International Art Ventures
ZU-UK is a company based in London that creates performance art and participatory theatre. I first heard of them when I signed up to Project Perfect Stranger, where participants from around the world were connected to an anonymous stranger for five days. For a short period each day, strangers would bond via WhatsApp messages (then voice notes, phone calls, and - finally - video calls) through a series of tasks. This came during a global lockdown, at the end of July 2020, so it was a welcome experiment and connected me with a woman in Florence, Italy: a stranger whose name I didn’t know, but who quickly found out about my hopes, fears, wishes and regrets - a friendship in reverse.
It was interesting, challenging and enjoyable, so when I heard about another ZU-UK project, Brega Parque International: A Remote Creative Lab, I was keen to sign up.
Brega Parque International
The lab was a collaboration between ZU-UK, Brazilian artists Lá da Favelinha, and Colombia art duo Nueve Voltios. The project ran over seven days in mid-November 2021, and was designed to “unlock creativity in the digital environment and transform how we make, meet and are seen.”
As with Project Perfect Stranger, participants received instructions with prompts over WhatsApp. This time, we were challenged with tasks for making, collaborating, and doing short creative assignments. We then uploaded these, knowing they might be sampled or used.
The project saw me videoing the contents of my fridge, laundry basket, and the space beneath my bed; drawing a self-portrait without looking at my face; going for a walk whilst taking pictures, then drawing a map when I got home; going for more walks and making sound recordings; and recording three conversations where I asked willing participants extremely existential questions (thanks Jon, Sarah and Charly!).
The culmination of the project was a live-mixed audio-visual event featuring work contributed by lab participants around the world. This event was designed to fall on the 2 year of the first reported case of Covid-19 in Wuhan, and aired on YouTube on 5th December.
Viva the Live!
Of course, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to watch Viva the Live! as it went out. It was hosted by the artists in Colombia, Brazil and in London, and included pre-recorded performances, but also live segments where the participants’ contributions were used.
The duo Las Áñez from Colombia performed live against a backdrop of self-portraits, made in all sorts of interesting ways. Here’s my less-inspired attempt behind the musicians (click any of the images in the following galleries to enlarge them):
Later on, Arquea, VJs from Colombia, live-mixed photo and sound contributions from participants. Here, they seemed to get attached to a picture I took of an inset post box:
Later, another picture I’d taken of a fairly banal view down a street got mixed with a photo from another participant, which got mixed with someone else’s alien, and then my map started to fade in behind:
It’s a bizarre and inspired situation to have pictures I took and images I’d hastily drawn being mixed by artists thousands of miles away, and blended with performances and photographs from different places.
The video is here. And if you like the idea of taking part in a similar creative and collaborative venture, you can sign up to ZU-UK’s mailing list.
