Kika Nicolela (Br)

1 November 2019 City Sonic

Windmaker (2007)

Windmaker was originally developed as an interactive installation involving 6 industrial fans, movement sensors, mobile sculptures connected to a computer and a video projection. The project later generated a single-channel video with the same title. The images follow a woman who struggles to find her place in relationship to infinite nature. The project is a grant beneficiary of the São Paulo Arts Council Award for Visual Arts.

Project receiving support from the São Paulo Arts Council for the visual arts..
Production: Kika Nicolela.

Organum

During the Middle Ages, religion, music and architecture were intimately linked; the experience of the divine was through space and sound. The Organum project (whose images were shot on the site of the Abbey of Villers-la-Ville – Belgium) is inspired by this “music” of ruin and plainchant (or plainsong), in particular the polyphonic music of the School of Notre Dame (Paris). Plainsong, is considered the source of all Western music, has been able to develop and preserve itself through abbeys and monasteries. In this interactive structure, the body and movement of the visitor produces a music of introspection and singular meditation. Once the visitor reaches the interaction zone, his presence can activate 8 different videos. In each, the same singer (in projection on the wall) evolves in a different place from the Abbey of Villers. His singing is improvised according to the space where it is located, and the sound quality also changes (more or less echo, voice more or less present, more acute or serious, sensation being more or less intimate etc.).

In addition, the interactor can slow down the video and sound with its displacement and can thus play with the choice of video / sound tape and its speed. Each time it activates a new video, this is superimposed with the previous video for 30 seconds, to produce an ephemeral polyphonic experience. For the polyphony to continue, more than one interactor is needed at a time, each in a different zone (maximum 4 at the same time).

Production: Abbey de Villers-la-Ville, Numeric’arts, In progress.

Biography

Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator, living between Brussels and São Paulo. Having Graduated in Film and Video at the University of São Paulo, Nicolela has also completed a Master of Fine Arts, at the Zurich University of the Arts. Kika Nicolela is interested in the encounter with the other, mediated by the camera – mostly, the video camera. The camera is a tool for her, to investigate representation and self-representation, identity and otherness, portrait and self-portrait, and create a space of fluctuation between these poles.

She is interested in making videos and video-installations that allow the spectator to have a larger role in the production of meaning; that is, works in which the meaning is reached through the constant negotiation between the spectator and the elements – often multiple and ambiguous. This ambivalence in the moving image is what she is searching for: pieces that produce a heightened experience in the very ambiguity of our own subjectivity, and of the real.

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