Captured Landscapes - human portraits
A Hungarian-Cuban collaboration for
human-centered art
in the Americas
The project has been honoured with financial support by the Shelby Steele Foundation.
Background
The idea for this project originated on a rainy evening, when I was stuck in a cab, near Times Square in NYC. Sitting in the car protected from the downpour, I had nothing better to do than look at the huge, flashing billboards that overshadow - and overlight - that area of the city. I was looking at the tourists flooding in and out of the hotels, and at the food delivery workers on bicycles braving the rain, trying to make a living. The longer I looked at the scene, immersed in the flow of honking cars and stop-and-go traffic, the more I realized how tiny people on the streets were compared to the advertising screens and their aggressive messaging. I started feeling as if I had entered Ridley Scott’s science fiction movie, Blade Runner, in real life. I took a few random photographs through the water-streaked car window, and the next morning I took some photos from the 15th floor of a building facing the square. When I looked at the pictures on a large screen later that day, I couldn’t help but notice the dystopian message of the images. The pictures reflected a space where digital communication and commercial propaganda overshadowed aspects of life I considered human. Shallow entertainment and commercial advertising from gigantic screens were forcing the city behind a mask of fast-pace sensationalism, and uniformity. The mask was looming large, making it harder and harder for people to see behind it; it was becoming the face of the city.
While the area around Times Square clearly represents only a slice of New York, it is a striking visual metaphor for the world we live in. A world of advertising billboards, social media posts and bottomless, simplistic newsfeeds. It is a world ruled by slogans, clichés, impersonal language, scripted communication, superficial connections and pre-packaged relationships. A world where authenticity gets lost, if not outright punished.
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Such a world is well-known to all of us who grew up in Eastern Europe at some point in the twentieth century. We know how such worlds are born and where they invariably lead to. We know it less through experience with commercial advertising, but from our history of authoritarian regimes, both from the left and the right of politics. We know from personal experience that the basic methods and the functions of slogans, whether for commercial or for political purposes, are the same: obliterate the personal or the individual, and glorify the uniform, the impersonal, the communal.
The photos of Times Square made me think about connections between my past and the present. They made me think about the effects of propaganda on our consciousness. They made me wonder about the meaning of public art … where does art end and where does propaganda begin... Then I remembered forms of resistance in Easter Europe to the slogan-based external reality that surrounded us… I recalled our sounds and silences, our images, our films, our theaters… our art. Rarely shiny, hardly ever glamorous, almost always personal. I remembered the importance of the private, the intimate, the individual. And I decided that the time has come to create a project about the past and the present. About slogans, clichés and propaganda, about their influence on consciousness. About art, art as resistance, art as revolution, art as refuge from the effects of the ideological. And about individual lives within the flow of all that.
Always attracted by multimedia formats and comparative contexts, I landed on the idea of a series of photographs and personal interviews in Cuba and in New York, accompanied by music composed to these photographic and interview archives. I knew that the best musician to work with me on such a project would be Elio Villafranca. I called him, described the idea to him, and I asked if he would be interested in working with me. When he said yes, Captured Landscapes was born.
goals:
inform and to entertain by merging art with documentary
2. reimagine diversity, create inclusivity
While raising awareness to the influence of propaganda on the way we see the world, I also want the photos to celebrate human life and human experience, as they naturally happen within a wider social context. I would like to create human portraits and document life events that will open current North American cultural conversations to perspectives that originate from and represent the wider world.
I wish to create a space where people can freely connect based on shared personal or historical experiences, unburdened by the politics of gender and race. Contrary to what North American cultural warriors would make us believe, most immigrants to this country naturally find commonality in our shared knowledge of economic, cultural and social consequences of war, dictatorship, revolution, internal displacement, post-war rebuilding and so on, which we have had to deal with over the past hundred years. Those experiences shaped the context of our lives and influenced the life-changing decisions we made. For the most part, these experiences have not been part of the North American experience, so commonalities based on those experiences remains a blindspot, or a politically inconvenient reality in the United States. Looking from an immigrant’s perspective, the real difference in ‘lived experience’, to continue using the local jargon of the day, does not result from differences in skin color, but from personally lived circumstances of life and of history.
While In the United States much has been said about the importance of remembering and celebrating diverse histories, in reality most immigrants who arrive here are expected to abandon an authentic reading of their histories in order to conform to projected ones based on racial labels tenaciously hanging over the North American imaginary.
Choosing Cuba and New York as sources of inspiration, I wish to continue connecting my own history and my family’s lived experiences in Eastern Europe with the Caribbean, (see my previous documentary project in Haiti), and with North America, where millions of people live who come from not only these two regions but from other parts of the world where war and dictatorships have routinely been shaping the context of daily life over the past hundred years.
creative outcomes:
Photographs for physical exhibition
extensive online gallery
jazz and latin-jazz inspired by the photographs
Artists’ previous work together
an interview-essay by Ildi Tillmann about Elio Villafranca’s music,
Cuban culture and American takes on history.
Motto:
“How can we really get to know each other? By abolishing the frontiers.” - Andrei Tarkovsky
Elio:
“My first album released in the United States is titled Incantations/Encantaciones (2003) and the songs Oguere’s Cha [based on a lullaby with mixed creole lyrics] and Negrita Prende la Vela [based on a Columbian folk song] are from that. It kind of reflects the feeling I had after I first arrived to America where everything is so divided [categorized], you know, they told me “well, if you are Cuban you play salsa, if you are from America you play jazz, if you play Cuban music it has to include drums”...everything felt very chopped up. And I have always known that this was not correct, that all the music of the Americas has the same roots, these divisions in music are actually divisions that we created, music itself is not actually divided.”
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Bio - Ildi Tillmann
I am a photographer and writer, working at the crossroads of art, documentary, commercial photography and narrative journalism. I was born and raised in Hungary, I lived in Israel in the mid1990s, and I moved to the US in 2000. I have a Law Degree from my native Hungary, and MA in Africana Studies from SUNY, Stony Brook, where my graduate research focused on culture and politics in the Caribbean. During my graduate years I started learning and practicing photography.
Over the past years I have worked as an independent photographer and essay writer. My work explores the narrative potential of photography, with an emphasis on art-based documentary. I am interested in revealing cultural connections and focusing on what connects artists and people around the world. I speak several languages, among them Spanish (relevant for the Cuban part of my project), and I believe in communicating with people in the language they feel the closest to. I think about art as a common language for us all. I advocate for artistic practices that foster connection and mutual understanding between people and cultures, which can discover the shared aspects of human experience in a variety of different contexts.
For a full bio, publications, awards, exhibitions or to see my work, please visit the relevant sections of my website.
Bio - Elio Villafranca
Born in Pinar del Rio province of Cuba, Elio is a classically trained composer and jazz pianist. He received his musical degree at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba in piano, percussion, and composition. Since his arrival in the United States, Elio has been working at the forefront of the music world, fusing classical, jazz, and the traditions of the African diaspora. Faithful to his Caribbean upbringing and cultural heritage, Elio’s music offers to connect, rather than to divide, whether musical genres or ethnic and cultural communities.
Currently based in NYC, Villafranca is a jazz faculty member at The Juilliard School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a Steinway artist, a two-time Grammy nominee, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of various other prestigious awards. For full bio, awards, acknowledgements and to sample Elio’s work, visit his website here.
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