k
P R O J E C T
an interdisciplinary project by cĂŠsar meneghetti in collaboration with enrico blasi & sam cole
http://www.artprojectk.blogspot.com/ english version
P R O J E C T
D E S C R I P T I O N K is an open multidisciplinary art project, a container of ideas, people and other projects, all working together between Africa and Europe. It could result in a workshop, an exhibition, a book, a film, a music concert or in all of the above. For the Dakar biennial it will be divided into three parts: An installation, a 10-channel video installation and a photographic show. K project is also a document, or a documentation, on the human condition and its social economic aspects, through the video installation videocabine #2, where a huge amount of people are invited to talk simultaneously about life, about God, about love and about themselves. A search between the south and northern hemispheres, where the private view becomes public, and everything that derives from the experience of the trip to a small village in Niger, Keita.
Keita is a key place because for the last 25 years its inhabitants have been struggling against the desertification together with the international community, in particular with the Italian Cooperation. 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, we intend to give dignity to the human existence as well as a sacred aura to the work of man, the faces and places framed, captured, lived.
T H E
V I D E O
I N S T A L L A T I O N
K project and the video installation VIDEOCABINE #2 suggests a reading of the territory that brings together the tradition of the desert landscape 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, landscapes that do not allow to lose the meaning of the representation of places. Talking portraits of the inhabitants of Keita, workers, peasants, students, community leaders, agronomists. Set up interviews of men, women, children that will talk in front of the camera of a completely different world, the changes, their daily lives, really important events, the most wide open sense of life. The work will be finalized in a dark room with two or twelve channels (video projection and monitors) that build up a sort of detached but intense complicity connection with the observer; an installation video extremely human, that reflects on a meta-technologic utopia, an embryo of a better world, were its image is a succession of fragments; a space simulacrum of the human condition, in which a small village in Africa connects with to the spectators all over the world, thus creating a dense and self-critical atmosphere.
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
The photographic exhibtion in Project K includes 20 large format images (170x200 cm) shot during different seasons in the Keita valley. The subjects are portraits of men and women from Keita who with tehiry daily labor have arrested teh desertification proces, which otherwise was unstoppable. The portrait penetrates beneath the clothes, the features, the facial and body expressions, and reaches down to the sould, which is hidden to whoever is unable to perceive. Thus, the photographer, captures what is most typical and at the same time universally valid and comprehensible in the person who is being explored, fixing and giving back, theough the media and the means of art, the impression he has received, making eloquent and visible to those wathcing the portrait the sould of the person who is being portrayed. As Oscar Wilde once said: “There is something fatal in a portrait. It has a life to itself�. The compositional technique which has been used was directly inspired by the aesthetic criteria of the great Renaissance Italian painters, which is essential and aimed at resulting as realistic to the subjective/objective observation of hte person, and to the non-idealized representation. The characters are viewed in their context, without artifice, in their usual clothes, and their portraits convey humaneness, dignity and elegance.
V I D E O C A B I N E
# 2
T H E
I N S T A L L A T I O N The photographic show is composed by 20 (*è meglio dire la tecnica, tipo 20 silverprints, 20 lambda prints, 20 plotter paintings etc) prints of 170 cm large X 200 cm long, placed in the perimeter of the white cube and spot illuminated. The videocabine is placed in the centre of the hall, it is sized 200 cm x 200 cm and 220 high. The video installation, in a black cube is composed by a centred painted black wall were will be attached 10 plasma or LCD monitors, 5 monitors each side. The monitors will be controlled by a hard disk recording system. On the monitors it will be on a single channel on the 55 interviews, each one with of the monitors has its own audio and the answers of the interviewees will be divided by subject: God, love, life, water, earth, mankind, etc. On the 2 main side walls will be simultaneously projected by a video projector of at least 2000 ansi lumen the landscapes and it will be heard in stereophony the direct sound of the landscapes. As a alternative to the 10 plasma monitors it can be made a reduced version using just the 2 side video projections containing interviewees and landscapes at once.
contacts cesarmeneghetti@hotmail.com enrico.blasi@ozu.it
technical support
institutional support