NICE PARTY NICE PEOPLE

Nice Party Nice People
 Format: Digital video, 6’30’’
 Year: 2023 Nice Party Nice People was born from two years of slow, deep observation, developed during a period of forced cohabitation with a community of African cichlids housed in an aquarium set up during the pandemic. The initial idea – to buy fish, plants, furnishings – responded to a personal, perhaps narcissistic, need for companionship and control. An apparently harmless act that, over time, revealed its full ambiguity. Watching those fish day after day, I became aware of the paradox I had created: I, who had always opposed the idea of animals reduced to ornamental pets, had built a glass cage. A closed ecosystem, where life was confined for my gaze and my pleasure. From this realization came a need for repair, an attempt to re-establish a relationship as empathetic as possible. I began to carefully tend to their habitat, to feed them with the best food, and above all, I tried to make their existence less predictable. Thus were born small ludic-cultural events inside the aquarium:
– A nightclub evening,
– An underwater video screening,
– A photo exhibition with the fish themselves as subjects. The surprising aspect was observing how these beings lingered in front of the images, perhaps recognizing themselves, interacting with their own representation in ways that challenge our presumed perceptual superiority. The video documents this relationship, its evolution, and its ethical implications. Nice Party Nice People is a visual diary and a confession, but above all an invitation to look beyond the glass of our cages – both real and symbolic – and to develop a deeper sense of responsibility toward the living beings we share the world with.