalent à l’anglais pan-) + ἄκος (ákos , “guérir”). Panacea est une vision, celle de la guérison à travers les traditions – devenir soleil – sur les noms du pissenlit. Panacea est un rituel de passage, une recherche d’un lieu d’appartenance à travers une connexion avec des systèmes écologiques.
Avec le soutien de Transcultures et des Pépinières européennes de Création
No Lockdown Drift, Pastoral, BE/FR, 2020, 5’09’’
Produced via connected exchanges during the first Covid-19 lockdown in Spring 2020 by the Pastoral post pop duet, Lockdown Drift captures the expectation, the floating sensation but also the domestic reverie, the imaginary transfiguration and a form of sweet melancholy.
The images and sounds that dialogue between the residences (both in Wallonia-Belgium) of the protagonists (Huy for Christophe Bailleau and Mons for Philippe Franck) all come from the interior spaces and their close surroundings.
An invitation to cherish the living in these different forms (human, animal, mineral, celestial …) and its power-hope of creative metamorphosis.
Production : Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
No Lockdown Art Fluxabilities selection
Various visual and sound flows in motion, digital / organic flow, audiovisual mutabilities
After Covid_19, Philippe Boisnard, FR, 2020, 7’
After Covid_19 is part of the research on disaster landscapes carried out by Philippe Boisnard in recent years. This creation, achieved during the first global confinement, was made live from pure-data (graphic programming software for musical and multimedia creation in real time) in both sound and image.
This landscape and its evolution attempts to aesthetically show the emergence of the vertigo of the epidemic. Like a metaphorical vision, its crescendo is that of the psychic panic of man in the face of the surge of the pandemic.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation
Flux & Densités, Alain Wergifosse, BE, 2020, 5’
In a set of prisms, filters and mirrors, Alain Wergifosse offers some fragments of opto-mechanical treatments on pure light and on some digital images put into video feedback.
These images and sounds come from a multi-channel video installation project in work in progress for the Vice Versa 2020-21 residency/exchange between Transcultures (BE) and La Chambre Blanche (QBC).
Production : Transcultures, La Chambre Blanche, European Pepinieres of Creation
i-REAL - Monde_04_ALICE - Marc Veyrat, FR, 2021, 3’05
This World 04 in VR, included in the artwork XR i-REAL, imagined, programmed by Jonathan Juste and whose soundtrack is signed Paradise Now, is “architextured“ (-! Henri Lefebvre !-) around the totality of the words used in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, famous novel published by Lewis Carroll in 1865.
Inside this Obscure World, “ob-scene” of the text (-! Georges Bataille !-), the words ®-CONSTITUTE as we progress walls of blinding texts/images progressively revealing passages, “Entre-eSPACES” (-! Carole Brandon !-) through which we can progress… The electro-rythmic-organic music of Paradise Now (BE/FR) roams the floating walls of this Lettrist maze as if looking for a mutant prey.
Visions of inside (Common Ground Project) – Kika Nicolela, BR, 2020, 8’51
Visions of inside is the first video made using the database of the Common Ground Project 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.
Kika Nicolela edited videos, sounds and texts by
Aline Yasmin & Alex Cepile, Anna Berndtson & Yingmei Duan, Anthony Siarkiewicz, Carlos Landaeta, Carlosmagno Rodrigues, Cecilia Dougherty, Christophe Litou, CRACA, Daniel Silvo, Davi Cavalcante, Gauthier Keyaerts, Gerard Chauvin,Gustavo Marcasse, Ivelina Ivanova,Isa Belle + Paradise Now, Jan Kather, John Sanborn, Jorge Lozano, Junebum Park, Katia Maciel, Kika Nicolela, Luana Lacerda, Marcia Beatriz Granero, Marina Fomenko, Mateusz Vianna, Mike Hoolboom, Mirella Brandi & Muep Etmo Nia Pushkarova, Nung-Hsin Hu, Philippe Boisnard, Phyllis Baldino, Rejane Cantoni, Samuel Bester, Sara Não Tem Nome, Simon Dumas, Simon Guiochet, Sonia Guggisberg, Susana Lopez, Ulf Kristiansen.
Coproduction : Transcultures, In progress asbl, European Pepinieres of Creation
CLOSE UP
A selection of films by Kika Nicolela
Although the face is recognized as being the “window to the soul” and our most efficient and immediate means of communication and expression, the face is the only part of our body that we don’t see, except through a reflection. The face is also rigorously submitted to a universal pattern of beauty that is, more than ever thanks to popular and cheap apps, flattening all differences.
This selection presents videos of Kika Nicolela that deal in different ways with the power – and limitations – of the close up.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME ?
16 min, 2009
Made during the Sumu Art Residency in Turku, Finland, the artist invites local people to shoot her with a camera and describe her in Finish. The video investigates the border between portrait and self-portrait. Part of the ‘Distant Affinities’ series, which deals with cultural stereotypes and identity.
ECSTASY POEM
03min, 2006
Side by side, two faces of the same woman look at the camera in an extreme slow motion. All nuances of her expressions can be perceived. In one portrait, she’s young, at the peak of her beauty. On the other one, she’s about 60 years old. The woman is the actress Liv Ullman, acting in two different films by Ingmar Bergman. ‘Ecstasy Poem’ raises questions of time, identity, representation and the act of looking.
CROSSING
09 min, 2003
The simple act of crossing a street. An ordinary, daily act, shared by thousands of people in one only city in an exactly corporal moment; masses without identity. In the flow, the comfortable sensation of being anonymous. Suddenly, a rupture. This body in suspense starts to express and to reinvent itself.
FLICKERING
3 min, 2009
Total darkness. The artist repeats over and over again the same action: she lights up a match, and she brings it as close as possible to her face. She uses the light of the match to explore her own face, having the camcorder viewer as a mirror.
INWARD
20min, 2020
A co-creation with Thomas Israel, INWARD revisits and reconfigures footage of several past projects of both artists. The result is an essay on on solitude, on isolation, on the fears imposed to us by ourselves and others, on our everlasting need to do more, to have more, to be more.
Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator based in Brussels since 2014. Graduated in Film Studies by the University of Sao Paulo, Nicolela has also completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK). She was the recipient of several prominent international grants and awards and she has participated of inumerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her videos have been screened and awarded in festivals of more than 30 countries.
Kika Nicolela is interested in the space between what we understand by reality, and fiction. Having video and new technologies as tools, she proposes experiences that question the stories we make about the world and about ourselves.
EFFACEMENTS / ERASURES
A new film by Kika Nicolela
Kika Nicolela’s new work was developed during an artistic residency in the village of Calce (France), known for its production of natural wines. Nicolela met local residents who chose landscapes – the places most important to them for a personal reason – to share with the artist.
The resulting video merges the images of the participants with the chosen places, erasing parts of their bodies and parts of the elements of the landscapes, in a play of transparencies and opacities. Their voices and their bodies become an integral part of these landscapes.
The work plunges us into a reflection on the relationship and connection between human beings and nature, between landscape and time, between place and memory.
Informations
- 25.09 > 26.09.2021
- Hybrida Festival
- Piazza Guido da Montefeltro, 12, 47121 Forlì FC, Italie
- ibridafestival.it
Production
- The Idrida Festival is produced by the VERTOV PROJECT
- vertovproject.com
- In the framework of NoLA – No Lockdown Art, programme Creaconnections : partenariat avec les Pépinières Européennes de Création, Transcultures.
- transcultures.be – pepinieres.eu
