Iva Kontic

Somewhere Close to the Rainbow is based on a series of interview sessions with a young couple who had recently immigrated to a small town in the south of England. She comes from Serbia, and he is from Hungary. After living in Belgrade and Mexico for several years, they moved to England in search of work and a new life.

Composed of sequential extracts from three conversations, the video shows the couple sitting on their living-room sofa, talking about their perceptions, expectations, and personal experiences in relation to the place where they currently live. The range of topics develops in different directions through the dialogue: from their motivation for moving to their current location and their relationship with local people, to the problems of being immigrants, as well as their ideas of home and their search for an ideal place to live. Any visual reference to the surrounding context is excluded, focusing the viewer exclusively on the protagonists, their narration, and the shifting dynamics of their psychological responses to their stories and shared experience. As the video progresses, the protagonists’ “mood” changes. Gradually forgetting the presence of the camera, their ideas transform from initially positive and “safe” statements into more introspective and critically coloured discussions, at times even provocative and “politically incorrect.”

Somewhere Close to the Rainbow explores the problematic of individual perception and cultural integration within Western society from an immigrant point of view, focusing in particular on the geo-historical contexts of England, on the one hand, and Eastern Europe, on the other, in light of the political and social shifts that have taken place since 1989. 

Presented as a video installation, Somewhere Close to the Rainbow consists of a video projection and a white two-seat sofa positioned in front of the video as a place for viewing. The “mirroring” of the sofa in the video and the real sofa symbolically invites the audience to relate to the protagonists and their narratives through their own personal experiences and ideas. In this sense, the work addresses the struggle and possibility of formulating and communicating individual experience in relation to a particular reality—in this case, that of the immigrant: whether such experience can potentially overcome a set of preconceived ideas, or whether it inevitably encounters clichés and prejudice once it is shared and decontextualised from the realm of direct personal experience.