Data seems free flowing and immaterial yet it is embedded in our physical world and has an immense impact on our environment. Data has become an indispensable tool for the circulation of goods world-wide and huge physical systems are activated when we use it. As individuals using data in our daily lives, we participate in highly complex, compartimentalized systems that are difficult to comprehend. Cargo of Clouds, by Isabelle Vigier and Anne La Berge reflects on this urgent topic.
Research on data centers and data farm locations around the globe shows that the data industry is tightly connected to the existing infrastructures of industry and commercial transport. The artists Anne La Berge and Isabelle Vigier have based Cargo of Clouds in the port of Venlo in the Netherlands, one of the important ports in Europe where large amounts of goods are transported daily in connection with the word-wide network of commerce and industry. Around the city of Venlo, like everywhere around Europe, historically agricultural landscapes are being reclaimed to make way for huge zones dedicated to the ever-growing infrastuctures of capitalism.
In Cargo of Clouds, the artists present an ambivalent image of a landscape that is the product of a society highly dependent on data, and deeply materialistic. Central to the story is the question of our involvement as individuals in systems that we do not control or comprehend, but that have a profound impact on the world, and nature around us.
Stills from the 3 screens
THE INSTALLATION
The installation with 3 screens and quadrophonic sound combines powerful visual and sonic images. The total sequence of 15 minutes is looped, so that the projection is on-going. The arrangement in the exhibition space allows for the public to circulate amidst the work, and take in the relationships between images, sound and space. Visitors may come and go at any time.
THE STORY
In the video tryptich, a character (dancer Valentina Campora) finds herself lost in industrial spaces, whereas in reality, the industrial zone is strictly forbidden for pedestrians. It is as if she has been transported from her personal screen, her interface with the world, into the high security apparatus that is hiding behind it. She has landed into a world on a non-human scale as a contemporary Alice in Wonderland. Meanwhile, containers are being shifted by cranes, moving weightlessly against the sky in a never-ending cycle. The quadrophonic sound creates a larger than life impression where nature and machine sounds co-exist.
Impression of the installation
Cargo of Clouds By Isabelle Vigier and Anne La Berge was filmed on location at the industrial port of Venlo, NL. It was produced by the artists with the Volsap Foundation. The project was made with the assistance of a powerful team of the artists’ choice: sound designer Alex Booy, drone camera operator and technician Paul Beumer, dancer Valentina Campora and code developer Timo Hoogland.
Cargo of Clouds was made with generous support from Stimulerings Fonds, Prins Bernhard Fonds, Fonds Podium Kunsten, Norma Fonds. We also benefited from a residence with Intro InSitu, in Maastricht, and practical assistance from Splendor, Amsterdam. We are grateful for their support.
Safe Piece (installation)was a special phase of the project of the same name, which started with a series of performances and was captured in a film (2019). Safe Piece was presented as an installation for the first time in Utrecht, centering on a selection of video stills by Isabelle Vigier and a soundscape made in collaboration with Andy Moor.
When her first child was seven months old choreographer Valentina Campora started a series of performances where she, the father of the child, and the baby are performing together in front of a small audience. Isabelle Vigier documented the sessions on video over four years. The film Safe Piece shows the process of evolving an improvised dance piece through time. The family develops a non verbal language that allows them to be all at once within a multitude of polarized dimensions : private and public, playing and performing, working and mothering, caring and taking risks, improvising and creating choreography.
For Safe Piece (installation) prints and sounds from the film are assembled in the gallery space, laying out the resonances of bodies through motion, play, rest, and shifting moods.
Interview conducted by Marcelle Schots (excerpt) copyright Movement Exposed Gallery Space. Prints are for sale at the gallery and online.
September 21st, 2020 § Comments Off on Safe Piece (a film) § permalink
Experimental documentary / dance film. Video (2019) 26 min.
A film by Isabelle Vigier and Valentina Campora, based on a series of improvised performances by Valentina Campora, with music by Andy Moor and the participation of Elio Campora Moor.
Safe Piece originated in choreographer Valentina Campora’s personal experience of trying to combine her artistic work with being a mother. Having to care for a baby and at the same time trying to continue creating new work posed a personal challenge. As an experiment, she began exploring the possibilities of dancing with her baby. In the course of four years Campora has created eight performances, all of them including herself, her young son and his father, Campora’s partner Andy Moor, a musician himself, playing for a small audience. Each performance was filmed by visual artist Isabelle Vigier. They used the video material to make the film ‘Safe Piece (a film).’ Vigier created the installation of the same name working with stills from the abundant video material collected over the course of the four years project.
In the film we see how displacing a family from the home onto the stage allows for the emergence of new alleys of communication and play. Multi-faceted, evolving relationships occur between parents and child within the realm of music and dance. The film proposes an image of the passing of time as a positive, profoundly generative force: seeing a little boy growing up provides both a pace and an emotional frame to the film. The concepts of potential, loss, and realization are embedded in it.
Safe Piece publicly addresses private questions which are deeply relevant because they deal with fundamentals: the right (for mothers/parents) to work, and the right to raise the future members of our society – in a social space where having children is often experienced as a limitation in terms of professional development. Safe Piece is an investigation into passion for making art and making a family.
THE MAKERS
Valentina Campora, an Italian performer and choreographer based in Amsterdam, NL, initiated the project and formed the team around it. She has developed the project in close collaboration with Isabelle Vigier — culminating in the film and the installation of the same name.
Isabelle Vigier a french visual artist and designer uses video in her installations and also works for the stage, in her collaborations with choreographers and composers. Vigier and Moor have worked together on many projects in the past, including the live performance ‘Le Journaliste’, but also through the music label Unsounds, of which they are co-founders. Vigier and Campora started their collaboration with Safe Piece and have gone on to work on more projects together.
Andy Moor (The Ex) is a well known musician improviser and composer of film music. He has worked in various projects with Campora as a live musician, composer, and often an advisor (for example ‘Clessidra, One to One’, ‘Identicality’ and in ‘A Divine Threesome’ by Gabriella Maiorino). Moor is Campora’s partner, and the father of their son. He is also responsible for the soundtrack of the installation version of ‘Safe Piece’.
Elio Chaly Campora Moor is Valentina Campora and Andy Moor’s child. He was seven month old at the beginning of the project.
SAFE PIECE public presentations
Suture Festival, Soven, Germany, August 2021 / Rogue Dancer Festival, Vancouver, Canada, January 2021/ Official Selection InShadow Festival, Lisbon December 20 Nov/13 Dec 2020 / Premiére, Music dance Performance Festival, OT301, Amsterdam, june 2019 / (as Work in progress and performance) Teatro Akropolis Dance Festival Genova, IT, November 2018 / Performing arts Festival, Theater Frascati, Amsterdam, NL, 2018 / Why Not Festival, Amsterdam, NL, 2017
FILM CREDITS
A film by Isabelle Vigier and Valentina Campora. Based on the performance ‘Safe Piece’ by Valentina Campora. Réalisation: Isabelle Vigier. Performers: Valentina Campora and Andy Moor with Elio and Milo Campora Moor and . Music: Andy Moor. Cameras: Isabelle Vigier, Hanneke Kuijpers. Editing: Isabelle Vigier. Sound mastering: Andy Moor. Filmed on location in Amsterdam (NL): OT301, Leine&Roebana Studio, Zaal 100, De Balie, Plantage Dok, De Roode Biooscop and at Le Theatre de St. Nazaire (FR). Production: Valentina Campora. Made with support by AFK Amsterdam Funds for the Arts, Theatre De Roode Biooscop and cultural center OT301, Amsterdam
DNK-Days / The John Cage Project: 20 artists (composers/musicians/poets/movement artists and myself with video) perform 2 minutes parts during a collective random composition based on John Cage’s score. This is the part I made for the event. We performed the piece twice in different constellations. Steim/De appel july 2018.
Yannis Kyriakides performs ‘Varosha’ with the images of the series of postcards In the Golden Seaside / Souvenir of Famagusta. I obliterated all human presence from a collection of postcard views of Famagusta. The deserted images capture the moment where, in July 1974 the resort was evacuated, and the place stood still. The collection was published with ‘Resort & Ruins’, Yannis Kyriakides, Unsounds 2013. The series was also part of the exhibition ‘Suspended Spaces’ Bagnolet, 2014.
