Paola Yacoub / Michel Lasserre O.V.
Paola Yacoub (Beirut, 1966) and Michel Lasserre (Auch, France, 1947) have worked together since 1996. Architects by training, their artistic process begins by studying territories in order to then analyse their historic, political, aesthetic and emotional implications. Yacoub and Lasserre document their forays into space with photographs, videos, sound recordings, maps and texts, which they then edit into dynamic audiovisual montages. Their research projects have principally focused on Lebanon.
O.V. was a weekly broadcast that offered an alternative counter-model to official news bulletins. The programs, approximately eight minutes long, were simultaneously projected at cultural institutions in different places around the world.
With the two-fold aim of showcasing current trends in contemporary art, and introducing the public to the physical and cultural dimensions of the museum, MACBA focuses once more on artworks and projects produced specifically using digital media. As part of this initiative, MACBA presents the project O.V. [Original version], by Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre.
O.V. is the format of an editorial project that explores relations today between images, territories and current events. The project consists of a series of weekly programmes formed by montages of still images featuring urban architecture and environments, chosen as a reaction to each week's international news. O.V. programmes, which each last about eight minutes, are shown simultaneously at 15 art spaces, museums and centres all over the world: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, South Korea, South Africa and the United States. The new programmes are presented to the public every Thursday at 19.00 in a specific venue at the MACBA.
Users can enjoy free access to the tools used to edit the programmes, as well as the project archive, at the O.V. website (www.ovhost.org).
O.V. takes the form of weekly programmes, turning the computer or television screen into the pages of a publication in which slowness, the combination of image and text and visual silence distance the use of digital media from the aesthetics of the videogame or special effects. O.V. contrasts the objective nature of the news transmitted by the media against the subjectivity of the artists that "edit" the work, counterpoising it with the personal reactions from the different audiences (generated simultaneously, from different parts of the world) with the aim of creating an archive of interwoven readings.