Jury Statement
Given the fact that Organ Vida has made a thematic turn in defining the character of the festival and starting this year it is held under the aegis of artistic documentary photography, the propositions of the festival, compared to the ones in the previous years, have been significantly more specific, yet interpretatively very wide within the context. The topic of this year’s festival, Spaces, has thus resulted in a great amount of projects that interpreted spaces in a literal sense and quite similarly, so the wealth of possible interpretations was one of the red threads that the jury had in mind when choosing the projects, all the while staying aware of the projects that stayed in the more traditional, documentaristic approach to the topic, yet showed excellence in narration or performance. Stories told by this year’s finalists accordingly form a wide narrative and visual arc – from intimate spaces of personal suffering (Sarker Protick) and an intersection of collective yearning, hopes and beliefs (Jeppe Nielsen) to spaces where decisions for all mankind are made, which are still unreachable to the common man (Justin Barton), the notation of heterotopia, giving the voice to those in captivity to speak about our weaknesses and paradoxes (Asmita Parelkar) and spaces irrevocably changing their traditional appearance is irrevocably changed by the new economic and political relationships (Michele Pallazi). The artistic documentary photography itself showed as a space inside which it is possible to equally put socially engaged photography (Loeffelbein Kai) as well as documenting one’s own emotional and physical journeys (Venetia Dearden, Mario Pucić). Its formal language of spatial narrative can clearly and wittily make a point (De Schampheleer Franky), but immensely expand the semantic levels (Maite Carames). The final selection for the exhibit and this c atalogue can thus be interpreted as a double reflection – on one hand it reflects unified contemplation and a ffinities of the jury, considerably heterogeneous in terms of theoretical background and experience, which proved
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Organ Vida 5th International Photography festival
to be a challenging and fruitful combination because of numerous good applications we received. Second point of reflection is the unanimous intention of the jury to locate neuralgic points of modernity in the context of space, yet at the same time give an insight of today’s artistic documentary photography and accompanying trends in the field of formal and content-related photographic expression. Along the way we faced multiple questions, of which one theoretical question seemed to arise constantly during the evaluation of applications regardless of the flexibility of the term artistic photography. That question regards the limits and intersections between artistic and documentary. Consequently, with ten selected authors, the jury decided to add to this catalogue five additional projects, whose performance and content grabbed some of the jury’s members’ attention both emotionally and aesthetically. Some of these projects lie on the border or intersect the genre borders. Photography is mostly (and wrongly) seen as a m edium that reproduces reality. It would be however more correct to say that it used something that, at first glance, looked like a reproduction of reality and used it to create new worlds. However, how those world will look like, in all photographic genres (including artistic documentary photography), will always depend on the photographer, the camera and the viewer. This year’s festival’s jury hopes that they can provide the audience, the authors, the theorists and colleagues an exciting and inspirational journey through the landscapes of contemporary artistic documentary photography as well as personal and social global spaces in which we reside every day. — Petra Belc