Wineke Gartz
Title: River Walk 2009
Running time: 12 minutes

A video collage made with two partly overlapping video projections of images shot in Kitakyushu, Japan in 2003 and 2004. Wineke Gartz became friends with some of the homeless men and women at the time she was living in Japan during a one year artist residency at that time. The footage is shot in different times of the year, such as summer time, Christmas time and during the rainy season. ‘River Walk’ shows the homeless Japanese men and women in their habitats in public parks and alongside the rivers. In the center of town they were living underneath a steel arcade next to a shopping and amusement center called ‘River Walk’, where they had made the benches into their temporary homes. In Gartz’ video dyptich, these images are partly overlapping with images of a busy restaurant area nearby, and with images of the omnipresent Christmas decoration in the shopping streets: castles made out of Christmas lights. They form a comforting and utopian background for the homeless men. The song in the video is ‘House of cards’ by Radiohead. ‘River Walk’ is part of the project ‘Men become Flowers’ (2003 – 2006). See for more information the press release from VRIZA – Disclosures IV, Wineke Gartz, ‘Ueno Park’ (Amsterdam, 2005) at: http://www.vriza.nl/VRIZA/Ueno_Park_-_Wineke_Gartz.html
Next to the video’s and installations, Wineke Gartz wrote the short story ‘Men become Flowers’ (Japan, 2004). The text can be found at:
http://www.vriza.nl/VRIZA/Ueno_Park.html