Vadim Dumesh
Точка . Зору / Point de vue - Installation - 2023
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 25
I am writing to you on the 443rd day of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While the Armed Forces defend our land, we, civilians, are scattered all over the world. Wherever we are, we long to return home. We are connected by invisible capillaries permeating everything. The smartphone activates these ties ---each video encounter is a gesture of intimacy. 10 days and 3,000 kilometers after meeting Vadim in Paris I was standing on Freedom Square in the heroic city of Kharkiv waiting for my dear friend Dmytro. With his serviceman friend the device journeyed to the frontline. Vadim invited us to be co-authors, and we entrust you with our point of view. You see our portraits and our surroundings, trust and sincerity, unbreakable bonds, landscapes and people that are dear to us, and Ukraine that cannot be defeated.
Kateryna Semenyuk
Точка . Зору (Point of View) is a documentary co-creation project in which smartphones travel from France to Ukraine and back, passing from person to person as a relay stick and collecting their video testimonies. The project is shot in an innovative format -- double camera -- both the front and the back camera of the phone at the same time -- both the portrait of the person and what the person sees. From person to person, from city to city, from one community to another, a kaleidoscope of faces and places is intertwined with the context of war in Ukraine.
Точка . Зору is part of the ongoing PhD in research- creation of Vadim Dumesh entitled "Documentary authorship and collective creativity in the digital age" co-run by Le Fresnoy -- Studio national des arts contemporains and the University of Quebec in Montreal, supervised by Viva Paci.
Vadim Dumesh is a documentary filmmaker, researcher and journalist, with an academic background in economics, film, arts and public affairs (at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem and Sciences Po Paris). Originally from Latvia, in his works Vadim explores questions of mobility, circulation, belonging, and human condition in larger economic and political structures. He cultivates a transdisciplinary approach and is currently investigating the potential of co-creation practices, which he is developing in his doctoral thesis in artistic research and practice ʺSituated Gaze: Documentary authorship and collective creativity in the digital ageʺ co-directed by Le Fresnoy and the Université du Québec à Montréal.
