Gdansk Dolne Miasto / Downtown Gdansk

Kristina Leko, 2000
56' Hi 8/beta SP/DV
Single channel video (unlimited edition)
In Polish
Cinematography by project participants and Kristina Leko
Video editing by Igor Kožić
Produced by Kristina Leko and Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland

With the support of the City of Gdansk and Apexchange Amsterdam


Context / Artist Statement

The video was made during a week-long workshop with eleven schoolgirls in downtown Gdansk, Poland in January 2000 as part of my project "Exchanging Biographies" (see public space project archive). The neighborhood was known for extreme social vulnerability: high rates of violence and crime, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, and illegal immigration from the former USSR. I wanted to provide the local children with an opportunity for creative expression by inviting them to participate and help create a documentary. Through my project, together with the organizers, we hoped to initiate a community platform that would begin to address the problems the children were facing. Our theme was autobiography: past, present, future. We wrote, read, and talked about our experiences and hopes. Then we filmed for three days, right at the beginning we were attacked and robbed in the streets, so the parents organized themselves to act as our bodyguards. The video was presented in several public screenings at the Laznia Center of Contemporary Art, which is also located in downtown Gdansk. The screenings attracted a large audience of school children and their parents.

Synopsis

This video documentary critically portrays a larger social reality through the eyes of children and explicitly invites adults to act and bring about change. It is a collaborative participatory piece that consists of eleven stories; we see, one after another, eleven young girls between the ages of 8 and 12 telling or reading excerpts from their autobiographies at different locations in a run-down neighborhood. The video was recorded in the places chosen by the girls according to their judgment and feelings. Some of them invite us into their homes and show us their rooms, toys, family members and pets, while others tell their stories in public or semi-public spaces - backyards, gardens, schoolyards, streets. Sometimes they operate the camera themselves, with voice-over commentary; sometimes they are filmed by other girls or by the artist. The girls talk about their lives, their futures, and their aspirations, and in the process become critical of the neighborhood and community in which they live. In this way, they outline and reflect on local problems such as crime and drug abuse, limited safe spaces, etc., and call for solutions.

Video communication project is a term that Leko coined for her first participatory video project in Gdansk, Poland, and has since used for her participatory and/or activist video projects. It refers to the fact that the medium of video is used to create an exchange between project participants, but also to communicate engaging content to the audience. The term was first published in her artist statement for the project Sarajevo International, 2001.

 

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