Cinesthesia

In December 2018 we were invited by Brighton University BA Photography students to speak on the subject of collaboration. Having organised a number of workshops and discussions in the past year with University students across the South East, we shared about our experience and ways we have been instigating collaboration between students. On each occasion, new works were created on the basis of participation and working together during these activities. We discussed instantaneous work which participants created in the space for a few hours, using limited materials, working with each other and complying to rules set by us. Following our talk at Brighton University, we prompted a crit for students there, who presented their work to the group of familiar and unknown faces. This was a powerful experience, allowing us to feel part of an institution for the evening.

To mark their second year studying at Brighton University, the same Photography students have recently worked together with a group of Moving Image students towards an exhibition. ‘Cinesthesia’ presents the collaboration between BA Moving Image students exploring the subjects of sight and sound through the lens. Simultaneously, as part part of the show, students have used the language of Photography to blur the borders between fact and fiction. They have done so through investigating a vast range of themes including archives, queerness, family and working class stories, surrounding the innocent seaside towns and tourist destinations such as Brighton.

One of the Photography students part of the exhibition, Antonia Nicolaides, is showing her most recent work ‘Nόστος [Nostos]’, consisting of her late grandfather’s archive, who used to be a political photographer in Cyprus. The archive follows public figures, capturing the life before and after the war in Cyprus, in 1974. Prior to the fall of the government in Cyprus, images were used as a main form of propaganda displaying a seemingly content and pleasant way of life. The photography showing life after, just as indoctrinating, present a fragment of the past with a notion of a historical and disruptive event. Antonia uses the archive to translate the experiences and past of her homeland to herself but also to her current home, distant from the Eastern Mediterranean history. Nόστος [Nostos] means a homecoming or a homeward journey as a literary subject or topos [place], referencing the return of Odysseus and other Greek heros from the Trojan War, in Homer’s Odyssey.

‘Cinesthesia’ opens on 18th January, from 5.30 to 8pm at 154 Edward Street, Brighton, BN2 0JG and will be open to the public from 19th to 31st January, 10am – 6pm, Monday to Friday, and Sunday 11am – 4pm.

^{Images by Antonia-Maria Nicolaide}
^{Text by Lina Ivanova}

Revolv Collective

Cinesthesia