The final beneficiaries of the IDFA DocLab Creative COVID Response Support scheme will receive €2500 each “to pursue the necessary adaptations of their work,” the festival said in a statement this week. Four projects will benefit from the support.
The temporary grant scheme is designed for selected competition artists to continue adapting their work in the face of pandemic-related challenges. It is funded via redistribution of the 2020 DocLab Awards prize money. The first selection was determined in February 2021.
The DocLab statement explains the support rationale. “After more than a year of lockdowns, artists around the world are still working tirelessly to get their projects adapted, exhibited, and seen by audiences. The artists from IDFA DocLab’s latest competition program are no different. Nearly five months after the festival, many of them continue to face a precarious year of online festivals and uncertain physical events. But adapting or reimagining a full-scale artwork is a complex and costly endeavour that often comes at the artist’s expense.”
“When mounting travel and exhibition restrictions became an inescapable reality last November, IDFA’s new media team arrived at the tough realization that the works selected for the DocLab competitions could not be presented equally to an international jury. In response, the team took a cue from their selected artists: they had to adapt… Enter the IDFA DocLab Creative COVID Response Support scheme.”
The final selection of beneficiaries are:
Echoes of Silence by Tamara Shogaolu
Tamara Shogaolu’s audio-driven full dome experience, which the selection committee described as a “beautiful project [that] documents how the sound of space has been colonized over the years,” is looking to travel to other planetariums and full domes in the coming months. Currently, Shogaolu has her eye on several international exhibitions in 2021 where she would present Echoes of Silence in full dome as well as in virtual reality.
Sylvia by Ziv Schneider
The rapidly ageing virtual influencer that came to DocLab via Instagram feed and live online funeral is dead but not forgotten. Even before the art world’s current obsession with non-fungible tokens (NFT), Sylvia creator Ziv Schneider planned to expand the story with so-called digital inheritance alongside more sustainable alternatives: new and unseen media that fans can bid on and own at a virtual auction-meets-memorial. Making “imaginative and poetic use of frontier technology,” as the selection committee aptly put it, Schneider’s adaptation is currently in the research phase, with details of the future event yet to be announced.
[The Black Man in the Cosmos] by Kitoko Diva
After premiering last November in full dome at ARTIS-Planetarium, Kitoko Diva’s immersive project is set to appear at a major African show in 2021, this time following the artist’s original conception of a three-channel installation. Inspired by Sun Ra’s historic lectures and hailed by the DocLab selection committee as a vibrant film they’re thrilled to support, [The Black Man in the Cosmos] will see a new opportunity to reach a new audience that is, importantly, closely tied to the subject of the piece.
Orbit Diapason by Tabita Rezaire
Originally planned as an installation at DocLab’s annual physical exhibition, Tabita Rezaire’s astro-politico-metaphysical work ultimately premiered online as a single-channel video on the festival’s do {not} play platform. Looking ahead to the spring, upcoming exhibitions at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the Aros Museum in Aarhus will give Rezaire the chance to return to her original vision of showing Orbit Diapason as an installation, now complete with a life-size dome structure for visitors to enter as soon as museums reopen.
The first recipients of the Creative COVID Response support scheme (February 2021) were Lauren Lee McCarthy for Later Date and Dries Depoorter and Shishani Vranckx for 24h Sunset/Sunrise v2.
Furthermore, IDFA DocLab has set a deadline of July 1 for IDFA 2021 submissions. The programme is open to non-fiction artworks that use emerging media to represent reality, including digital art, web experiences, audio pieces, immersive experiences, physical installations, and live performances.
