Labadi Rising, 2014
3 min 33 sec
Credits
performance group: GOLOCAL by Serge Clottey
directors: Conny Zenk / Daniel Aschwanden
camera: Conny Zenk / Daniel Aschwanden
animation & editing: Conny Zenk
sound: Matthias Hurtl
an urban sprawl, a gigantic, close-knit urban conglomerate along the westafrican coast from Abidjan to Lagos? The prediction of urbanist Mike Davis (planet of slums) fort he year 2050 could easily be outpaced by reality long before.
Labady, an area at the periphery, one of the many of Accra (and Kumasi) which weren ́t planned in british colonial ways nor do they manifest tropical modernism of the young independent period or resemble new investor ruled real estate but simply built , grown, ghanean historic city,even if some parts may appear slumlike these days. This area where the city is just about to merge with neigbouring portcity Tema is fitting exactly into this scheme.
Provided with exuberant creativity, trained in the daily struggle of a seemingly chaotic but highly flexible and as has been proven unbeatable subsistence economy along with resulting innovational strength young africans meet the challenges of everydaylife in the manifestations of concurrence, poverty, violence against weaker members of society, environmental pollution, corruption and exploitation through global capital ant there own elites.
Thats where Daniel Aschwanden, Conny Zenk und Mat Hurtl meet the performancegroup GOLOCAL around visual artist Serge Clottey, all of them in- habitants of Labady and improvise together a future scetch in this context in the public space of the beach area.
The longerlasting conceptualized artistic encounter is understood on both sides, the european as well as the african, as a field of experimentation to develop and strengthen the capacity to dialogue on eye level – under bothsided not easily to resolve postcolonial conditions. The development of this dialogue doubtlessly belongs to any contemporary and future scenario of african-european relations at all levels. Art in this context could provide new spaces and nonlinear models for encounter.
Kofi Setordji, internationally succesful visual artist of the older generation and instigator also for Accra ́s younger artscene as the founder and curator of the independent Nubuke foundation mentioned in a lecture about african art the fact that „here everybody is an artist, designer and marketingspecialist in everydaylife“ and subsequently the meaning of african art always can be seen as art of life, as applied art in this context.
The method of the collage, to be observed as a principle of life apparently omnipresent as a tool to appropriate symbolic as well as real territories serves as a matrix also for the videoshooting. The big themes are to be found in microspaces and depict themselves in surprizing transitions, tacked together in raw ways; the location, things, humans, actions, smells, realities, sounds, continuously measured again, built-in, destroyed, rearranged an applied, the construction of a future.
UPCOMING:
visionXsound:[KV-N] 2014 MEDIENKUNST-SCREENINGTAGE
06/09/2014 14:00 bis 22:00 A–Z
20/09/2014 14:00 bis 22:00 Z–A
Conny Zenk 