VAA-VIDEO ART AWARDS BEYOND THE SHORT FORMAT WEBINAR

We’re preparing the 3rd Edition of VAA. The new call will comes out soon. The Prize conceived and promoted by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro is dedicated to video art between Italy and South Africa.

In such a delicate moment caused by the persistence of the pandemic, we want to insist on the need not to stop, to continue to keep alive those threads that nourish and enrich creativity and at the same time offer a new opportunity for promotion and visibility to the works that the VAA has selected and awarded, between the two past editions 2018 and 2019.

The appointment is for the 8th DECEMBER 2021 at 4 pm (italian time) as part of the initiatives for the Contemporary Day in Italy and in the world. the Centro Luigi Di Sarro and the Italian Cultural Institute in Pretoria present Beyond the short: webinar , a remote dialogue between Italy and South Africa with the protagonists of the VAA Award which encourages and promotes the production of works that use the moving image.
The meeting will be opened by the message of the Italian Ambassador to South Africa Paolo Cuculi as a testimony of how important are the exchange projects that cross ideas and cultures.
At the end of the event, the new Call will be opened and published.

The 3rd Edition of the VAA includes a new prestigious partner GRENZE.Arsenali fotografici, the experimental photography festival in Verona that will host the selection of the finalists and the winning artists.

On the web platform https://vaa.webinars.zone/ an archive of the two editions of the VAA held in past years has been created, it will be possible to register for free for the webinar or even just discover the protagonists of the two editions of the Award, or the two Top 10 of the works that the jury has selected and among which has identified the winners. The works of the 20 artists involved are visible in the video section.

VAA 2019. The winners are Jabu Nadia Newman with “Untitled:Friends” and Niccolò Masini with “White time”. At Cinema Labia in Cape Town the ceremony, next screening will take place at cortoLovere Festival in Italy.

Screening and Awards Ceremony of the 2 winners and 8 finalists of the VAA-Video Art Awards 2nd edition took place on May 14th at the historic Labia Cinema in Cape Town. Now the VAA screening evening moves to Italy where the cortoLovere Festival will host the event on September 26th at the Tadini Art Academy.

The prize-giving event took place in the historic Cinema Labia, Tuesday 14 May 2019. All the 10 shortlisted works in the two selections (Italian and South African) have been projected.

The VAA – Video Art Awards is designed and promoted by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria and the International Short Film Festival cortoLovere, where the VAA Top10 will be screened again (23-28 September 2019).

Niccolò Masini CV http://www.niccolomasini.com

He studied in the classrooms of the IED in Milan, graduating in 2011 in Illustration and Animation courses. Thus began his career in the world of visual art. However, the definitive turning point accomplished by moving to the Netherlands, where he attended the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, from which he graduated in 2015 with a specialization in Audio Visual Arts. During his time at Rietveld, he has the opportunity to follow an international exchange program at RMIT University in Melbourne. The Dutch experience will open to him doors to several international experiences: Australia, Argentina, the United States, Kuwait and Canada. Winner of numerous international prizes, competitions and residences, from 2016 he began to devote himself entirely to his personal research, which he combined with commissioned work. Practicing in three continents, his work has been exhibited internationally in countries such as Australia, Canada, Argentina, Japan, Holland and Italy. To date, he lives and works between Genoa and Montréal.

“White Time” still

“White Time”

“There are a certain amount of ordinary moments in life that are con- sidered neither here or there, these are spaces for otherness, for some considered irrelevant, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.” Michel Foucault

These spaces of otherness are infinite, disposed on time framed dimensions that inexorably passes through, with or without our consideration. The experience of the traveler, consisting of a series of movements within space, producing a phenomenon of a new order, where geography overtakes knowledge. Our conception of spatiality shapes our perception of time, and, on an individual scale, defines our way of perceiving movement. Spaces trace an inventory of the adventure of knowledge, omitting nothing; knowl- edge traces cartography of known lands, omitting nothing. Acting as a prelude to a subjective perception of a suspension in time, White Time is a video installation where a simple figure stands in a not specific dimension. Surrounded by the surface of the black screen different elements interact with each other, mutating through the composition of an undefined spatial location. Niccolò Masini

Jabu Nadia Newman CV https://jabunew.tumblr.com/

Jabu Newman was born and raised in Plumstead, a suburb of Cape Town. She is 25 years old and studied at UCT, University of Cape Town, where she graduated in Political Science and then specialized in Visual and Media Arts, then deepening cinema and directing at the African Arts Institute. He works in film production and continues his artistic research with video art and photography works, mainly oriented to the exploration of human and social relations. He won the VAA award with the video “Untitled: Friends”.

Jabu Nadia Newman

“UNTILED:FRIENDS”

The title Untitled:Friends alludes to the complexity of chosen relationships, specifically how deeply bound two souls who share no family relation can be: a strong connection that no title or description can truly articulate. 

Like most of Newman’s body of work, the film specifically focuses on femme binary identity and relationships. The storyline is intentionally centered around femme friendships and simultaneously challenges and celebrates them against a backdrop of a mundane heteronormative neighborhood, where these layered and complex identities are prosecuted and undervalued. 

Untitled:Friends was shot, written, directed and edited by Newman over a period of two years and reads like a personal visual diary, in which she invites us into her childhood and teenage years in Plumstead. Come per la maggior parte dei lavori di Newman, il film pone un’attenzione particolare all’identità e alle relazioni nel mondo femminile. Il racconto è volutamente centrato su una storia di amicizia fra donne in cui contemporaneamente si sfida e si festeggia, in una atmosfera mondana, quel substrato di codici di etero-normalità in cui le identità stratificate e complesse sono perseguitate e sottovalutate. Untitled:friends è stato girato, scritto, diretto e montato da Newman nel corso di due anni e si offre come un personale diario visivo, nel quale l’autrice svela i suoi anni d’infanzia e adolescenza nel quartiere di Plumstead. (Jabu Nadia Newman)

“Untitled:Friends” still
VAA Screening Programme

VAA-Video Art Awards II Edition Italy-South Africa. CALL CLOSED

Theme “Interconnections: Legacy and Identity”. A very topical subject for this 2nd edition of the competition that Centro Di Sarro dedicates to artists under 45 who work with video and new media. Call CLOSED – UNDER SELECTION.

LUCA COCLITE and KAMYAR BINESHTARIG WIN THE VAA-VIDEO ART AWARD

The award ceremony took place a few hours ago in a busy, crowded and happy Italian Art Day at the Tsoga Centre in Philippi, Cape Town.

The event is organized by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria and the collaboration of Rainbow Media NPO and will offer the participants the opportunity to discover the vibrant artistic scene of the township in a succession of video projections inside the community centre in Samora Machel, managed by the youth of Ubuntubethu.

On the four screens the 10 short films, selected by the jury, will run:  and during the Art Day the winner of the Italian section was presented: Luca Coclite,  the italian filmmaker who got the South Africa trip award and landed in Cape Town to take part in the award ceremony. Also on show are the finalists of the South African section whose winner Kamyar Bineshtarig will get the award trip to Italy to participate in September at the International Short Film Festival CortoLovere on Lake Iseo, during which the finalist 10 videos will be shown again.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Luca Coclite, winner for the Italian category, comes from Gagliano del Capo, near Lecce. His artwork, Solitary Gardens, is inspired by the work of Elaine Summers, Fantastic Gardens (1964). The video is split into three different parts, moving from ‘giardino’ (garden), a metaphor of someone who is seeking happiness and perfection, and taking us through a great variety of well-known places in New York city representing an individualistic and solitary picture of human condition. The movie is made up of ‘Human Botanical Garden’, ‘One day everything you see will be invisible’ and ‘Anti-Souvenir’, portraying an unstable reality flowing from an earthly paradise to an illusion. Here, the solitude from the Winter Garden Atrium, the artificiality from the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the dioramas from scientific museums and, lastly, the deterioration of forgotten objects at the Dead Horse Bay lead us, in Rilke’s terminology, ‘from the visible world towards something timeless, inward and invisible’.

Kamyar Bineshtarigh, winner of the South African category, is a student at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town. Seeing homeless people using newspaper posters to sleep on in the streets of Cape Town, Bineshtarigh found the inspiring motive to create his short film, Shelter. He found it ironic that posters depicting the government’s promises for a sustainable living for the poor, were, in fact, used by the poor for a more comfortable sleep in the streets. Chuma, the actress in the film, is a fellow student at Ruth Prowse; she was a homeless artist that started drawing by burning pieces of wood turning them into charcoal and drawing portraits of other homeless people around her. She also assisted in developing the concept so that it is closest to the reality of a homeless person in the streets of Cape Town, and introduced Bineshtarigh to other homeless artists, including the trumpet players in the film.

The screening of all finalists will take place again in Italy during the CortoLovere festival (24-29 September 2018).

Italian Section:

  • 8’20” – On Time Travelling, by Ilaria Biotti
  • SOLITARY GARDENS, by Luca Coclite
  • MIGRATION, by Gilda Li Rosi
  • MANI NOSTRE/Talking Hands, by Caterina Pecchioli
  • ENTRA IN QUESTA FERITA ° il dolore da bruciare è la porta da spalancare, by Michela Tobiolo
 South African Section:
  • NOBODY WANA SEE US TOGETHER, by Nonkululeko Chabalala
  • AQUA REGALIA, by Faith XLVII
  • CONCERNING ALCHEMY, by Rory Emmett
  • SALT, by Thania Petersen
  • SHELTER, by Kamyar Bineshtarigh

VAA-VIDEO ART AWARD 10 Finalists on Show in PHILIPPI, Cape Town March 24th 2018. In September again in Italy during the CORTOLOVERE International Festival

The selection of the VAA-Video Art award Competition launched by the Luigi Di Sarro Center with the Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria concluded. The jury chose the 10 finalists of the two sections: Italy and South Africa. The finalist videos will be shown on March 24th during the Italian Art Day in Philippi, Cape Town and then again in Italy in September during the CortoLovere International Festival.