Piotr Filipiuk (Poland) – Hotel Paraiso, 2017, 06:016
In the summer of 2014, I was on holiday in Tarifa, camping on the land of a farmer we made friends with. During our stay there, more than two hundred migrants from Africa landed on the beaches nearby. For several days one of the migrant groups was stationed in a sports centre, adjacent to the farm were we had set up our camp.
In producing the video I made an attempt to recreate my own emotions evoked by the situation at the campo in Tarifa – the coming into contact of people from opposite continents, the neighbourly ‘closeness’ at arm’s length, while on the other hand – a barrier additionally reinforced by the presence of law enforcement services.
The video consists of images which I began to record en route from Poland to Spain, landscapes of Tarifa recorded for the needs of the family archive, followed by shots of our migrant-neighbours, and snippets of press releases from local newspapers.
One of the elements constituting the audio part of the work is questions asked by a teacher of the short course in Spanish I attended before going on holiday.
Piotr Filipiuk
Visual artist mainly focusing on video and Multimedia Art Installation.
Graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Lecturer at the Faculty of Art at the Pedagogical University of Krakow and associate of the Video Community.
He has presented his works at multiple collective and solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Art Agenda Nova, Zbiornik Kultury Krakow, Festival of Young Art Przeciąg, Szczecin, Wozownia Toruń; Waterside Project Space London, Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Beit Berl College Israel).
In his artistic practice he studies and explores areas from the fringes of culture and subculture, energy of blocked behaviours nesting under the surface of established laws, customs, traditions, and generally understood propriety.