k-lab project
DESCRIPTION
An artistic project that consists in video-installations and big photographic portraits to give voice to Keita people and to their work.TRANSCRIPT
k P R O J E C T
an interdisciplinary project by césar meneghetti, enrico blasi, sam cole and matthew mountford
http://www.artprojectk.blogspot.com/ http://www.ozu.it/pagina_open.asp?id=48&lin=eng http://www.case.ibimet.cnr.it/keita-niger/
K lab is an open multidisciplinary art project, a container of ideas, people and other projects, all working together. It could result in a work-shop, an exhibition, a book, a film, a music concert or in all of the above.
K project is also a document - or a documentation - on the human condition and its socio-economic aspects: a large number of people are invited to talk simultaneously about life, God, love and themselves.
A search between the southern and northern hemispheres, where the private view and everything that derives from the experience of the trip to a small village in Niger, Keita, becomes public.
Keita is a key place because for the last 25 years its inhabitants have been struggling against the desertification, together with the international com-munity and in particular with the Italian Cooperation.
P R O J E C T D E S C R I P T I O N
This project will function as a link to connect people and geographical spaces while also functioning as a metaphor for an identity which is emblematic of a collective global situation.
By working through fragments of reality, framing, capturing and living faces and places, we intend to give dignity to the human existence and rediscover the value and sacredness of the work of man.
K project and the video installation videocabine #2 suggests a reading of the territory that brings together the tradition of the desert landscapes and a cultural social analysis. K is committed to the construction of images and the development of a specific language, both contemporary and poetic: portraits, details and landscapes that do not allow to lose the meaning of the representation of the places.
Talking portraits of the inhabitants of Keita, workers, peasants, students, community leaders, agronomists. Set up interviews of men, women and children that will talk in front of the camera of a completely different world: about the changes, their daily lives, really important events, the meaning of life itself.
The work will be finalized in a dark room with twelve channels (video projection and monitors) that build up a sort of detached yet intense complicity connection with the observer; an extremely human video installation, that reflects on a meta-technologic utopia, an embryo of a better world, where its image is a succession of fragments; a space simulacrum of the human condition, in which a small village in Africa connects with the spectators all over the world, thus creating a dense and self-critical atmosphere.
T H E V I D E O I N S T A L L A T I O N
The photographic exhibition of K project includes 20 large format images (w 200 cm x h 170 cm) shot during different seasons in the Keita valley.
The images portray men and women from Keita who with their daily labour have arrested the desertification process, which otherwise would be unstoppable.
The portraits penetrate beneath the clothes, facial features, expressions of body and face and reach down to the soul, which is hidden to whoever is unable to perceive. Thus, the photographer captures what is both most typical and at the same time universally valid and comprehensible in the person who is being depicted, fixing and giving back, through the means and with the tools of art, the impression he has received. He renders the portrait visible and meaningful to those watching, showing the very soul of the person who is being portrayed. As Oscar Wilde once said: “There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own”.
The compositional technique which has been used was directly inspired by the aesthetic criteria of the great masters of Italian-Renaissance painting. Essential and bare, it is aimed at resulting as realistic to the subjective/objective observation of the watcher, and to the non-idealized representation.
The characters are viewed in their context, without artifice, wearing their usual clothes and carrying their work tools. The por-traits convey humaneness, dignity and elegance.
T H E P H O T O G R A P H I C I N S T A L L A T I O N
V I D E O C A B I N E # 2
The photographic exhibition is composed of 20 prints, w 200 cm x h 170 cm, placed around the walls of the white cube. The photos are illuminated by individual spotlights.
The videocabine is placed in the centre of the space, sized w 200 cm x d 200 cm x h 220 cm.
The video installation, inside a blacked-out cube, is composed of a centred black wall with 5 flat screens attached on either side.
The following will be shown on the monitors: single interviews, each of which with their own audio and the answers of these divided by subject: God, love, life, water, earth, mankind, etc. On the side walls the landscapes are projected contemporarily.
T H E I N S T A L L A T I O N
