Folk Frå Fykse
Will Foster and Sille Storihle



A portrait of a village.

To present the faces of the villagers and the monumentality of the buildings they live in an attempt to activate them as a focus for notions of community and place.
People live here.

Myself and Sille spent an afternoon visiting each household in Fykse to take individual portraits of the people living in the houses. In most cases these where family units - parents and their children and in some cases further generations of a family who have lived in Fykse all their lives. Although we had scheduled appointments to visit each household we seamed to encounter a lot of the people on the street, returning home from work, driving a tractor, visiting the post box or in the case of the children riding a bike around the village and the schoolyard.  For myself this was an enjoyable experience and emphasized the closeness and connectivity of the community both on a geographic and personal level and also simply helped me get my bearings a little more - “Oh so that’s where they live I thought they lived over there”.

At the start of the Bluss Night event myself and a Bluss volunteer guided the audience through the village stopping with the porta-projector at each house to project the portraits onto the buildings. It was interesting to witness the people react to seeing an image of themselves projected at large scale and exposed to an audience. What did this experience mean to them? This experience is of course varied, specific to the individual, and undocumentable.

Will Foster

“The public projection can become an urban night festival, an architectural “epic theatre”, inviting both reflection and relaxation, where the street public follows the narrative forms with an emotional engagement and a critical detachment...Warning. Projectors must be switched off before the image loses its impact and becomes vulnerable to appropriation by the building as a decoration.”

Krzysztof Wodiczko, 1983, p48, Critical Vehicles, The MIT press 1999

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Porta-Projector
Designed by Will Foster

A portable outdoor projection system that can be used to project large-scale video and digital images on to a multitude of surfaces. It is waterproof, light weight and compact enough to move easily from place to place.

Previously the porta-projector has been used to show a selection of international artist’s films in the UK to find out more visit:

www.willfoster.co.uk/comingsoonproject

Photography credits starting from top:
1,6) Lauritz Eide
5 ) Lars Arvid Oma
2,3,7,8) Will Foster
4) Sille Storihle