Every year, Through Waters assembles an itinerant photo collection that travels to cities all around the world showing international photographers’ views about water. This exhibit is enriched with a series of local relevant actions, specifically designed concerning each place’s conjuncture and relationship with water, by linking artists and water specialists with the participants.

When TW 2013/14 Edition lands in Cambodia, it becomes ARTWATERENESS, amplifying its scope by reaching, not only cities, but also villages. This project consists on a set of actions which takes artistic stimulus and resources to the rural Cambodia, which represents 80% of the country population, that wouldn’t access this kind of artistic assets otherwise.

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ARTWATERENESS WITH SPECIALISTS

Together with UNESCO Cambodia, two local WASH NGOs, RACHA and 1001 TEUK SAAT, and a group of experimental artists, we join culture and science, bringing together knowledge, awareness and art.

Thanks to their expertise, our partners link us with the artists, the villages and the rural schools we develop our actions with, while we open a space in the exhibition for them to promote and showcase their creative and scientific work.

ARTWATERENESS ON WHEELS

This is a green attempt to democratize Arts based on establishing a dialogue about water with the rural communities in Cambodia.

Through Waters team rides their bicycles to take a movable adaptation of TW Photo Exhibition touring across the communities generating awareness about water. The activity enables cultural exchange: on one hand, we give people the chance to get in touch with new artistic expressions, on the other, we encourage them to reflect about their personal stories about water, generating and sharing their own creations by means of workshops.  This four months cross-cultural adventure is broadcasted in a real time multimedia experience.

ARTWATERENESS EXPLORERS

We create a group of artists to perform an artistic research experience; each one spends one month living with a rural community which holds a special link to water.

Together with the villagers, they reflect on subjective and common views about how water connects life. This research is expressed in an artistic way by sharing the personal and group inputs during the creative process and by artists’ individual artwork and collective creations with the community.

Through Waters works with two such powerful elements as Arts and Water. Each one itself is essential for life, a human right and an element of global relevance, but it is the synergy of both what brings the added value to this project: water awareness through art, because it empowers action due to several reasons:

The approach to the value of water from the artistic experience (both as spectator and as creator, for communities and for artists) claims to the intellectual part of the individual, as well as it connects oneself with sensations, feelings and emotions, generating a holistic experience.

Learnings when associated to enjoyment, emotion and playfulness have been proven to be more meaningful and enduring memories than those merely academic.

The innovation of the methodology causes a notorious impact in participants, favouring their attention.

Placing one’s creations next to the artists’ works from other countries contributes to be aware of the global dimension of the subject: water is a vital shared resource which affects everyone worldwide.

This project also fulfils the transversal goal of Arts democratization, leaving the constraints of the museum behind and taking it closer to communities that would never access it otherwise.

ARTWATERENESS is a dynamic experience, individually built by the members of the global society, in which every action brings up artworks that feed on each other enriching the original stimulus, the exhibition, in the same way that every drop merges with the rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, and flows together with the others in a stream, showing the richness of diversity.

A big screen welcomes the audience with background music. As soon as someone approaches, AquaBoll start drawing the outlines of the audience, in a continuous overlapping forms. The colors are taken from seawater and alternating with white lines reminiscent of the surf. It 'a continuous floating in colors and shapes that evoke the natural relationship between man and water. The gestures of the spectators are then accompanied by the sound of the waves, the intensity of which depends upon the movements, giving the illusion that these trails of color are precisely the waves of the sea.

The sound, the colors, its unpredictability, its poetry and its reality to live with and protect, WATER.

Paolo Scoppola creates interactive video installations based on natural interfaces. Born in Rome in 1971, his passion for music and drawing blossomed at school. He discovered his interest in photography later and then for computer science, which he went on to study at university. After graduating, he worked for ten years in the development of virtual reality applications and 3D software, also creating some musical projects for television productions and a series of photographic reportages. After a short period of lecturing at the Experimental Centre of Cinematography (Italian National Film School), he devoted his time to interactive video installations. In 2008 he presented his first work: Reflection, at the Festival of Spoleto. In 2011, he extended his interests to interaction based on brain waves, developing research projects in collaboration with the University of Trieste. He currently works with advertising agencies, research organisations and participates in festivals and cultural events.

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