Worlds Within
Animation Zone: SuperYou Animatieplaats: SuperYou
The ‘overview effect’ is defined as the cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts as soon as they see earth from space: they promptly realise our fragile blue globe must be protected by all of us, and that we bear a collective environmental responsibility. Nina van Hartskamp was inspired by this overview effect. With Worlds Within, she created a similar kind of effect, but one that is very intimate and inclusive: an ‘in-view effect’ – a perspective that includes the notion of coexistence as a crucial part of life on earth. With this work, she makes invisible worlds visible and draws attention to our essential companionship with microbes. To do so, she collected and cultivated the microbial life in the bedrooms of various people by exposing petri dishes to the air while they sleep. After incubating the cultures, they are photographed and presented as planets, worlds within the world. These strange planets are totally different for each individual. Confronted with ‘their’ little planet, the participants are invited to think about the living worlds within and around them.
NINA VAN HARTSKAMP THE NETHERLANDS | 2020 | 6+
130
Stop-motion animation is almost as old as film itself. It was one of the primary special effects before the arrival of digital animation. Over the years, many variations have evolved, but the basic idea remained the same: a series of stills with tiny changes in each frame, resulting in a fluid motion as full animation. At the Animation Zone, professional animators teach children about the basic techniques of stop-motion animation. In these sessions, the children create and animate specially designed characters and objects. The hand-crafted scenes are recorded with a camera above the big green workspace and shown live on a screen. Afterwards, they can be viewed again at home. This year’s Animation Zone is designed by Sioejeng Tsao, also known as SEEYOUSIOE. Her work consists of paintings and digital illustrations, forming a colourful exploration of different social aspects and her own queer and bi-cultural identity. She graduated in fashion styling at the Academy Artemis and now combines her illustrations with her activism around racism and feminism. Cinekid’s Animation Zone, developed over a decade ago by Michael van Eeden and others, has many different forms and is popular both in the Netherlands and abroad.
SIEOJENG TSAO, CINEKID THE NETHERLANDS | 2021 | 6+
