SCREENING BATTLE #01

Urban practices and ideas for movements:
Programmed and invited by the videast Jérôme Fino, Brad Downey and The Wa participate to the first "Screening Battle". Sometimes they work together sometimes not but are related by their common interest in the action as an art form. Dealing their own permission, Brad Downey and The Wa use public spaces as a tool for communicate. Jérome Fino uses his camera as a notebook for notes and screening as moment for dialogues.

 
The Wa is an artist in the sense of Robert Filliou " Art is what make life more interesting than art “. His work is based on a creative way to ask question to the public space and his statement, sometime really spontanious and out of any archives sometimes preparing project for several months, there s no rules in his way to produce but one target makes sure that the message communicate to everybody.
He start by graffiti but quickly found out that this " art " was dedicated to an elite " the writers elite " that the reason why he decide to use all kind of medium and enlarge the audience. To him the public space must be used to communicate and not only to support consuming pulsing but more to create an exchange with the citizens on different topics, since 2004 he s leading (with F.A) a campaign on garbage in Berlin trying to make people putting the empty bottle on the ground instead of putting in the garbage in order to support bottle collector .The answer was a orange sticker (colour of the Berlin’s garbage) just a bit bigger than the one he did, made by the company that own the garbage then this project turned to some mail exchange between him and the company that are collected in order to be published….

Since 2005 he worked together with Jerome Fino on a movie " One week with The Wa " realized in different places in the world (Hong-Kong, Paris, Berlin, Marseilles, Shanghai, Brussels….), showing him making different actions in different places one action per day.

Jérôme Fino is a video artist slips into the character of an entomologist researcher. Most of a time is running after action to film. Recently it's some musicians that he observes under the lens of his microscope. At the border of the documentary, his films show a fragmented image of an agitation during performances. Since 2007, he regularly participates on the realisation of urban performances with Brad Downey, The Wa and Franz Acke. The rest of the time he organise concert for his grandmother and do the speaker on Radio Panik each third Wednesday (Brussels).

There are multitudes of signals and systems that govern our cities and imperceptibly determine our everyday movement.
Artist Brad Downey stakes a claim for the right of the individual to interpret and understand these systems, and thus regain power in the public arena. As a public, we are acclimatized to these signs and beacons, and their subtle manipulation and proliferation can go undetected. Brad Downey, via his art, shines a light on this institutional regulation of public behaviour. By wider awareness of these controls, his viewing public, he hopes, will gain greater understanding of his own urban and social situation. Subtle, comic and very often provocative, Downey aims to surprise the viewer by illuminating how public and private property, and urban space and personal experience, overlap in an era of increasing privatization. He finds forgotten remnants of urban architecture to re-invent and rejuvenate. These are then re-inserted into the everyday landscape. The works are a temporary disruption, usually remaining in place for as short a time as a few minutes, but also sometimes becoming a permanent fixture in the landscape of the metropolis. Brad Downey uses film, sculpture, painting and drawing, among other media, and is currently situated in Berlin.