captured Landscapes - Human Portraits
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A Hungarian-Cuban collaboration for pro-human art and education in the Americas
The project has been honoured with starter financial support by the Shelby Steele Foundation. Thank you for believing in us! We also enjoys the backing of Free Black Thought, the Institute for Liberal Values and FAIR for All.
Background
The idea for this project came to me on a rainy evening last December, in a cab, near Times Square. Stuck in traffic but protected from the downpour, I had nothing better to do than observe the huge, flashing billboards that overshadow - and overlight - that area of the city.
I was watching the tourists flooding in and out of the hotels, and the food delivery workers on bicycles, braving the rain, trying to make a living. The longer I looked at the scene, the more I realized how tiny people on the streets were compared to the advertising screens and to the aggressive messaging.
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 ignore their dystopian message. In the space they reflected, digital communication and commercial propaganda overshadowed aspects of life I considered human.
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 news feeds. 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 art … where does art end and propaganda begin... I remembered intellectual resistance in Eastern Europe to the slogan-based external reality that surrounded us, 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 their effect on our consciousness. About art as resistance, art as refuge from the effects of the ideological. About as the space where we can contemplate the shared knowledge and experiences of the human race.
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:
To create art for education by combining art and documentary
explore the narrative potential of photography and music
Offer an immigrant perspective on empathy and inclusivity
Besides examining the influence of propaganda on the way we see the world, I also want the photos to center human life and human experience as they naturally happen within a wider social/historical context, as opposed to a parochial one that centers only on North America.
I wish to create an artistic space where people can freely connect based on personal 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 find commonality in our shared experiences, regardless of our gender, or of the assigned racial box we are invariably put in. Such experiences include the economic, cultural and social consequences of war, dictatorship, revolution, internal displacement, post-war rebuilding and so on. Experiences that we, unlike North Americans, have had to deal with over the past hundred years. Commonalities based on those experiences remain a blind-spot, and a politically inconvenient reality for activists in the United States.
While much is being said about the importance of remembering and celebrating diverse histories, in reality most immigrants who arrive to this country 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, dominating both the political and the cultural landscape.
What we will create:
Photographs for physical exhibition
Two online galleries: one from Cuba and one from New York
Short, written stories to accompany the photographs
A full-evening jazz (New York) / latin-jazz (Cuba) performance - music inspired by the project photographs
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Bio - Ildi Tillmann
I am a photographer, writer, and a mother of two, working at the crossroads of art, documentary, commission-based 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 professional photography.
I have been working as an independent photographer and essay writer over the past five years, exploring the narrative potential of photography and art-inspired documentary. My work centers on finding connections between histories where mainstream narratives suggest that none exist. I have written essays for the Journal of Free Black Thought and Root Quarterly, among others, and I am a grantee of FAIR in the Arts, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and of the Shelby Steele Foundation.
I speak several languages, including Spanish, and I believe in communicating with people in the language they feel the closest to. I think about photography and music as means of communication for people who do not share a spoken language. I advocate for mutual respect and understanding between people as individuals, as opposed to people assigned to - or signing up to belong to - politically convenient identity groups.
For a full bio, awards, exhibitions or to see my work, please visit the relevant sections of this website.
You can listen to a conversation between Eli Steele, Shelby Steele and myself, moderated by Monica Harris, executive director of FAIR for All, here.
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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