It’s ok to brag, they say, if you have something to brag about.
And we do! 🙂
When we were striving to get KAP Jasa – kite team Slovenia recognised as a NGO working in public interest, people who were to approve our status were a bit baffled. What are kites? To which category should we assign them? Is it a sport? Technology? Art?
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Yes, kite flying is both a sport (not only the stunt kites – try to pull down a huge flying monster!) and a technology, involving physics, aerodynamics, material science … But first and foremost kite flying is a culture. A culture that began – as some new and tentative discoveries say – in the islands of Indonesia more than 10.000 years ago, flourished in China and India, conquered Europe and spread around the world. The kite culture is flourishing, more and more kite festivals are springing up, more and more people are making kites, flying kites, enjoying kites.
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And oftentimes kites fly beyond culture: they are pure art …
We managed to convince the powers that be that kites indeed deserve to fly in the realm of culture: KAP Jasa was recognised by the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia as an NGO working in the public interest – and now we have to defend this and prove our worth every two years.
Photography is also an art form, of which aerial photography is an important part. As soon as we managed to fly, aerial photography was born; expensive at first, with huge montgolfières lifting both the photographers and cameras into the sky to catch vistas never seen before.
It took the genius of Arthur Batut to make aerial photography more accessible: he merged the art of photography with the art of kites – and thus invented kite aerial photography.
For a couple of decades kite aerial photography was the way to do aerial shots – until we started to lift machines into the sky: airplanes, helicopters, rockets, and the like took over.
Kite aerial photography was delegated to the realm of hobbies, and with the advent of cheap drones it seemed that it would simply disappear, thrown into the bin of history together with polaroids and floppy disks, the idea of attaching the camera to a kite line being as weird and incomprehensible as the pencil-cassette combo is to the new generations.
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But. Drones soon lost their novelty appeal, people started to see them as annoying, intrusive, and vulgar – a complete opposite to natural, quiet, beautiful kites. A slow but steady resurgence of KAP has begun!
Of course, KAP is still very niche – but it’s evolving, growing, attracting more and more people, becoming hip again.
And to celebrate that, a couple of master KAPers had a great idea …
International Kite Festival in Dieppe, France – Festival International de Cerfs-Volants de Dieppe – is famous, and rightly so. It’s one of the largest and most important kite festivals in the world, a huge biannual congregation of the best kite flyers there are, the crème de la crème of kite culture.
Just look at these:
This year a group of KAP master decided to spice up the festival of kite culture and kite art in Dieppe – by kite aerial photography art. They had a great idea to organize a special KAP exhibition – and aptly named it Les Yeux du Vent: Eyes of the Wind.
The organizing crew did an outstanding job. They got sponsors (thanks, Nescafé!), space at the Dieppe waterfront, two huge containers for the exhibition, the rigs, large prints, the honourable jury to judge the photos …
And they published a call for entries.
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It was soon apparent that the KAP community is alive and kicking, as the poor jury was flooded by kite aerial photos from all over the world, one more stunning than the other.
The valiant members of the jury went above and beyond their call of duty: after weeks of hard work, debates, comparisons, and arguments they managed to select 45 finalists that were exhibited in Dieppe.
But were their decisions correct …?
Of course they were! We know – because they selected three of our entries to feature in the exhibition! Ha!
These three, with links to our stories about them …
The archaeological site of Sipar in Istria, Croatia:
The Renaissance wonder of Urbino, Italy:
The melancholic meanders of Bloščica river in the forest of Bloke high plateau, Slovenia:
We entered ten photos, and got three selected. If that’s not a success, we don’t know what it is …
Proving yet again that KAP Jasa – kite team Slovenia is worthy of being an NGO working in public interest in the realm of culture! 😉
Big thanks to Michel Gressier, Michel Dehaye, Pierre Lesage, Yves Leroy, Henri Debeuckelaere, Christian Bécot, Gérard Clément, Ludovic Petit and Ludovic Cardona Gil; to all the KAP masters who participated, to Ville de Dieppe and Dieppe Normandie Tourisme; to Atelier Numérique La Romaine, PLS Location, Opalexpo, and Les vergers du Domaine de la Gentilhommière for tech support and production; and to the principal sponsor – Nescafé.
Bravo à tous!
And hope this fantastic exhibition becomes traditional – both the world of KAP and the world of art need it.
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