33 Bd Victor Hugo, 06000 Nice
02 DEC
2022
au
04 DEC
2022
14h à 19h
The Villa Victoria hotel, nestled in the Carré d’or district of Nice, is opening its doors to welcome the guest curator programme led by Oleksandra Khalepa.
In residence at the Villa Arson, the Ukrainian curator will invest the hotel with a proposal entitled « Flowers of War » gathering 5 videos by Ukrainian artists.
Since 2017, NGO “Carbon Art Residency” has been developing the art of new media in Ukraine. As part of this mission, we organize training in laboratories, festivals and other events aimed at promoting the art of new media, creating interactive art objects, digital art sculptures, audiovisual performances, mapping and VJ-ing, virtual and augmented reality, laser and interactive installations, art-works and sound compositions with various types of experimental art.
Russia’s war with Ukraine began on February 24. During this time, our digital art community has been scattered around Ukraine and the world. In these conditions the question arises every day: When war will end? What will we do next, what will we be like after the war, what will Ukraine be like?
To explore these issues, we are launching an art hybrid residency for Ukrainian artists. Mission – to create a safe hybrid space for creativity of digital art community. The purpose of the project is an artistic reflection and reinvention war images into seeds for the future which will grow into the flower garden. As a result, a series of works will be created during OVNI festival from the 2nd to the 4th of December.
In this work, I want to show a rather terrifying thought – this is the everyday life of war, in the information field.
The idea for this work came about in March, when all social media was flooded with blurred images of the suffering of Ukrainians. We saw the parallel of covered bodies of the dead people with fabric and censorship on social media. This video is more the result of an affective impression, when the ability to distance and analyze was nearly impossible. On video a white fabric hides the body of the dead body among the snow-covered street and becomes part of the landscape. However, the snow melts, revealing all the horrors and crimes that will never be washed from our memory. We worked on the work together and this is our first collaboration. In times of war, some connections crumble and new unexpected ones emerge in their place. This collaboration and responsibility to each other made it possible to get out of our stupor and start creating.
The only source through which I perceive the world in the last months is the news. Thousands of photos and videos echo in the mind. These short snippets of information shape my reality. Does this reality claim to be objective, or is it simply there? Did I choose it? Can I change anything ?
The life of Ukrainians changed dramatically after the Russian attack. As a result of hostilities, Ukrainians take shelter from shelling and bombings in the basements and corridors of buildings and the subway. In some cities, air strikes are announced several times a day, so people have to spend days and nights in shelters. In the worst cases, people cannot leave the premises where they hid for several weeks or find themselves under rubble. With the help of a video projection of
generated objects with a texture made from photographs of destroyed buildings, I wanted to convey the feeling of the environment in which Ukrainians are in a country engulfed in hostilities and shelling. How do people feel in rooms where they have never been in peacetime? But how will we change the cities and villages that are now destroyed.
Creating the “Tree of Life”, we sought to transfer the traditional idea of this archetypal symbol of world culture to the media space. Keeping its main purpose, “Tree of Life” is a means of visual expression of the voice of the modern generation of brave Ukrainians. Focusing on this visual symbol, we created a modern “Tree of Life”, where each door is a symbol of fate and human life, which has “frozen” for an indefinite period of time. Seeking rescue behind the closed doors, we were all forced to hide in our own homes from the constant bombing that continuously covered our cities. The prototype of the virtual tree is the oak – the national Slavic symbol of the ancestry. A tree is information, a kind of library with a layer of memory of generations, because its leaves and branches symbolize numerous genealogies. Oak, as a sacred tree of the Slavs in Ukrainian culture, is the archetype of the “World Tree of Life”. As a totem, it also becomes the personification of human being, life, and death, playing a prominent role in the cult of ancestors. Traditionally, on holidays, trees were decorated with ribbons symbolizing secret wishes, memories, and people worth remembering. Based on this tradition and its symbolic meaning, we transferred it to virtual reality, in which the role of ribbons is played by the doors and voices of Ukrainian people.