Highlife

Highlife is an installation realized together with Can Sungu which houses inside a cardboard-coated frame a mash up of Nollywood clips, a private video with the building of a villa, a store sign, videocassette cases, all materials coming from a former Nigerian videoshop in Turin.

About Highlife

In the 1990s, and into the first decade of the new century, Turin was full of Nigerian video stores. I entered King’s Video in Via Saluzzo several times, and one of them was because I was involved in the production of Getting Better, a health education video aimed at Nigerian immigrant women in Italy, directed by Antonio Lucarini. What this video shop was like can therefore be seen in this video shot in 2007. Shortly afterwards the video store closed, and the shopkeeper left, leaving inside a couple of boxes dozens of VHS videos with Nigerian films produced in previous years and destined for the home video market. Since they were about to be thrown in the trash, I took them, and so I did with the beautiful wood-carved sign.

This video material is the basis for Highlife, a work I made together with Can Sungu, who had already used images from VHS for his earlier work and was fascinated by this African collection. Searching through the box, up popped a VHS with footage of a construction site, possibly filmed in Benin City. The documentation of the progress of a construction, probably made to reassure a client unable to see it by himself. A long video, with some mostly unintelligible dialogue. It seemed nice to relate it to the images of comfort, or outright luxury, we were working on in the meantime. The work eventually took on an installation dimension that seemed to allude to poverty, because of the use of salvaged cardboard sheets. Or to a kind of similarity with the box full of VHS. But the reason we chose cardboard is, rather, that we wanted to build a cozy place, with our material means and skills, having in mind, if anything, the similarity with the building construction process of private video. The soundtrack for the video with the lounges was commissioned in Nigeria, addressing exactly who, ten years earlier, had prepared the song used in Lucarini’s video. It was then particularly significant, after the Berlin exhibition and before the Rijeka exhibition, to install Highlife in the very premises where King’s Video used to be.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

As far as I am concerned, Highlife didn’t lead to great new discoveries: it is almost thirty years that I interact with Nigerian people. I can say that writing the subtitles for the amateur video has been a very interesting job. In my opinion, what we have made of this videotape represents, better than any other component of the installation, our overall approach: very little tampering of materials, high consideration for their content, regardless of their original nature: the video of the construction of the villa was subtitled with extreme care, as if it were a sacred text. And for Highlife, it is.

© Cristiano Berti

excerpt from Helena Kariko, «Factory of Dreams: Somewhere Faraway… There is Me. Interview with Cristiano Berti and Can Sungu», Riskchangeproject.wordpress.com, February 27, 2018