Triny Prada: Food for Thought – Matière à penser (2009)

Directed by: Triny Prada | 48 minutes | documentary

The DVD ‘Triny Prada: Food for Thought’ is structured in three segments, each of which consists of a number of short films that shed light on a specific subject. The segments are called “Material for Consumption”, “Meditation Material” and “Kindling Material”. The first and the last consist of four movies, the middle one of five. The length of these sketches varies between two and eight and a half minutes.

Triny Prada lives in Paris, where she also studied at the National Conservatory of the Arts and has exhibited in several European cities, such as Toulouse and Berlin, as well as in Tunisia and her native Columbia. After a car accident, she started out as a painter and became captivated by the idea that there is only a thin line between life and death. From this perspective, she made her film ‘L’Enfant FIL… osophe’ in 2003 (where the word “fil” stands for the thread of life, which can be cut just like that). Her experiences with video gave her more freedom and more opportunities to bring her vision into the limelight, she says. Her videos, of which thirteen have been collected on ‘Triny Prada: Food for Thought’, share poverty, hunger and animal rights in common.

Prada makes her own recordings or has herself filmed during her public performances, mixes images with each other or on top of each other and also creates the music herself, by also mixing different sounds that complement the images. Because of this, some of the movies are quite tiring for the senses, especially for the eyes to watch. This is especially true of the incomprehensible ‘Un goût d’amande verte’, which should be accompanied by a warning that this segment could provoke a headache. “Material for Consumption” is the collective name for films about, among other things, a tout who sells snake oil and other miracle cures, called ‘El Curandero’ and a man who smashes waste plumbing, ‘Action Ready-Made’. In the fragment ‘iFood_pop’ Prada takes a closer look at overconsumption. This has its origins in an incident during her childhood. She had just moved when many of her school friends died after a toxic substance got into the baker’s flour. The themes of overconsumption and food chains are also addressed in the ‘Sculptures poulétiques’ and ‘nature morte’ segments of “Meditation Material”. Something she clearly has questions about.

In ‘Sculptures poulétique’ she cuts up a half chicken from the poulterer or supermarket and rearranges the limbs and chest to make it a work of art and in ‘Nature morte’ a whole dead chicken is shown in close-ups. after which a number of questions scroll across the picture about hormones and genetically modified products. Even if you do not agree with Prada’s view on alleged political and social abuses, her work has an intriguing quality, although not all films are equally interesting. In any case, she has an outspoken vision and pushes her artistic boundaries with great enthusiasm and commitment. Her short films are innovative and refreshing and provide food for thought.