Pixxelpoint 2021

PROGRAME

THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2021

19.00 Deep Deep Forest Exhibition Opening and Official Opening of the Pixxelpoint 2021 Festival
Nova Gorica City Gallery

The exhibit will feature the following artists:
Lavoslava Benčić (SI), BridA/Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango, Jurij Pavlica (SI), Ilya Dolgov (RU), fantastic little splash, Lera Malchenko & Oleksandr Hants (UA),s Daryna Fes (UA), Gijeong Goo (KR), PLATEAURESIDUE - Eva Pavlič Seifert × Aljaž Celarc (SI), Robertina Šebjanič (SI)

21.00 Zergon: Live Audio Improvisation
KLUB Teater, Nova Gorica

In audio improvisations, Zergon uses different modular synthesizers (Buchla and Eurorack), effects and samples taken at various locations, and blends them into an immersive, developing, spatial and pensive atmosphere.

FRIDAY, 12. 11. 2021

17:30 Wild Slovenia
Directed by: Matej Vranič (Slovenia, 2021, 83 min.), 6+
Documentary film
Small exhibition room of the Nova Gorica Cultural Center

The new film by Matej Vranič (Birds of the Lakes) takes us on a magnificent documentary journey through the splendors of Slovenia’s nature. The film showcases the diversity of our local flora and fauna, with emphasis on mammals and birds, as well as a number of interesting types of amphibians, fish, insects and plants. The film takes us into the Alpine tops and into the remote forests of the Dinaric mountains, across the Pannonian plains and deep into the subterranean caves and beneath the surface of the Adriatic. Our eyes are met with stunning details from the animal world.

Cover charge: €5, €4

19.00 Brane Zorman: Spirit of the Trees | Touch
Live performance in a spatial 3D sound with headphones
Nova Gorica City Gallery

The composition and performance Spirit of the Trees | Touch speculates about the auditory aspect of the life of trees and explores the integration of a particular part of the plant with the colony of organisms and the forest community. The audio recordings give the trees a voice over their annual and lifelong cycle, which begins and ends with silence. The silence before the tree juices flow forth in the spring, and the silence after destruction of the plants due to climate change, droughts, and wildfires.

SATURDAY, 13 November 2021

17:30 In the Forest of Huckybucky
Directed by: Rasmus A. Sivertsen (Norway, 2016, dubbed, 75 min.), 4+
Children’s animated film
Small exhibition room of the Nova Gorica Cultural Center

The puppet musical is made with stop-motion animation, based on the Norwegian classic about the Morten Woodmouse, who dwells in the Huckybucky forest with his friends, who know the true meaning of friendship! A children’s animal story, which brings out feelings of nostalgia due to parallels with the regional classic children’s show, Zverinice iz Rezije.

Cover charge: €5, €4

19:30 Maša Jazbec: What kind of future do you envision with robots?
Lecture
Small exhibition room of the Nova Gorica Cultural Center

A lecture about the interactions between man and robot, and about their harmonious co-existence.

MONDAY, 15 November 2021

18:00 Olena Kasperovych: Guided tour of the Deep Deep Forest exhibition
Nova Gorica City Gallery
Guided tour in English, with consecutive interpretation to Slovenian.

TUESDAY, 16 November 2021

16.00 Lavoslava Benčić: Machine learning for creatives
Workshop: 13+
France Bevk Library, Nova Gorica
Maximum 10 participants.
Participants should bring their laptops.

In the course of the workshop, participants learn to use algorithms for various purposes and uses, with emphasis on creative applications, where machine learning technology and generative neural networks give them unlimited options for creative expression and research.

THURSDAY, 18 November 2021

18:00 Olena Kasperovych: Guided tour of the Deep Deep Forest exhibition
Nova Gorica City Gallery
Guided tour in English, with consecutive interpretation to Slovenian.

The main exhibition at the Nova Gorica City Gallery will be open for visitors every day from 9.00am to 7.00pm from 11 until 18 November, 2021.

Olena Kasperovych

Olena Kasperovych, curator based in Kharkiv, Ukraine. As curatorial research has been working on the topics of personal and national identities perceptions, migration of plants in cultural perspectives: about understanding of local and foreign, adaptation and movement. Initiated and curates international artists residency in contemporary art centre YermilovCentre in Kharkiv. As independent curator Olena has produced several exhibition projects which were shown in Kharkiv, Dnipro and Poznan. In 2018 she joined the Liverpool Biennial team as assistant curator. In 2019 she was a participant of the Odyssee program funded by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2020 awarded the Gaude Polonia stipendium by the Polish Ministry of Culture. Studied cultural studies and art history in Kharkiv and Lviv.

Deep Deep Forest

When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.
And ah, how hard it is to say just what
this wild and rough and stubborn woodland was,
the very thought of which renews my fear!
So bitter ’t is, that death is little worse;
but of the good to treat which there I found,
I ’ll speak of what I else discovered there
(Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy)

Subconscious: Archetype of the wild forest. According to Carl Jung, the archetype of forest is a prototype of the subconscious, the same deep and difficult to reach and understand. Forest as something great, unknown, unexplored and therefore frightening and full of danger, of aggressive unconscious nature, our inner monsters and fears that have been living there from the beginning of time traced to the collective memory.

Hero’s way: forest as a place of initiation and transition. Forest as a part of space that is antagonistic to a human becomes an examination place for a Hero. In the forest Hero meets his/her fear, by overcoming which he/she comes back to his/her society in another status. The so-called rituals of initiation found in many traditional cultures are associated with the forest. They were diligently described and analysed by Mircea Eliade in his “Rites and Symbols of Initiation”.

Erich Fromm’s choice to have or to be is revealed here from the perspective of co-existence of ownership (agro-culture) and the wild untouched nature. The problem of appropriation of nature permeates all spheres of our life: from construction of metropolises to a flower pot on a windowsill. Photo-propagation of nature in a modern society becomes something unconscious and ordinary, growing and spreading to all forms of photo-activity.

Allegorical forest is a “primary matter of chaos”, in this “green chaos” heroes struggle to improve their human nature. To enter the dark enchanted forest is a transition, the realm of death, the mysteries of nature that need to be penetrated and understood. Can the forest pose the same challenge for a human of today? If we assume that for a modern human, “wild” and “hostile” conditions are not necessarily represented by the image of the forest, then there arises a question: what comes into its place? It is even more interesting to know about the “transitional places” of the present.

With the possibilities opening to us nowadays it becomes more and more difficult to get to unknown places. The use of virtual reality may be compared to such an alternative Hero’s way, safe one, it is still able to give the feeling of spatial journey and a “walked” path.

I invite artists to discover the forest phenomenon as the manifestation of depth, danger, intimacy, of the unknown, of wilderness, marginality, transition, initiation, the outside, of peace, harmony, impassable, impenetrable, pure.