videospritz
All We Could Do Together
at 6 pm
“Imagine what we could achieve together. Imagine all the things we could do together – instead of lives cut short, instead of dreams evicted. We often act against each other, growth against growth, chainsaws and fire against wildlife. But don’t forget! The forest is a multi-species organism and is always open to the inclusion of people in our community!”
Oto Hudec
Oto Hudec, All We Could Do Together, 2023, still from video (courtesy of the artist and Gandy Gallery)
Trieste Contemporanea is pleased to present, in collaboration with the Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, a new videospritz event with Slovak artist Oto Hudec, on Thursday, September 5 at 6 pm.
During the evening, Hudec’s video All We Could Do Together (2023, 12’) will be screened and discussed with the audience.
The event will be introduced by Nadine Gandy.
The video is a poetic and political work that reflects on environmental activism and the possibility of collaboration between humans and nature. It was made at Lake Balaton (Hungary).
Using hand-painted watercolor miniatures and handcrafted sets, the artist reconstructs ten stories of environmental protests from around the world — from the Chipko movement in the Indian Himalayas in the 1970s to recent mobilizations against mining and infrastructure expansion in Europe and the Americas. Through a visual language that blends documentary and animation, All We Could Do Together celebrates both collective and individual actions in defense of trees and forests, paying tribute to those who have sacrificed their personal well-being to protect the environment and serve as inspiration for future generations. In the narration, the boundary between the human narrator and the tree narrator is deliberately blurred: they appear in the stories almost as a single entity, pursuing a shared goal — mutual salvation.
In the video All We Could Do Together, the forests, trees, parks, and meadows of western Hungary serve as the backdrop for scenes that reinterpret past events, when activists fought for the protection of trees and forests. It is not the first time that Oto Hudec has used miniatures incorporated into a real landscape to create a video with documentary-like qualities. The source material comes from photographs of historical events from the 1970s to the present, used as references for painting miniature watercolor backgrounds and specific activists. Every element of the video, from the lighting to the types of trees used, was carefully studied by the artist in order to as faithfully as possible recreate the historical situations that inspired protests across the globe.
Oto Hudec (1981, Košice, Slovakia) is a multimedia artist who creates videos, murals, animations, sculptures, sound works, and public space installations dealing with themes of immigration, refugees, and the effects of globalization on the environment. His research on climate change and ecology often focuses not on new scientific solutions, but on how nomadic and indigenous peoples have achieved sustainability. He is currently an associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Technical University of Košice, Slovakia, and is represented by the Gandy Gallery in Bratislava. His projects have been presented at: De Appel in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tranzit.sk in Bratislava, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, AlbumArte in Rome, East Slovak Gallery in Košice, and Gandy Gallery in Bratislava. Recently, Oto Hudec participated in the project “Floating Arboretum” at the Czech and Slovak Pavillion at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale.
