Graduated from University of Leeds
Selected by Rebekka Kill
Cultural Travelling in Leeds Communities, 2007
Artist statement
Cultural Travelling in Leeds Communities, 2006-2007
Cultural Travelling in Leeds Communities is a research project started in October 2006 and developed during the eight following months through various visits, interactions and recordings. Following processes of an ethnographic practice, the project concentrates on notions of displacement and cultural travelling among 'invisible' community groups of Leeds, which perhaps reflect on concepts of integration, belonging and identity within a dominant culture.
Completing a series of visits among the Chinese, Polish, Sikh, Asian Muslim, Greek and West Indian community, I focus on their self-enclosed nature and their separation from the outside. Using video as a medium for documentation, I form an unobtrusive, observational approach towards the subjects filmed by statically positioning the camera inside those spaces. Entering the communities as a foreigner and stranger in their familial environments, I perform in front of the camera lens in an attempt for interaction.
The video also acts as a mediator of these events; it translates and reframes my personal experiences with real encounters in 'private' and familial spaces, into a relocated audiovisual experience for others in the public space of the exhibition. Concentrating on the technologies of video, this project attempts to explore how video can be a tool of primary research of experience of the 'invisible' and the foreign.
(Re)positioning the videos of the six communities in separate screens within my installation, I attempt to synthesise the disconnected community groups into one unanimous and 'democratic' space where they can coexist and be accessed simultaneously by the audience. The video-installation arrangement is not an attempt to offer a sense of observing 'the exotic other' through secondary encounters, but rather suggests a study on encountering these 'imagined communities', as Benedict Anderson has described them.
The constructed table, placed in the centre of the installation, acts as a meeting point for these cultures as well as a viewing position from where the audience can observe the six videos. The work presented in the exhibition, includes a private event that has already taken place in the space, which can be seen on the video loop displayed on the table. For this event, all six communities were invited to lunch together on the 25th of June, bringing their own dishes and relocating them around the dinner table. Holding a literal and metaphoric meaning, the table creates its own 'imaginary community' by dislocating the differences, behaviours and rituals of eating inside this composed space.
Selector text
On entering Janis Rafailidou's space at the University of Leeds the first thing you notice is the smell. Mmmm, food, lovely, but are we allowed to eat it? There is a large table in the middle of the room with olives, and bread and delicious snacks, the table has large benches on each side, like an over sized picnic bench. Nobody is eating yet though, and I don't want to be the first.
On the walls are a number of video screens and on each one there appears to be an event, or a conversation, or a performance, or a meal involving radically different communities. Over here, there's a Sikh community, over there Polish (I think) and at the end West Indian. There are six screens altogether and the videos have a 'fly on the wall' quality that is instantly gripping. As people enter the space, in spite of the tempting looking food, they are drawn to the video works, and these are works that the audience are spending time with. These are fascinating cultural snapshots; mesmerising and captivating.
For Rafailidou this space is a form of 'cultural bazaar where visitors are welcome to interact as foreigners inside this multicultural environment'. I don't really feel like a foreigner though, I feel like a guest. I feel welcomed but polite (I still haven't snacked), no more or less 'foreign', than the rest of these people from Leeds. This, in turn, produces a sense of Leeds as an integrated, multicultural city. But, then, I stop and think, 'am I being thoughtless about this?', I'm sure that this sense of warmth and community is not shared across Leeds. This work is an experience, I feel instantly and deeply embedded in it, I feel that I have activated it, it is probably the most 'relational' show that I have seen this year.
(Rebekka Kill, 2007)
Qualifications and training
- 2006 MA in Fine Art, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
- 2002 BA Fine Art Degree, University of Leeds, Leeds
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