Biographie
Born in Romania in 1981, Alex Bodea works and lives in Berlin. She graduated from the University of Arts and Design Cluj (MA) in 2011 and is a recipient of an Erasmus scholarship at L'école supérieure des arts Saint-Luc de Liège (2007). She is the founder of The Fact Finder, an artist-run space located in Berlin which is dedicated to artists whose work relies on field research, archiving, investigation and storytelling.
Démarche
Alex Bodea works at the crossroads of visual art, journalism and storytelling. Fuelled by a desire to witness and record, she makes use of a language based on drawing and text, both of them stripped down to the essentials. She is mostly interested in documenting (fact finding) aspects of urbanity such as everyday street life, passersby typology, social dynamics and interactions.
In her fact finding missions she has collaborated and made visual stories about institutions such as Serralves Foundation (Porto), Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Martin-Gropius-Bau, HAU, Berliner Festspiele, Deutsche Oper, Deutsches Theater, International Literatur Festival (Berlin), Art Encounters Foundation (Timișoara) and numerous artists, writers and actors.
Projet de résidence
Human ability for simplification (reduction) has been an important trait for the survival of our species and for the development of our society and culture. On one hand, without the capacity to filter and reduce the abundant amount of stimuli existing in nature to only what is within our functional parameters, we wouldn’t be able to function at all. And without our ability to reduce complex concepts to symbols, logos, tags, icons etc. we would stumble upon great difficulties in communicating and storing information. But on the other hand, reduction stops us from seeing the bigger picture and makes us jump to conclusions. This can be harmful, especially in the era of social media, when one’s entire complexity can be reduced to just a profile picture. My residency project will be focusing on the dynamics of simplification versus complexity throughout field research in the environment of Bourges.
Workshop
I would like to introduce students to the practice of fact finding, a practice that involves field research, investigation, archiving techniques, and storytelling. We will apply these techniques within the enviroment of Bourges, while choosing from a pool of potential topics related to the city. The aim is to generate a collective oeuvre which brings together different stories or different perspectives on the same story, in various mediums (drawing, writing, photo-video, newmedia, performance, storytelling, journalism, anthropological research and others), all related to Bourges. The variation between approaches, mediums and perspectives is encouraged. There will be a strong emphasis on the way we will communicate our findings: there will be a final public presentation where we will invite, alongside the general public, all the people involved in our stories.
