Komikaze At Stumptown Comics Festival
izvor: http://www.culturenet.hr/default.aspx?id=25269
time: 18.04.2009. – 19.04.2009.
place: Portland, USA
organiser: Stumptown Comics Festival
Art collective Komikaze partakes at the Stumptown Comics Festival on 18th and 19th of April in Portland (US). Coming from Zagreb, Croatia, with love and madness, the comic collective Komikaze is a webzine collecting voices from the roaring masses. ‘The KOMIKAZE disease operates in and out of the website www.komikaze.hr with all threads leading back to editor in (mis)chief Ivana Armanini and her seven dwarfs of different dimensions and temperaments. When they don’t devour and publish comics, they travel around the countryside with pens and paper and invite people to draw together. The result is not always sick, dark, dirty and subversive – sometimes it can even be sweet and banal! It’s all wiki-based and invites interaction; downloading, printing, and photocopying is welcome and encouraged! Since back in 2002 KOMIKAZE has published 19 webzines with more than 100 artists from 20 countries, seven printed anthologies, two albums, several CDs and lots of fanzines. They have also exhibited the works on more than 100 occasions and held about 30 workshops in Croatia, France, Italy, Slovenia, Bosnia and Germany.’ ‘KOMIKAZE is a gang of crooks that disturb and provoke the public with their appearance. They question the worlds built on false convictions, shaking the foundations of so-called sensible, ordered and pretty constructions – and reveal them in their helplessness. KOMIKAZE actions are part of a plan to destroy manipulative capitalist centers of power and authority. Our beliefs are based on the old Native American proverb: A desert land is worth more than money collected in piles, and on it grows a deep sense of freedom! This form of subtle anarchy is used to question the ways we see the world. We wish to pluck out the glass eyes of habit and show that everybody can see well with their own eyes. Since our aims are brutal and bizarre we point our knifes at art, and artistic expression, in order to save the innocent! We refuse to regard comics as a cheap prostitute paid to entertain puberty boys! We want to return dignity and respect to the medium with it’s century old history of verbo-visual existence. Our actions are various. The act of exhibiting is not sacred to an art form for which the copy equals the original. Photos, photocopies and prints speak just as strong as the inked paper, and distribution is simple – That’s how the virus spreads! The point of the story is that everyone is the container of an important message if they follow their inner, wild eye. The process of viewing is important, not the exhibited objects. The KOMIKAZE vision of the future is a constant circulation of comics distributed on the Internet, printed on demand and pasted everywhere, also in the woods if desired. It’s only a question of time before everyone will realize that to spill ink on paper is an act of freedom! It’s economical, ecological and multifunctional. Every housewife would die to have one at home.’ |
(D.H., 17.04.2009)