Video Documentary
2013
Back in 2013, a few month after I moved to Barcelona, I met an Argentinian artist. He was that kind of character you know would make it into a documentary.
I met with him, and I expose the idea about video-graphing his life and work. We weren’t sure, in the beginning, how to put everything together and I though that it could be interesting to let one of his works present his other works. This is when I came up with an open call, a competition, for him to create an alphabet, which would introduce us to the other alphabets he produced.
This Argentinian artist was basically an alphabet creator. He made them out of books, trash, tools, bicycle parts… or anything he had at hand to shape letters. Asking him to request other people to send photographs of shapes resembling letters, gave me the chance to follow on his adventures.
It seemed like I had a good free flow script for my documentary, although, as if we were in a tarot card reading, I lifted up the Devil card.
I did learn a good lesson from this project, as I understood that not all that shines is gold. The competition actually got big, it went global. We started receiving proposals from all around the globe, and I lost the artist I was filming a life about. Success went to his head. What once was a fun documentary, it became an ego war and I lost my project. But, it reinforced my human and creative values.
I was not proud of this project for many years, as I felt how all my efforts were taken away. Now, this is one of the projects I’m more proud of, as I was able to use all my expertise in full: creative, film and media director. This project gave me the opportunity to create and conduct a major project which ended in a multitudinous exhibition. All on my own, i worked on all texts, marketing, social media, locations, staff, photographs and videos. I watched and videoed how a human being can loose his mind when fame knocks on his door, and I learnt to stand my ground and defend my own individual creativity. I might have lost a good project, but it prepared me for a better one: Stambolsky as a creative force started to shape its identity.
From this page, I invite you to find those letters hidden around us…
