The W:OW Project

Stay or fly away?

NEW screenings:
WOW.18/USA, 21 July – 14 December 2018 @ Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles/CA
Kunst im Dialog, 3 August 2018, 21.00-22.30: Video night LITVAI gallery for photography, Landshut (Germany)

One of the most neglected aspects about refugees is that they are in a situation of emergency in which they have to take a decision immediately, and whatever they decide, there is no turning back. Just as the butterfly in this video: “Fourteen seconds to decide, will you stay or fly away?” Whether the butterfly decides to stay or to fly, the circle closes anyway and takes away any possibility to go back on the tracks.

The video is part of the project Korporal Zoo, a series of movies which deal with the relationship between animals and human beings studied from several perspectives: cultural, social, environmental.

The video is part of The Refugee Film Collection

title: Stay or fly away?
technique: Experimental video and animation
length: 0’49”
year: 2015
visual and sound: Maria Korporal

Breaking Borders – the video

“Breaking Borders” is the evolution of my interactive installation “Die Grenzen der Sprache”, which I presented in April-May 2017 as part of the exhibition “Update 17” in Gallery VBK, Berlin.
see the dedicated page, with a video of the vernissage

The work presents the statement “Die Grenzen der Sprache sind die Grenzen der Welt” by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The German word “Grenzen” has a double meaning and the phrase can be translated in two ways: “The Limits of Language are the Limits of the World” or “The Borders of Language are the Borders of the World”.

The installation consisted of a mini-projector and a computer with mouse and round keyboard. The projection was a round video of an endlessly turning wall that had totally enclosed the world. When you clicked on the image, a box appeared where you could enter text. The visitors of the exhibition were invited to write a word or a very short text. This was less simple than it seemed: the round keyboard did not have all the letters of the alphabet, so peope had to be inventive.
Sending the text, the wall broke and you could see the open sky with floating texts: all the words that the visitors had entered, which were stored in a database. So, the more the exhibition progressed, the more words floated in the sky.

In the first part of the video “Breaking Borders”, I present the installation and some scenes of the work in action during the exhibition; in the second part, the complete collection of words float in the sky above Tempelhof, an abandoned airport in Berlin, which is nowadays a field of freedom, where people of different cultures and different backgrounds peacefully stay together.

The incomprehension between different cultures – the most important cause of the problems in the world – can only be combated if people are willing to understand each other’s language and communicate with each other, even if that is not easy.
(MfK)

Screenings:
• vanaf 11 mei 2020: Bologna in Lettere 2020, het festival online.
• festival WOW.19 / Bulgaria @  The Quarantine Film Festival, Varna – 12-14 July 2018
• group exhibition RiVOLTA CELESTE, from 8th December 2017 to 8th January 2018 at the Museo Comunale in Sant’Oreste, Italy.
read about the exhibition (italian)

title: Breaking Borders
technique: Experimental video and animation
length: 5’36”
year: 2017
music in the first part: Bravo – Mehrl – Olivera – Taveira – Italiano: “It is raining more than twice” (excerpt) from the album “En la vuelta de la voz”.
concept, camera, animation, effects and montage: Maria Korporal