Archive for April, 2008
NomadicMILK in Ghent
Monday, April 21st, 2008NomadicMILK in Ghent 2
Monday, April 21st, 2008A video impression of the NomadicMILK presentation in the Zebrastraat, Ghent, Belgium.
NomadicMILK Kameroen version 2008Esther Polak and team‘NomadicMILK’ is an art project on the experience of space. This version of the project focuses on the mobility of dairy by the Nomadic herdsmen in North Cameroon. The project portrays the migration from the dry season to the wet season camp in search of the best grazing grounds. Video recordings are realized in the floodplain, the wet season location. During the wet season this area is totally covered by water.In 2006 two Zebu cows were equipped with a GPS-collecting collar. The intention of Esther Polak and team was to visualise the thus obtained routes, and subsequently confront the herdsmen with them. To realize this a small robot was developed, that could redraw the routes as sand drawings, scaled both in space and time, and based on the original GPS data. In this case the route from the dry to the wet season area was drawn: a trip that in reality took about four month and covered about 85 kilometres.The installation consists of a beamer projection that shows imagery of the daily life of the Fulani families. The monitor on the ground shows the herders commenting on their own track, of which an exact copy is present in the exhibition. Based on a highly technological visualisation, the sand track shown is a simple drawing that now by the comments of the Fulani people again turns into to a complex experience of space and time. The radios hanging from the ceiling make audible the voice of Esther Polak who translates and retells the comments of the Fulani herdsmen.
Setting up – opening day
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Today Ivar and me did find time to visit Brussels before the opening of Update02 at 21:00 in Gent.
We visit the exhibition Holy Fire at Imal, were we play around with the “Media Mirror” of Alexei Shulgun and Aristarkh Chernyshev
Later we also visit the exhibition “No Place – like Home Perspectives on migration in Europe” at Argos. Especially the work of Ursula Biemann “Sahara Chronicle” turned out to be of interest for me: it also dealt with issues of mobility, but it did focus mainly on African-European migration. The work consists of a series of short video’s: all small portrays of the nodes in the chain of migration, showing it as an everyday practice, way of live….
All the projects in the exhibition had this approach more ore less, and it made me thinking of smth I had wondered about before….
In Netherlands recently a book was published by former Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk: “Het zijn net mensen”, (Almost Human) The main conclusion of this provocative book is that our image of the Middle East is colored by all kinds of filters. One of the most important of these, for the written press as well as the visual media, is television networks. The book tries to reveal the filters itself, and thus the difficulties of nuanced journalism and the impossibilities for a naïve audience to see trough these meganisms, let alone get a real idea of what the world outside the democratic fortress of Europe really looks like. For me it is somewhat frustrating that this argument totally neglects the works of artists like presented in this show. I would like to drag Joris Luyendijk to this exhibition, and show him, there is more to representing the world than mainstream journalism alone. Everybody who did read the book, and feels now frustrated about these information filters is a potential audience for this kinds of shows, but how will we make the two worlds -art and journalism –really meet?
Working in Ghent: day 4
Friday, April 18th, 2008
To set up this installation for the first time takes a lot of energy.
In Amsterdam it seemed all so easy, but now I have to find the best solution for this space and context.
The work is presented between the highlights of the ZKM collection: my neighbors are now Bruce Naumans “Good boy, Bad boy”, Jefferey Shaw’s “The Legible City”, works by Masaki Fujihata and “Bubbles” by Wolfgang Münch/Kiyoshi Furukawa. The latter producing a lot of sound, that now blends with the mowing of the Zebu cows in the NomadicMILK installation.
So how to compete with all this? I don’t think about it that way. I just concentrate on my own installation and feel inspired by the surrounding works, and besides feel content about the tangible presence of the sand track and the hanging radio’s , that give the tracks of the Fulany Families now a real substance in this art space.
Working in Ghent: day 3
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
progressing