Made in collaboration with several local craftswomen and craftsmen, Humane Materiale II, is a video installation about contemporary and traditional crafts by Carolina Caycedo specially made for the contemporary arts space dispari&dispari project of Reggio Emilia. While the video component is an instructional documentation of the craft making, the accompanying audio score is a poetic portrait of the artisan, exploring the relation of hand labor with intellectual activity, the potential of healing and self-understanding behind manual activity, and the building of community through the transmission of skills.
Humane Materiale is about the hands and things they produce. But between them a mental process is embedded that feeds to and from the moving hands, completely connected. Consciousness is not just a mental quality: it is exercised by the whole body, from head to toe. With the advances of computer technology and the increasingly sedentary lives we live, it feels like we have lost some of this holistic consciousness, reducing our ability to know the world to only a few senses. Although this may only be partly true, the body and the brain are not really separated, they are part of the same construction, completely interconnected and dependent on each other. So if we cause atrophy in one part of our body because we underuse it, we are somehow affecting our way of learning from the material world around us, which in turn is the vehicle that allows us to think also in abstract terms.
Humane materiale (stills)
2012
Humane materiale
Bergen, 2012
4 channel Video Installation
HD, color y sonido. 50’, 44’, 38’ y 30’ loop.
Variable Dimensions.
Made in collaboration with several local craftswomen and craftsmen, HUMANE MATERIALE is a video installation about contemporary and traditional crafts.
While the video component is an instructional documentation of the craft making, the accompanying audio score is a poetic portrait of the artisan, exploring the relation of hand labor with intellectual activity, the potential of healing and self-understanding behind manual activity, and the building of community through the transmission of skills.
The exhibition space will be activated by a series of workshops hosted by the portrayed crafts makers, and open to the general public. The resulting crafts will become part of the exhibition. Tvebandstrikk, nålebinding, wool spinning, and lefse and potetkake baking are amongst the surveyed crafts.
