This is a festival that lives up to its name: UFO. Because in the multitude of cultural events in France, this one is original in more ways than one. Objectif Vidéo Nice, since that is its real name, is in its 8th edition. Here, there are no dedicated stands, held by galleries or screenings in cinemas. The first idea, which we owe to Odile Redolfi, director of the Hôtel Windsor in the city center of Nice, lies in making the rooms of her establishment available for the presentation of works by artists from different horizons.
For Odile Redolfi, it is an extension of her artistic commitment: instead of transforming this family “inn” with a glorious past into a sanitized luxury hotel with indecent opulence. It has preserved the cachet of yesteryear of a place where hospitality and art form an alchemy that continues to surprise and seduce. Not very common on this Côte d’Azur which caters to the flashy real estate appetite of unscrupulous developers. Courage, passion and perseverance. It had to be a UFO!
For this new edition, placed under the sign of madness (which ended on December 4), the extravagant journey started at the Windsor to continue in other hotels, including the West End, on this valiant walk of the English, facing the Mediterranean. Places scattered in different neighborhoods, including the 109in the former slaughterhouses, came to lend a hand to the event.
Walking through these rooms was worth opening presents, sort of Christmas boxes from which emerged not rabbits but images each more surprising than the next. It would be a lie to say that we have been under a permanent spell. But what emerged from this journey is essential. The image is not only the retransmission of a capture. She is above all a medium. It allows the person who creates it to take the viewer to poetic or erotic, political or playful territories. With or without music, with or without words, the video provokes reflection, encourages questioning, outlines answers.
Difficult to talk about all the facilities as there were so many. The Prix Ovni Sud Émergence (which rewards emerging regional artists) was awarded to Clémence Elman and Léonard Contramestre. As its authors present, “This is the story of a shoot in the Camargue which only cost €37, the price of a beige corduroy suit negotiated at a flea market and a pair of cowboy boots bought on the internet”. Using several screens (placed on the chests of drawers and the bed) we are drawn into a spatiotemporal loop that freezes the story. However, it is about a questioning on the incapacity to develop a narration by using references and processes specific to the cinema but whose succession of identical scenes where the angle and some accessories change, causes an astonishing stutter. This is called Tornerò and lasts 15′ 54”.
Wilfrid Nakeu, an artist from Cameroon working in Paris, received the Cosmopolis Prize. He presented Spiritual Reconnection of African Politics, NFT 2022. Her work takes the forms of performance, music, slam, photography, sculpture, painting or video. In 2021 he collaborated with Gisela Ewe on the production of a joint binational work that explores the “Colonial traces hidden in the urban space, representing perspectives and images buried in memory, marginalized. » This is also what he does with this video where he wonders “if one can speak of an independent African policy. I expect there to be a debate”, he confided to Humanity. A video where elements of extracts from speeches of African leaders follow one another accompanied by his paintings, a mixture of industrial acrylic and that resulting from his own pigments. “The video projected onto the bedroom wall is just one part of the process”, he insists. On the bed a canvas on which a character with a face like a voodoo mask, with a mouth wide open, like a cry of suffering. In a disproportionate perspective, he extends his arm. The hand is extended. Rifle cartridges are placed there. “It is the image of the people who undergo power”says Wilfrid Nakeu.
OVNI also welcomed Irène Pittatore, herself present in a bathtub in the bedroom, as if reflecting her videos filmed with a smartphone, 12 out of 21 of which take place in a… bathtub. A story of containment. This is Covid-19 Isolation Diary (40′). Stuck with her husband in the small Italian town of Ospedaletti, in Liguria, the artist had to use the bathtub because she could not get the faucet in her kitchen sink repaired. A diary, all out of step, in irony. A mise en abyme of his confined weeks.
Romain Carré, young visual artist (born in 1997) who says it all “I am from a generation that is more internet than television, Iexplore “contemporary issues”. He especially likes the diversions of popular video formats broadcast on the web to change the discourse – “quite tough, complex, even political” – and therefore the purpose. So here is Unboxing 2022 (20’33”). In a dystopian near future, an anonymous youtuber performs an unboxing. The parcels and letters that reach her retrace one by one the era in which she evolves. This one, sketched in a roundabout way, harbors ambiguities. The seriousness of the facts associated with this matter is read lightly, in an entertaining tone.
A crush on entering the room directed by Elsa Parisot and her beautiful film, The Woman at the End of the Water (5’23“), between music video and trailer. Idea that arose from press clippings of 1901 reporting a creature half-nymph, half-magician. Wonderful images between Atlantis and Atalante which is reminiscent of early cinema where the illusion was still poetic.
Another favourite, the work of Yoann Ximenes, The Wanderers’ Symphony (23’00”), a form of contemplation in real time which transposes the movement of the planets into sound using cymatics (combining loudspeaker, light, water and projection optics).
The guest of honor of this edition was Ukrainian multimedia artist Oksana Chepelyk, since 2007 curator of the kyiv International Festival of Social Sculpture. Among the installations, let’s mention La Fiancée de Tchernobyl (2017-2020, 48′) by Isagus Toche with the collaboration of Iryna Bilobrodska. A wedding dress made up of original gas masks attached to each other to form a feminine silhouette, embellished with a white veil, a traditional Ukrainian flower crown and long colored ribbons hanging from the headdress which float according to the wind. A specter haunting a countryside. Fascinating and chilling at the same time.
A great range of new productions. As Nathalie Amae, the artistic director of OVNI, puts it, “the festival is this time in balance that brings us together at the very place where the artists operate a displacement, often radical, of all our expectations. » Successful bet.