Pablo Pijnappel (1975)
Facts and fiction flow together so ingeniously that you can go on making new stories from the endless parade of details. Pablo Pijnappel interweaves slides with film images and video with text. The images are static; the motion of the story lies in the subtitling or spoken text. The artist ties his personal life story into his curiosity and powers of imagination. In his installations*, Pijnappel shows and tells stories about the people who have been important to him. Like in Walderedo (2006), in which Pijnappel explores the history of his father who lived and worked in Brazil and Japan. Indirectly, it is also a journey of memory and an investigation of cultural crossovers.
With personal recollections, documentary photographic material, found footage and self-recorded images and recordings, the artist explores concepts such as immigration and identity. That exploration takes place in the grey area between the artist's personal interpretations and the universal aspects of those concepts. The questions of who someone was, how we remember that person and why we remember them that way are encapsulated in the journey. Pijnappel does not answer them; his primary goal is to reveal the wide range of possibilities.
