We’re pleased to share that the winning artwork of the “Cyberport x Niio Presents: Esports Digital Art Prizes 2019”, is Genesis was created by Michel Platnic.
Genesis short film draws inspiration from the biblical narrative of the creation of the world, as recounted in the Book of Genesis. Through pictorial, sculptural, theatrical and cinematographic means, the main and only character symbolically “recreates” day by day the act of creation. The empty space is populated through the painting of flora and fauna followed by man’s use of it, which ends in destruction. The grand and wonderful acts of the biblical creation story – as large as the universe itself – are translated here to an intimate scale, to images both near and familiar: The world is the familial space, the celestial globes are lamps, the flora are represented by house plants, the fauna by a cat and a bird; it is the creation of the world and its destruction in a nutshell. Platnic made use of the biblical creation narrative due to its fundamental status in, at least, the Western civilization.
Platnic extricated from it the characteristic Western terminology that still shapes our understanding of the world and the constructs of our society, and opposes to it images from the natural world. The individual is facing the world or authority, and is not aware of his power and his responsibility. He is a prisoner of a language and a culture that conceptualize a priori his ways of observing and understanding his surrounding, that rigidify certain possibilities and exclude others. He is condemned to a fragmentary, culture-dependent understanding.