saturday night we went to a pecha kucha night here in shanghai. it was the first such event i attended, but the 6th that sinocities organized here.

pecha kucha is a night for designers or creative people to meet and share their ideas, portfolio and projects. each is given a precise amount of time to speak of whatever they want.

the place where it was held is called “Yangshupu Factories” and is a bit far from the city center, but worth a visit. a subtle maze of trees and lakes, with slippery dark stone paths and plants hanging on bamboo branches. when we got there (almost an hour in advance), we had time to delight ourselves in a slow coffee, relaxing on an outside patio beside a pound. the bushes around had some sort of xmas lamps on them, as if sprinkled by fireflies. :)
in the back there is a coffeehouse, hidden in a two-story building, where the organization had spread some chairs that were clearly insufficient for the number of people that decided to show up.

despite never having attended one such event before, i had high hopes for the it, but the end result was just so-so. photographers and architects showcased their recent works in succession, but most lacked the skills on how to present it right.

that was exactly the problem for me, especially because we saw too many photographers eager to show their portfolio, which turned out to be either plain uninteresting (but that’s just a matter of taste perhaps) or a mess of unrelated (best) photographs.

i tend to think that you always need a story. you need to convey something to people through your photographs. there needs to be a sequence, fictional, emotional or factual circumstances, an explanation or a connection, no matter how irrational.
but there wasn’t and in the end i thought, although some of them had good pictures, they had just wasted the opportunity to explain themselves. the why, the how, what sparkled their interest, what had they felt when portraying those people or places.

nonetheless, i liked some of the architectural projects that their authors explained. innovative with simple details, and very real.

my favorites? a presentation by Olympia Kazi on critical mass and a surreal presentation by a mechanical engineering student on herself, life and poetry. very non-sense, fresh and yet daring, engaging and amusing.

check out the pecha kucha website to see if there’s one happening near you!