KN

Face to Face was initially a video-installation in which various men and women answer to 5 questions concerning love. These people were left alone with a camera, facing their own image on the video monitor. The questions, written over a paper, approached different aspects of love and provoked the participants to reflect and expose themselves. During the exhibition, the artist gradually edited the recorded material and projected the video next to the recording cabine. Later that video evolved to a 15 minutes single-channel video. The faces images that play in slow motion, added to the profusion of voices that alternate in both audio channels and the subtitles that translate them, defy the spectator: he must create his own narrative, combining his reflection to the material presented to him. Project winner of the Exhibition Grant by São Paulo Cultural Center and the Production Grant by Recife Arts Week. Video recipient of the Best Video Award at the Videoformes Festival in Clermont-Ferrand.

"In Face to Face, at the Paço das Artes, Kika Nicolela utilizes a common procedure of documentary films, the interview, but twists it, converting it in 'auto-interview'. Facing myself at the LCD video camera screen, I answer the questions the artist left for me in a piece of paper. Alone in front of the camera, I have a time to answer the questions to myself. The work investigates our relationship to love. And, why not, with ourselves, with our mirror, with our shadow. 'Love is a shadow theatre', it occurred me to define.”

Paula Alzugaray, Face to Face, excerpt

“When Nicolela gives to the visitors your list of questions and invites them to answer in front of a camera in a reserved room, yet within an exhibition space, she is not demanding little. And there are many moments of suspension and silence sewing the answers. The video shows precisely those images. One after another, the faces of those interviewed looking thoughtful, without words, in moments of doubt and dilated hesitation summed in the edition. The images show what is not able to listen, what is not possible to say. The sound - which sometimes comes from one sound speaker, sometimes from the other - overrides the answers. Every attempt to define love, whether yes or no, whether it sets free or imprisons, whether someone loves, whether another no longer loves anymore. It’s curious how the responses echo, are repeated and reverberated; we see the sum of particularities settling the universal.” 

Carla Zaccagnini, Face to Face, excerpt