On the theme “Sources and resources”, the 2021edition of the International Digital and Visual Arts Meetings of Abidjan (initiated and coordinated by Jacob Bleu) offers a series of exhibitions, lectures / debates / presentations, workshops and performances by African artists (Pascal Nampémanla-SN, Cédrick Sungo – CDC, Oliko La matter -CI…) and European artists. This fifth edition combines, in “face-to-face” and “connected” modes, various digital and visual arts practices (from VR to plastic arts, including video art and sound arts) is being deployed for its edition at three locations in the Ivorian capital: Villa Alfira, the BJKD Foundation and the Cap Sud gallery.
Transcultures and the European Creation Nurseries are pleased to participate for the third time, with a selection of around fifteen audio-visual creations linked to the “No Lockdown Art” initiative (see details below), concerts / sound / multimedia performances offered in the multiverse of Second Life (Echo Starship-Mk, Deceptiondigital-DE, Martyn Bates II – BE, Renata K – TK, Paradise Now + A Limb-BE, Glazz de Cuir – ES, Venus Adoreable – PB) and the participation of Philippe Franck (Transcultures / European Nurseries of Creation) in lectures and debates (with the participation in particular of the heads of the UNESCO representation in Côte d’Ivoire, the BJKD Foundation, the Ivorian art critic Célestin Koffi Yao and Ivorian researcher / professor Paul-Hervé Agoubli).
No Lockdown Art – Video Selection
As part of the No Lockdown Art ongoing project initiated by Transcultures and the European Creation Nurseries during the first lockdown linked to the Covid-19 to support contemporary artistic projects likely to be broadcast online, several videos have been produced by artists (visual, sound, multimedia…) integrating the sonic and experimental dimensions in creations of various aesthetics, which escape traditional classifications and offer a poetic and alternative look on our mutant world.
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 : 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)
Coproduction : Transcultures, In progress asbl, European Pepinieres of Creation
Prince, John Sanborn/Commando, USA, 2020, 5’23
In the process of creating ths video, the American queer writer/performer Lynn Breedlove provided this insight into the text: “I wrote this when Prince died, about how he affected me and my pals’ personal lives by speaking up and being himself. It’s about how an artist never knows how or where their work’s gonna land, whose life they’re gonna change.
But if they make something with integrity, The World gets different….” This led her to focus on the feelings of longing and loss prompted by dealing directly with painful memories from turbulent times, and towards crucial voices, long neglected. The result is relevant, raw, and intensely intimate – a “home movie” (with a post rock soundtrack of her group Commando) of emotions confessed to camera and to the world.
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
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, Pépinières européennes de Création
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, Pépinières européennes de Création
Triptyque Prototype, Thomas Israël, BE, 2020, 2’50’’
Triptyque Prototype is an enigma with an exploded temporality which allows cross readings, associative. Its protagonist (the dancer Marilyn Daoust on a choreography by Manon Oligny) is in tension between the doll or the android and the woman of flesh.
This video filmed in Montreal in 2015, as part of the interdisciplinary performance project Les Oracles (initiated by Productions Rhizome-Quebec in partnership with Transcultures-Belgium) was finalized in Brussels in Spring 2020 with a minimalist soundtrack by Paradise Now.
With the support: Transcultures, des European Pepinieres of Creation, Productions Rhizome
Ces riens essentiels #4, Gauthier Keyaerts, BE, 3’19’’
Ces riens essentiels is an infinite work-in-progress, initiated during the lockdown. The journey actually started in 2018 when Gauthier Keyaerts was in Brittany, shooting images from the Ocean, the shore, lichens…
He brought back this particular energy and feeling of spirituality (felt by André Breton).
It helped since March to focus on the essentials: family, body, nature (insects, trees, flowers…), love… this sublime chaos.
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation.
Post Human Survival, Didié Nietzsche/Radio Prague, BE, 2020, 5’20’’
On a meditative soundtrack by experimental group Radio Prague (Didié Nietzche, Jules Nerbard – electronics, Renata K – flute) A soft hallucinogic evocation of nature taking back its rights and peacefulness during the pandemic lockdown, but also afterwards, when the evil human species will have left the earth…
With the support: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation.
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 of Transcultures and 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.
Mars Abstraction S3 – Petermfriess, DE, 2019, 10’00
This third video work of Mars Abstraction series defies the imagination in relation to a purely linear extension of human territories in space that is unlikely to happen as such. The visual material, taken from public sources, is reworked and recomposed to evoke the landscapes of Mars where, despite the date given by several probes, unknown mysteries and energies remain.
As we do not know much about what can be heard on Mars, this video is accompanied by a sound creation that is inspired by both the imaginary and existing data.
Production: European Pepinieres of Creation, Transcultures.
COR01β – LAMAφ, BE, 2020, 10’00
Constituted just before the lockdown in Brussels in March 2020, the COR01β video brings together, as a multi-color and multi-layered composition, all the energies and challenges of the moment, expressed in a full video of the transversal group LAMAφ (musicians, dancers, videographers, actors…) which occurs, in a contextual approach favoring improvised encounters, in different urban spaces.
Collective creation by Maurice Charles Jj (BE), Didié Nietzsche (BE-, Eliza Pais (ES), Emanuele Gonano (IT) and Petermfriess (DE)
Top Budget – Prism, AG/IN/IE/FR/BE, 2020, 5’03
The Top Budget track was realized with little means, following technical problem with the equipment, the duo having recorded with the microphone of a old computer, using free softwares and various borrowed tools.
This is how the low tech sound of PRISM came about. In that spirit, this video shows how problems lead to last-minute solutions minute, a dark but energetic tension, alternating current and high voltage.
The video was filmed with an old iPhone, and also uses images found, recycled, … in a DIY, crazy and punky spirit of the duet.
Cosmic Invertebrate Mindfuck – A Limb BE, 2020, 5’03
A Limb (BE) electronic cinematic music interacts with SaveMe Oh (NL) visuals in the Second Life open space.
All was recorded live, during a streamed event, scheduled for Transcultures (as part of its ‘No Lockdown Art’ initiative), and organized by A Limb. It is a criticism of sex messages present on medias so often, and even more often during pandemic times. We are shooted more than ever with consumerist sex fucking our mind.
Related links “Coronavirus Pandemia” serial by Glasz DeCuir (ES) : First Wave – “Wash Your Hands” – Second Wave – “Superspreader”
Music : A Limb [soundcloud.com/a-limb]
Visual artist : SaveMe Oh [savemeoh.wordpress.com]
Filmed and edited by Glasz DeCuir [glaszdecuir.wordpress.com]
Infos
- 07 > 10.04.2021
- VILLA ALFIRA – Fondation BJKD, Cocody Danga – CAP SUD, Marcory
- Abidjan – Côte d’Ivoire
- facebook.com/numericartbidjan
Production
- With the support : Transcultures, Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles (digital arts), Pépinières européennes de Création.
- transcultures.be – pepinieres.eu
