Took some time away from the construction site last week to take part in a photo exhibition for Tongji University Design Week. The given theme for the whole event was ‘New World’. Certainly a theme that permitted some interpretation.
My good friend Francesca who lectures at Tongji, Urban researcher Lena and myself decided we could combine our travel histories and compile a collection of photos covering almost every continent of the globe, and in curating photos that represented cultures or places perhaps lesser known to most people, we are able to show times in our lives we have experienced new worlds – in a physical, cultural or spiritual sense. We then had sound engineer/artist Eugenio come in and add an enchanting, ambient soundscape to play continuously alongside the photos. The result is a truly immersive and other worldly experience!
(video requires vpn and sound!)
It was also great to work with some creatives in other fields, as well as some of the design students of the University. Of course we did it all at the last minute (like any good university student) which brought back some fond memories from my university days, hanging out at the studio into the wee hours of the morning!
Press Release:
Floating Modernity of the New World
新世界浮动现代性
Photographers
Lena Kilina – Russian Visual Researcher
zifeng@mail.ru / www.kibilina.tumblr.com
Shelley Mock – Australian Interior designer
shelley@birdhousedesign.net / www.birdhousedesign.net
Francesca Valsecchi – Italian traveler of physical and imaginary worlds
francesca@tongji.edu.cn
Soundscape
Eugenio Altieri – Italian Sound designer/Music producer/Visual Artist
www.eugenioaltieri.com
Floating Modernity is an immersive experience of photography and soundscape.
New World is how we define the numerous places we visited as journeys into creative exploration and human wandering.
Alternative to mainstream storytelling, our pictures and recording show the ‘New World’ at the scale of the human being, through fragments and landscapes, gestures and movements. It aims to engage the participants in a virtual journey through a small scale storytelling able to represent the local details as well as global trends, together with the contradiction and surprises within both.
In this contemporary world of frantic visual stimulus and continuous images flow where everything seems endlessly mutating, bright, and digitally coloured, photography has the incredible power to distill moments out of time and space, despite its nature grandly rooted the place and present. Perhaps for this reason, it is the medium that still helps humans to clarify visions of what is possible and enlighten the diversity of what exists.
In this exhibition we showcase pictures that are meant to be read by a slow full-frame immersion rather than being swept away at the speed of mobile screens. The images presented aim to reproduce a wandering in the ‘New World’, across the traces of the past and its decadence, and the landmarks of the future and its opulence, across the unusual and the ordinary of that process we name as ‘development’, which is a rather simplified word for the complexity of the change that is humanity, society and environment are addressing.
Walk into, and welcome to start a journey into new worlds where paths of complexity can be imagined, discovered, and shared.
Time – October 11th- 25th 2017
Place – Tongji University Shanghai Campus, D&I Main Building, corridor between library and darkroom
Francesca Valsecchi
Shelley Mock
Lena Kilina
