1st Edition Video Selection
This competition is an opportunity to encourage artistic production in video art and offers a spotlight to experimentations in the audiovisual field that make use of new media and technologies as creative opportunities. The VAA aims at identifying exciting and innovative artworks produced by emerging artists in Italy and South Africa.
The participants’ artworks are parts of two selections, Italian and South African. The jury appoints 5 finalists per country and, between them nominates the 2 winners. The goal is building a bridge between the two countries. The prizes consist in a trip to participate to the awards ceremony in Italy or in South Africa.
Solitary Gardens
Luca Coclite
Inspired by the work of Elaine Summers, ‘Fantastic Gardens’ (1964), Luca Coclite presents ‘Solitary Gardens’. The film is divided into three different parts, starting from ‘giardino’, as a metaphor of someone who is seeking happiness and perfection, and taking us through a great variety of well- known places in New York city representing an individualistic and solitary picture of human condition. The movie is made up of ‘Human Botanical Garden’, ‘One day everything you see will be invisible’ and ‘Anti-Souvenir’, portraying an unstable reality flowing from an earthly paradise to an illusion. Here, the solitude from the Winter Garden Atrium, the artificiality from the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the dioramas from scientific museums and, lastly, the deterioration of forgotten objects at the Dead Horse Bay lead us, in Rilke’s terminology, ‘from the visible world towards something timeless, inward and invisible’.
Shelter
Kamyar Binesh Tarigh
Seeing homeless people using newspaper posters to sleep on in the streets of Cape Town was the beginning of my inspiration to create this short film, seeing articles that sometimes depicts the government’s promises for a sustainable living for the poor, how ironic that they use those posters for a more comfortable sleep in the streets. I came across Chuma the actress in the film at Ruth Prowse School Of Art where we study together, she was a homeless artist that started drawing by burning pieces of wood turning them into charcoal and drawing portraits of other homeless people around her. She also helped me in developing this concept so it is closest to the reality of a homeless person in the streets of Cape Town also introducing me to the other homeless artists including the trumpet players in the film.
8’20” – On Time Travelling
Ilaria Biotti
8’20” – On Time Travelling explores the surface of the Nenthead Mines (Cumbria, UK), an archaeological site covered with the remains of lead and zinc mining industries, recalling past labour conditions in northern England. A flock of mineshafts lives in Nenthead among rare lichens surrounded by wooden fences. Often invisible on the surface, mineshafts consist of deep and narrow holes that lead to an immense underground world, a vast mining complex unfolding across the subsoil of Cumbria. Mineshafts care about a sustainable future for humanity. For this reason, they invite passersby to stay in the here and now, by quoting passages from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. To do this, you should avoid everyday forms of time travelling, such as the sunlight hitting your skin from 8 minutes and 20 seconds in the past. Mindfulness. Fragments of this novel are alternated with statements about sunbathing collected in a local pub during the time span of three weeks.
Nobody Wana See Us Together
Nonkululeko Chabalala
My artwork is an exploration of the politics of existence at various levels of analysis, the individual level, the social or state level and the international level with regards to emancipation. My artwork deals with understanding how our external environment affects our reality which I understand to be socially constructed. Through the medium of photography and collage I experiment
with deconstruction and reconstruction of photographs to create a surreal narrative of identity and space as well as the ideational and the material aspects of existence. My artwork is highly influenced by theories of social science such as constructivism and critical theory.
Migration
Gilda Li Rosi
The project presents one of the most recent themes in recent times, namely immigration. At the first moment the subject of immigration should not be the content of this work, but I wanted to represent something of myself, a personality of my unconscious. What I thought right away was my native land, which is Sicily and the consideration of being able to represent this important part of me seemed decidedly intuitive. On the other hand, what I did not consider was the media bombardment that in the last periods has made sure that Sicily was joined to the subject of immigration, in this so my psyche has recreated the images present in the ‘’ Migration ‘’ work. An important thing to underline is that the work does not present a judgment or a position on the aforementioned topic, but the intent is to portray and arouse a dismay or a sentiment related to the theme represented.
Concerning Alchemy
Rory Emmett
Through this work I attempt to grapple with the act of painting in its relation to labour, particularly within the context of Cape Town, as I seek to further interrogate the privilege that makes one person’s work worth more than another person’s work or labour.
The performance takes place outside the Cape High Court between apartheid-era ‘Whites Only’/’Non-White Only’ benches. Colourman
uses a chisel and hammer to carefully obliterate three concrete blocks painted in the primary colours of yellow, red and blue.
The bricks are slowly disintegrated to a powder. In mixing them to achieve a chromatic grey, I attempt to distill the ‘alchemy’ of pigmentation production, and in addition, the liminality of a malleable identity. In this process, I use Colouredness as a medium to make sense of systems of classification, as well as to deconstruct them.
Talking Hands: Valeria
Caterina Pecchioli
“Valeria” is an extract edited in autonomous form of the character that opens and close my first feature film: “Talking Hands”. The film investigates, through a train journey from Bolzano to Syracuse, the relationship between Italians and corruption. This character, met during the trip, is the look with which I identified more and that better fits the intentions of the film, made of hope and not just a complaint. The girl is the only one in the film to reveal her face, thus she embodies an Italy that does not want to hide but that is ready to change. Visually I play on an “expressive short circuit” where hands are talking while the face expresses itself without words. Stylistically the film is a natural evolution from my personal poetics tackling the social issue through body language and the expressive power of the territory itself.
Aqua Regalia
Faith XLVII
Set amidst the squall of Hong Kong, this project is the third iteration of FAITH XLVII’s ongoing series Aqua Regalia. The explorative video is one of the first videos for Faith to co- direct, alongside South African film maker Dane Dodds. FAITH’s fascination with abandoned spaces has led her to discover buildings across the world that are saturated with layers of histories and memories; in this case an expansive and desolate five-story apartment block in central Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The material residue of the former residents were sifted through in search of personal relics and sentimental treasures which formed the building blocks of the installation.
Enter in this Wound
Michela Tobiolo
Entering this wound is conceived as a landing towards the other. The wound returns what it hid, becoming a door to cross, a place to cross for metamorphosis. From inside to outside and from outside to inside, from intimate dimension to collective dimension in a flow that is balm for the wound of the self and the other. The possibility, great and precious to reconnect with oneself and the other thanks to the awareness of being part of something bigger, to be preserved. As if it were essential to travel within one’s own wound, to see its colours change, in an alchemical transformation that makes the change of one’s pain close to the change of nature. Understanding of being part of everything and in that all being able to see nature as Divinity and Martyr, to which we can not but bow down returning to our roots and our ancestral connection with the savage. I and you. Me and more from me. And if it were possible to find a step and then a rhythm that traces a road, thanks to so much beauty, I wish it to each of us.
Sawt
Thania Petersen
Salt holds huge significance for humanity since ancient times. As a mineral used for healing, preservation, ritual, religious ceremony and more. In contemporary times, a handful of salt has become synonymous with Civil Disobedience as Ghandhi began his salt March through Gujarat by picking up a handful of salt and throwing it to the ground. This was an act to encourage his people to unite and walk-in revolt against the occupation of their lands and liberate themselves from oppression in a procession that steered away from violence and encouraged power of unity and strength of the masses.
I believe in order for us to create a sustainable future where freedom, liberation and equality is a reality, we need to invest time in healing. Until now we have been too quick to fight, and although I believe fighting too is necessary, you cannot fight a war with a broken leg in the same way that one cannot lead a country and its people without overcoming the trauma and pain inflicted upon nations and people for centuries.
