FATOU KANDE SENGHOR(SENEGAL) and JOHANNA DOMKE (DK) ARTIST Presentation on THURSDAY EVENING

FATOU KANDE SENGHOR(SENEGAL) and JOHANNA DOMKE (DK)

who will be giving a short presentation of their practice together with a small pre-cap of their collaborative work.  This work in progress will continue in Joal, Senegal and is destined for the Dak’art Biennial in May and My World Images Festival 2010.

Thursday 28th JAN at 20.30 - 22.00

Our intentions with these small presentations is to create dialogue on diversity, identity,otherness in relation to their practice with photography and video as medium.  

Fatou Kande Senghor works a great deal with rituals in Senegal. Johanna and Fatou  are developing a really intrinsic photographic installation piece 'Grandma's room' in Residency in January at SVHK. In April, they will continue to develop a short video/film 'Man Kenenki' that they will shoot in Dakar if all goes well. The video is based on a documentary and fictive interpretation of the Leopold Senghor's  twins/grandsons of the former President of Senegal. The twins have lived very different lives, even though they grew up together in the States.  In his twenties, one of the twins returns to Senegal to rejoin his family and search out his traditions as a Senegalese and muslim while the second twin remains in the States, and only returns much later to his own sentiment of alienation to his history and cultural belonging. He is accepted because of his look alike features with his twin, wishes to mirror his brother's closeness , and at the same time, feels the distance of it all.

Please RSVP. at michelle.eistrup@gmail.com if you are interested in attending.

Best Wishes

MICHELLE & KAN SI

Artistic Coordination

         on

 Face à Face

http://faceafaceindenmarksenegal.blogspot.com/

BIO

Fatou Kande is working with photography, video and printing. She is part of that generation raised with television, hip hop, techno , music videos and digital technology. She is from a fast-forward generation, but yet she knows how to catch her breath and a slower pace to print her images about sensuality, consciousness, preoccupations of her continent and this world. She believes in creating with tools of her time and the spirit of her moment in history. She is convinced that art in Africa is an efficient weapon to address and resolve issues that concern Africans, and touch others in the world. 

Johanna Domke´s approach to work with film/video is about walking the line between authenticity and fictionalization in order to talk about our construction of reality and its representation as image. Her practice derives from an observing origin and a fascination in social/urban contexts, focusing on the individual in relation to its social environment, public space and power structures. Her work implies both documentary and fictional strategies of filmmaking, resulting in a mixture of hyperrealism and artificiality. She creates a plane of references to reality which has fiction discernibly woven into it. She is not interested in purely documentary films, but often borrows their conventions, that she uses as potential for fictionalization.

Grey Ice Cold

Its saturday and I am driving around a busy city to pick up KAN-SI, my friend CLAES and some other stuff that already is squattered around in several locations. Long long time ago I travelled with Claes thru the Sahara and spend a chaotic and wild time in Niger and Mali. Claes ended up in Dakar and as I now speed tru the city my two passengers discuss the infrastructure of Dakar. Its strange how Kan-Si always have such a radiant sunny aura, that is so opposite to the frozen state Copenhagen is caught up in these days. We are out to do our first attempt at practical collaboration: photo-session on the beach. When we finally arrive at the beach - now covered by ice - the wind is devastating. We are already freezing like hell before we start shooting and there is no way we can think, discuss or evaluate what we are doing. The only goal is to get it done with. Get it done and get out of the wind.

Its a grey day, everything – the sky, the air, the snow, the asphalt, even the ice on the sea - is grey. Grey Ice Cold.

LIVING IN THE COLD

LIVING IN THE COLD

An incredible young artist named SAMBA FALL came for a visit.

It is still very cold, no changes in that chapter. A bit of warmth comes to us with samba fall’s visit because he is such a sharp, plaseant and funny person not to mention a great artist. Samba  lives and works between Dakar and Oslo Norway. Two temperatures, two speeds, two modes that make his heart beat and deliver art that is recognized internationally. Samba comes to us because it is in him to come visit brothers and sisters from the same country that have come from home and are visiting so near by, also because it allows him to exchange about  art stories from dakar and finally because he has a great friendship with piniang with whom he studied at the beaux arts and worked for the same cartoon studio back in the days. To me, Samba is like a squirrel, he remained thin as ever, handsom, lively and brilliant.

He was always a curious young man, eating up life from his homestudio in medina Dakar that had a view in the family yard. He could then work and interact with his grand parents, his ants, the young women fixing their hair, the neighbours coming in and out. Samba could breathe in life in medina for days and not produce any art and when he was ready, he would just narrate his world, with his own pictural lettering, moments that are dear to our hearts, moments of communion between human beings, life simply shared. I know why it is so easy for him to practice his art so delightfully: he has understood very early in his life what humility, openness, sociability, generosity, observation and interaction meant to catch the spirit of narrating. Then the medium was his to chose. Samba very early felt that scenography was important to show his works. Samba draws, paints, films, animates, lives, crackes jokes, converses about everything happening in today’s world in English, French, wolof and norwayan. What an asset for our continent.

It seems then we are ready for a face a face.

Piniang and Kristen are getting close, piniang has to adapt to the danish environment and create new textures; his setting lacks things to pick up and bring to life anew. Everything is so neat, organized, cold, flat. He has built this incredible character the minute he found some iron thread. He is impatient to really get started. I realize this is how we are trained in Africa, “hands on” : while we touch the material, we give it volume, content, meaning, form, life as opposed to writing about it, thinking about it, talking and planning it. That is the major difference between us and our partners that needs to be negociated peacefully. What a tough workshop. Negociating difference: that’s what it is about really. Endurance, stamina, strengh of mind, generosity, openness, comprehension.

 Kan si and frans are doing marvelously, their work sessions happen at our apartment, at frans’s home while he cooks a meal or during their car rides in Copenhagen. There is a lot of generosity and contribution going on. They are truly in the core of the concept. Frans is a true traveler, it isn’t  just countries he visits, it is ways of being a better human being he accumulates from one country to the other. A sum of a great value when one exists in this huge world.

My team has gone through quite a few meetings to recenter and recapitulate a few points specially budgetary wise, but we have got a great subject in our palms that is inticing and challenging and looks like it just might work. We are trying to deal with the subject of belonging-links-connections, answering president poet Leopold sedar senghor’s poetry and theories of identity and borrowing the story of twins that have grown up together and parted as adults, one has gone home to Senegal and the other is still in washington struggling to reconnect truly with his home. We are building a human size mobile, inspired by the “libra sign” that both the twins and the president share, and also the balance of such a piece would symbolize the quest of each of us in our own lives. We are going to be active participants of our work as we are both Johanna and I writing our personal stories and poetry  that will hold this story together. We shall add objects to the mobile in part two of the residence in joal and shoot a short film that will work with the structure. We have looked at the possibility of building the structure in iron with master sculpture Guibril André Diop from Senegal.

Now we need to start building the elements content wise and physically.

DID I give you  a tour ????

The art center where we have great facilities to develop our creatitivy

                         

The darkroom where I am wish I lived

Friday 2:am a tradition in the art center, artists and staff have cake and drinks to celebrate sharing the space. An opportunity to network and make friends.

The tea pot. Kan si baught it in dubai. It was made in china, sold in an Iranian shop and has travelled around in kan si ‘s bags. Its been our best companion  these days. Feeding us with warm green tea and

fresh mint.

Johanna, researching on senghor’s life and poetry.

We are building a human size mobile. With elements of our research, moments of conversation on our theme, photos, photogravure, text, poetry, drawing.

Cant sleep early cant wake up early. goodnight

ELECTRONIC DIARY- DAY 1

Copenhague, at long last.

I just had a baby girl, another one, to add to the two that make my days. She is walking, throwing sounds and words around while trying to increase the speed of her pace in our apartment. She is a big girl now fatou, I thought, I can travel and go for new adventures around the world. KAN SI the Senegalese artist and curator had chosen me and PI NIANG to participate in this project intitled FACE A FACE. I was ready, a come back in the arena of residences and workshops, nothing was going to keep me away from getting on that plane. Michelle, the co-curator with KAN SI had been like a pilot easing its plane, load and passengers to destination. So aware of what the African artist go through (paperwork wise) to get anywhere. It was a great sign : experience of a traveler, tenacity and connections. We had travelled to Banjul Pi NIANG and I, 7 hours away for that visa, then back in 24 hours, and we made it; we were on that plane. Then that plane had been late but we had made another connection. And finally, we did arrive to the country of the Vikings. I smiled as we landed because here I was in a town significant in my life since 2004 when a Danish filmmaker came to Senegal and initiated the film “hotel of my dreams” in the small town of popinguine. I had worked on the project for a few years as a line producer, assistant director, translator and had finished the journey with this production with a very bitter taste in the mouth.

So here you are Copenhagen, I finally get to meet you….

We live in an incredible apartment where we let creativity go crazy, as we socialize, reflect, share. And cook. The facilities we use at the center for arts bring a great boost to our projects and the Danish artists we are pairing with are good people. Its time to roll the camera.

We were given a unique guideline : “negociation and flexibity”. Is it a tough one? No, this is about the life of a good artist. The three groups we are have been going through different vibrations at the starting point of their projects. As the negociation process unfolds, everybody gets busy. I have a lot of admiration for frans Jacobi and Kan si, they are two grown men that went to the essential on day one. From the essential, generosity, comprehension and strategy eased in without so many words. That is about experience and flexibility isn’t it? PI NIANG and Kirsten are both timid individuals, they danced aroud each other with good manners then shared life stories that got them closer. So they moved quickly to a practical strategy. Johanna with whom I am pairing is a relaxed young woman with a lot of strings attached to her bow. She is a sharp one that reminds me of me at a certain point in my life and working with her around an idea of mine pulled out of my treasure box put us both in an intense and prolific mode. We have been incredibly and amazingly productive around that theme. We have share life experiences with absolute trust, but our link is the most fragile of the three groups. We have not caught the rhythm of that dance yet, You know : “grounds one lets go and the grounds one gets back”.

I think we have gotten carried away by this subject we just spent 48 hours on and it has pulled us away from an invisible framework that is really there for us to feel. Tomorrow we need to tackle that issue and come up with something.

DAY 2 : PHOTO SHOOT “LIVING IN THE COLD”