La Fortuna was a video installation during the exhibition made by François Dey and me. But it is more then just a video work or sculpture. It is visualisation, an echo, of the actions we did in the church which resulted into this video work. The installation was made with found materials from in and around the church.
Before the other artists of the show started preparing their works we wanted to make use of the space, its emptiness and the acoustics. On the video you can see us moving around, making some actions in the church but it is not really clear what we do. These play-actions were improvisations, showing the process in the making, the playing, waiting and hanging or bumming around.
Our actions referred to the different functions and situations occurred in the church, the religious practice, shelter for refugees and immigrants, a climbing wall arena for climbers, future plans for an indoor children's playground and at the moment a temporary cultural space for artists.
The title derives from a picture that François found, depicting a man blowing his own sail on his "ship" of fortune. The video is sped up and shown on a small screen. The speed alteration not only changed the image but also the pitch of the sound and reverberation time. The echo becomes shorter and thus the space is shrinking with it. The screen size and effect gave the video a miniature slapstick feeling. It reminds me of the children animation show Buurman & Buurman which my son watches occasionally.
As part of our continuous actions we made a sonic performance during the finnisage of the exhibition. We positioned ourselves in the upper part of the church were the organ was situated. You could hear but not see us and the acoustics were pretty spectacular. François verbalised texts written on the wall by refugees. He recorded them on tape and modulated it into a modern choral instrument. With my modified Casio sample keyboard I mimicked at times the grand church organ and sampled tiny fragments from tapes of Terry Vreeburg which he brought to listen too during the build-up of the exhibition.
