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Roy Villevoye’s Film ‘Voice Over’ to Screen in New Orleans
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On December 1, Roy Villevoye’s Film ‘Voice Over’ screens in New Orleans
Dutch producers Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout founded Rotterdam and New Orleans-based Deltaworkers in 2010. Deltaworkers is a nomadic artistic production and residence program that investigates the southern states of the U.S. as one of the last mythical places in the West. They host and present European artists from different disciplines in New Orleans, a city that forms the perfect gateway to the south, a region where many of the historical, socio-political and cultural roots of U.S culture can be found.
On December 1, Deltaworkers presents film program ‘The Outer Limits’, including Dutch film ‘Voice Over’ by Roy Villevoye. The film shows how Papuans make a large traditional wooden state to commemorate their recently deceased relative Omomá in the tropical rainforest. The filmmaker, who has known this man as a very good friend, follows this ritual up close. Simultaneously, elsewhere he faces a harsh business reality in which he has to stand his own just by himself.
‘Voice Over’ will screen at 8 PM at St. Mary Majaks in New Orleans.
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About Roy Villevoye
Roy Villeovye is an Amsterdam-based visual artist, photographer, and film maker. Since a significant part of Roy Villevoye’s oeuvre consists of photos and videos featuring Papuan villagers, it is vulnerable to the charge of neo-colonial exploitation. But although Villevoye enlists the cooperation of Papuans to produce artistic commodities that enable him to survive as an artist in the West, his art does not gloss over the economic discrepancy between him and the people he visits and depicts. On the contrary, it reflects continually on the complex interaction and interpenetration of two cultures which are also two very different economies, and on the inevitable frictions and dilemmas that accompany the production of the work. In what can be seen as part of the ‘relational’ or social turn of art in the 1990s, Villevoye moved from painting to a performative practice that foregrounded the social and economic structures from which the work emerges with rarely seen candor. Rather than creating situations of seemingly carefree sociability under highly controlled (art-world) circumstances, Villevoye developed an art of exchange with people (and peoples) with whom relations are necessarily fraught with asymmetries and inequalities.