While doing time in the prison, VideoKaffe has produced a collection of handmade artisanal wooden knick-knacks, handicrafts and sculptures and constructed a surveillance center to monitor the prison works on show at the Valtio+ exhibition.
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Videokaffe is a collective of craftsmen and artists exploring and illustrating the shared beauty of art, phenomena and technology. The members are professionals in various forms of art and craft: sculpture, video production, new media art, boat building, clock-smith, art education and music, to mention a few. Videokaffe is interested in the phenomena of everyday life—the ones that catch our eye and we actively engage with and the the ones we don’t.
Known for colonizing galleries and residencies for intensive work periods, Videokaffe will harness the myriad specialties and skill-sets of its members to create artworks, experiences and environments behind bars in the Turku Prison. By taking over a whole floor VideoKaffe will build up an interactive workshop on-site while constructing a series of installations throughout the cells and spaces monitored and observable via live stream to the world beyond the walls at Titanik.
In the reverberations of our information society data collection and monitoring systems have served as both appendages and surrogates for our collective actions and histories. The organizational principles behind search algorithms and pattern recognition are read and interpolated into daily interactions that serve to lock us in our individual thoughts, beliefs, cells. VideoKaffe has created a collection of artifacts to reflect and challenge this notion. The sheer magnitude and force of information accumulated on our behalves continues to shape us and the world available for experience and so we must not lock ourselves away.
VideoKaffe artists in Valtio+:
Sebastian Ziegler
Olli Suorlahti
Erno Pystynen
Heini Aho
Mark Andreas
Jack Balance
Jenny Mild
Henrik Mikander
Thomas Westphal
Paul Flanders
