Guy Wouete

Title: Next Week
Directed and produced by Guy Wouete
Duration: 04:49
Format: 16:9
Language: without words
Production date: 2010
Production country: Malta/Netherlands
Acknowledgements: Realised with the support of the so called ‘Boat People’ in the refugee camps in Malta. Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and CulturesFrance
Thanks to: Ansuya Blom, Ether Vossen, Medina Tokalic, Paul Perry

Next Week

A Multimedia-Installation that includes: 2 videos: Next Week HD, 04mins 49secs & Corridor HD, 10mins 45secs, both colour / sound, (Ed 5+2ap, each). 56 photographs, 45cm x 30cm each (Ed 5+2ap) digital pigment print on archival wool paper 290g. 2 large paintings, 2,64cm x 1,26cm (each). 1 pallet, 2,53cm x 1,43cm on which a bicycle wheel is assembled and motorized.

These works are a result of a journey to Malta in May 2010 where I did research in three migrants camps, Balzan Open Refugee Camp, Marsa Camp, the Hal-Far Tent Village Open Centre for Refugees. The idea was to observe the immigration/immigrant’s reality beyond the conceptual and the political mind but also to reconsider Darwin’s term of evolution of the species and the natural selection.

“Coming from Cameroon in central Africa, I know the immigrants stories from inside, I saw that reality, I live in it and I experienced it somehow.” Being in Europe, I decided to look at this question of migration from another perspective, from within the so called paradise with the eyes of those who had enough of their sufferings and their problems. Who wanted to make it somewhere else.

Next Week (the video), was filmed on the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea. The narrative unfolds in sequences with a panoramic view of the Mediterranean Sea. The viewer enters an atmosphere of meditation or transit, and discovers (after a moment of impatience) a tragic destiny of the so call boat-people who drown with their hope of a better life.

Corridor is a video based on a series of small video clips and photographs taken in immigrant camps and on the streets of Malta, all in slow motion. It combines a soundtrack litany specifically designed with images in order to lead the viewer into a factual reality far from a subjective construction.

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