Ioana Tomici (IT): Talking Shop: Witnessing The Riots on The Beijerlandselaaan (2022)
Talking Shop: Witnessing The Riots on The Beijerlandselaaan is an audio piece of multiple voices and languages, which aims to revisit the events of January 25th 2020, that took place on the Beijerlandselaan. The work consists of recorded testimonials from shop owners and residents of the street, relaying their diverse experiences of the night in which the riots took place.
As an editor of the material gathered, IT strives to convey conversations with shop owners, who have experienced these events first-hand. Their voices amount to a more personal narrative of the riots, adjacent to those of national news coverage. Narratives at play, where personal stakes define a more nuanced approach towards the way that the street unfolds.
Bio
IT (Ioana Tomici, RO) is a media artist and audio-visual editor, based in Rotterdam (NL). Her work investigates the limits of communication, written or spoken, by constantly attempting to define, translate and process linguistic structures into a strange soup of maleable particles.
Artist Seecum Cheung extended in 2021 the invitation to Tomici for the ‘Artist as Educator’, a project as commissioned by the education department of Museum Boijman van Beuningen. Working as one multidisciplinary team, the goal of 'Working in Progress' was to simultaneously learn from one another and capture a part of life in Rotterdam-South. During a two-month process, perspectives, ideas, techniques, and art works were discussed to learn from one another and to inform the final audio-visual images.