Project Mosaica: Call for Projects Award Winners

Friends and colleagues:

www.mosaica.ca is very pleased to announce that Wilfried Agricola de Cologne and Nick Fox-Gieg are the first recipients of Project Mosaica’s annual Call for Projects Award for their work on the theme Jews and Diaspora: Web Culture, New Culture, Jewish Culture. The projects portray aspects of the politics of diaspora, each in a different visual language. The completed projects will be mounted at www.mosaica.ca by September 1, 2005.

Wilfried Agricola de Cologne: “Family Portrait”

Wilfried Agricola de Cologne’s collaborative Net-based project "Family Portrait" portrays three generations of the Argentinian Partnoy family, in a triple diasporic tale of survival and artistic creativity. The Partnoys escaped persecution in Europe, fleeing to Argentina where they were once again persecuted during the so-called Argentine Holocaust. Raquel Partnoy, her husband and her two daughters escaped and emigrated from Argentina. They are now visual artists, writers and poets living in the United States. For Project Mosaica, Agricola de Cologne will produce a third and final version of “Family Portrait,” including new aspects of the story and a chapter about the Partnoy family’s lost son. Agricola de Cologne’s project spotlights poignant aspects of Jewish diasporic history and focuses on those artists whose identity and work is formed
by this history.

Wilfried Agricola de Cologne is a media artist and new media curator living in Germany. His global networking project “Remembering- Repressing-Forgetting” was shown at the Bergen Electronic Arts Centre, Norway; the New Media Art Festival, Bangkok; Now Music Streaming Festival, Berlin; Invisible Networks, Chicago; BASICS Festival, Salzburg; VI Salon Y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital, Havana; File: Electronic Language Festival, Sao Paulo. Version two of “Family
Portrait” was published in September 2004 in the framework Woman: Memory of Repression in Argentina and can be seen at www.nmartproject.net/partnoy/portrait.html.


Nick Fox-Gieg: "A Good Joke"

Nick Fox-Gieg’s Web animation retells a classic joke to reflect on the current state of the diaspora. The joke is a perennial in compilations of Jewish humor. The details differ, but the scene remains the same: a priest challenges a rabbi to a debate on the spiritual condition of Jewish people. But because neither speaks the other’s language, they must communicate only through pantomime gestures.

More than just a funny story, the situation described is an all-too-common event in European history, lending the proceedings a serious edge right from the start. In some versions, the stakes are very high indeed, with the rabbi arguing for his life or the lives of the people in his care. Still more interesting, though, is the picture of cultural conflict it paints. For Fox-Gieg, responses based on ignorance or arrogance pose a danger of a subtler kind when wise and decent people choose not to educate themselves about the world they live in. The
hard-won victories of the Jewish diaspora depend on that education.

Nick Fox-Gieg is a video artist and theatrical designer. His short works have been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and on television in Canada, Israel and the Netherlands. His theatrical video design has been featured in the Festival d’Avignon production Boxed In and in the Broadway musical Squonk; he has performed his live sound and video works at Paradiso in Amsterdam and the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles. He was an artist-in-residence at the STEIM Center in 2002, and in 2001 and 2003 he was awarded fellowships by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Mosaica: Jewish Culture, Web Culture, New Culture
http://www.mosaica.ca