Following Caucasian storytelling tradition, the project builds up a new tale coming from the people from Vladikavkaz.
Vladikavkaz is a crossroad where religions, nationalistic feelings and politics, terrorism, traditions, ethnics groups and historical injustice mix. An area where people has many confronted feelings at different levels. One can not address them directly but feeling around. The population self censors and limit their expression in many ways. Free speech is suspicious and the discourse is controlled by media. With this in mind, the aim of the project was to trace people’ thinking about very simple concepts, through their answers to a video camera. Small video cuts were edited with their answers… I was honored to interview a wide group of people with many different approaches and social/political positions: Diana Gogichaeva an art student, Zita Sozaeva, the chairman of the Public Chamber, Rector of the Institute of Management, Soltan Kabolov, the chairman of the Soviet of veterans of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, general-major of aviation, Father Savva, head of the ortodox church, Elsa Karaeva, the director of an Art school in Oktiabrskoe village, Kazek Tsalikov, obusiness man, and Georgy Boraev, returned from USA student.
Extracts of these videos were shown on different parts of the city doing a distributed narrative as the original storytelling went from mouth to ear over the times. Like drops on the public way, shop windows, public spaces, TV stores, etc, hosted parts of these videos constructing a mosaic of different thinking and opinions…
Questions are very simple and they are related to daily life: What the mountains means to you?, the marriage?, the tradition?, technologies?, the train?, the TV?, …
Sponsored by: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania
National Centre for Contemporary Arts
Held on: August 8st – 25th 2012
Location: Vladikavkaz, North Osetia Alanica