Video Comics
The field of Video Comics was born from the meeting between artist
Silvia Licht and screenwriter Zehavit Stern, who intended to create a
mutual artwork for the Heara 6 Event of Contemporary Art at the David's
Tower Museum in Jerusalem.
"Zahavit came to me with a short story about a man coming back home
from the Israeli Military Reserve, during the El Akza Entifada days" - says
Silvia Licht - "and I told her the only way we could do it in a short time
period, would be as a comics. From there I thought it would be a good
idea to project it and to add a soundtrack to it. At first I thought I was
limited by this medium, but later we both understood we had a new art
language in our hands, so we tried to develop it and to valuate it as it
was."
"Our Video Comics has a unique artistic language" – Zahavit Stern
agrees – "Its not made with hi-tech animation, not even gives the
illusion of movement. We work with static comics, in its most primitive
version and as a conscious choice. The animation in our comics is
attained by the soundtrack and by the addition of brief movements in
certain elements inside the frame.
Our challenge is to create something that reacts to our contemporary
reality. Our video comics should act on the spectator as a guerrilla
fighter: small, fast and determined, hitting in the unexpected place."
Silvia Licht and Zahavit Stern kept using the Video Comics technique in
their following works "Studio W' and "Natura Morta", both dealing with
Israeli social and political actuality.
"Studio W" begins as what seems to be a typical evening of a thirty
something woman in Tel Aviv, followed by a first lesbian encounter at
the gym, and a political action in the Abu Dis fence in Western
Jerusalem.
The Heara 7 contemporary art event at the Nachlaot neighborhood in
Jerusalem gave birth to the last Licht-Stern Video Comics, "Natura
Morta".
Nachlaot neighborhood is the center of the terror beaten city of
Jerusalem, nearby the Ben Yehuda market.
"Natura Morta" tries to deal with the painful subject of the suicide-
bomber's terror, with the aesthetics of horror and with the escapist
society.
