With the installation “La Fōz”, Fred Chemama, aka Mira 眯腊, transforms the space into a living camera obscura. In Cadaqués, the installation invites visitors to step into the darkness and paint with light, tracing gestures across walls, bodies and objects, and seeing them instantly appear as ephemeral images.
Fred Chemama will take part in the opening on October 8, and his interactive installation will be open to the public from October 9 to 11.
Fōz machine
La Fōz machine is a nomadic, site-specific interactive video installation that simulates long-exposure photography on bodies, objects and walls in real time. Both a phantasmagorical machine and a unique photo-installation technique, it reveals layers of presence, absence and memory. It creates or summons ghosts. It is both a camera obscura and a mirror, an image-magic device. As an installation, it invites viewers and users to experiment directly with the system.
At the crossroads of photography and video, Fōz machine explores the relationships between movement, sound and light through immersive real-time installations. Alongside his solo presentations, Fred Chemama collaborates with artists from a variety of backgrounds to create original and enchanting projections. The project is conceived as nomadic, ephemeral and malleable, shaped both by spectators and by the artists taking part in the performance.
At the intersection of live performance, video, performance art and concert, each iteration of the Fōz Machine depends on its environment, its audience and the artists interacting with the system. The interactive work allows participants to unleash their creativity while experiencing the fleeting nature of images and light, endlessly renewed.
The project has been presented on numerous occasions and in a wide range of contexts, in Belgium, France and Morocco.
Read: La Fōz machine: the surprising “temporarily photo-active zone” by Karolina Parzonko
Fred Chemama (Fr/Be)
Photographer, videographer and multimedia artist Fred Chemama, aka 眯腊 (mira), is a multidisciplinary artist who studied audiovisual production at ESRA Morocco and photography in France. He currently lives and works between Belgium, France and the many places his travels take him, where he encounters other artists and cultural organisations across Europe and beyond.
During the final year of his studies, he travelled to Mexico to produce a series of underwater portraits of fishermen in the state of Oaxaca, using a large-format camera and a custom-made waterproof housing. These portraits are now submerged inside light boxes, where they have been gradually decomposing in water for several years. Over the years, he has also developed several long-exposure self-portrait projects.
Action, encounters and the mise en abyme of image-capture processes drawn from reality lie at the heart of his practice. This has notably led him to adopt an occasionally iconoclastic approach and to create ephemeral, site-specific installations using discarded ink ribbons sourced from souvenir photography concessions.
Premeditated collective action and the exploration of various processes for producing images “drawn from reality” were central to his early practice. This already tended to question the authority of the photographic image as a vehicle of information and to transform it into what he truly sees it as: a pretext for bringing people together through poetry.
Today, 眯腊 continues to experiment at the boundaries of photography, video and digital arts, exploring the body, light, movement, situations and place through an approach closely connected to bodily action.
His latest interactive installation projects (“cyclo-kino”, the “Gestographe”, the “Fōz machine”…) combine disciplines and media, transcending them through playful and intriguing systems.
Festival InCadaqués (Fr)
The international photography festival InCadaqués invites you, day after day, to immerse yourself in the photographic experience from both an educational and artistic perspective, whether you are an amateur or a professional. It is a welcoming and festive event in which the photographers themselves take part. Its key words are discovery, encounters, exchange and sharing.
InCadaqués offers a new event format in which creative dynamics lead to appropriation. The collection itself becomes creation. With this in mind, several venues give visitors the opportunity to meet photographers and collectors among their portfolios, prints, books and original works. Limited editions and prints will be produced specially and exclusively for InCadaqués 2025.
Information
- 07 > 08.04.2024 | 20:00
- Festival InCadaqués
- 17488 Cadaqués France
- incadaques.com
Production
- Festival InCadaqués
- La “Fōz machine” was produced with the support of Transcultures and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (digital arts)
