Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
University of South Wales
Diario de un retrato, [Journal of a Portrait] prose and sound contribution to the Montevideo Biennale multiplatform Installation, September 2011
Diario de un Retrato began in 2010 and is the third collaborative project between Des Barry and Diego Vidart. Altogether five artists from five different countries (Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, Wales and Norway) participated. Three documentary photographers, a writer and a curator proposed to generate a space for discussion, interchange and creativity in which they would analyze the role of photography, of reality and temporality, based on the creation of a multilingual and multiplatform narrative. During the preparation for the third Montevideo Biennale of Photography, the group of artists was invited by the organizers to install an exhibition, to explore the narrative limits of photography. To do this Barry and Vidart created a collective alter-ego, Esko Tikanmäki, son of a Finnish Tango musician, Matti Tikanmäki. Using a documentary format, Vidart, Barry and Helgeson travelled to Kitee in Finland to gather objects and images to make Esko ‘real’, as if Esko himself had collected these images and objects on his final journey there after the death of his father. Esko began by writing a blog in which he presented the early search, the objects he found, which he constructed and created. For the Montevideo Biennale, the collaborators decided to take Esko’s material and re-contextualize it. ‘Diario de Un Retrato,’ a multi-media exhibition, opened at the Biennale in September 2011. This url <www.vimeo.com/29482162> connects to the film that was projected onto opposite walls of the exhibition space and which includes the handwritten illustrated diary written by Des Barry. An additional video from the project, which was not part of the exhibition is available at <https://vimeo.com/30097742> A fictionalised interview, this tells the Esko story that happened in Malmo, Sweden, done with curators of Signal Artspace, Malmo. Please also see the supporting documentation presented in hard copy.
