07/08/2023
Yesterday evening found the DokuFest audience in the garden of Lumbardhi at Ryoichi Kurokawa's show as the starting point for the big night of DokuNights. Amidst the audiovisual exploration, the entire cinema space was turned into a stage, freeing everyone from the urge to foresee what the next beat might sound like. Everything had to be a surprise.
Kurokawa's artistic practice combines digitally processed visual elements, ambiguous perceptions of what is considered emotional spaces, and the play between sound and light to create an experience not only emotional but also a remarkable physical experience. The eternal relationship between nature and what we build in it marks his work, while we find elements of the natural world are developed with what people themselves create.
The entire range of meanings that are superimposed on the places in which we live, in Kurokawa's perception, turn into spaces and buildings whose form is undone at the atomic level, having the idea that all nature and what builds us is a molecular accumulation that it holds together, and yet again at the nanoscopic level, these entities that shape us keep a distance from each other.
Man's connection with nature is one of the themes that defines Kurokawa's work, and yesterday we watched a digital description of the almost symbiotic relationship between what we build with our hands and what nature always renews. Under the vibrant rhythms of the neon lights, the forest takes over the house and lives in a symbiotic relationship with it, inhabiting its spaces that change in time while the lights pulsate the same as the musical rhythms that sometimes were (or resembled) a heartbeat, a run in a forest full of leaves, sometimes like an intimate voice in our mind.
The performance was complex as the audience was also an element of this performance, as the almost primordial primary effect of lights and sound is what builds people's behavior in circumstances where they feel completely stripped of circumstantial means, and it is only the body and mind that can control them.
Kurosawa made us reflect and enjoy an incredible performance as DokuNights continued and the audience was directed to the Andrra Stage where Willikens and Ivkovic, the electronic music duo that creates through building sounds that resemble cinematic musical journeys, awaited us.
Their musical style combines groove music with soothing rhythms making room for dreams in their music, and where better than on Andrra Stage.
The residents at Salon des Amateurs always think of expanding the space of freedom in music by combining different musical genres, and by reflecting and elaborating on the idea of how people listen and enjoy music. Like their practice of connecting telepathically to play music, it reshapes their creativity leaving room for surprises and unexpected emotions.
DokuNights continues tonight and we are waiting for you to dance along and watch the performances of Lyra Pamuk and Space Afrika from 22:00.
By: Blerina Kanxha
Photo: Elmedina Arapi
