So last night I went to see the Buenos Aires Pecha Kucha Night ( Vol. 8 ) at the Konex Theater near the Abasto. To be honest, the majority of the presenters were creative and charismatic in person, however - lacked presentation skills. I will not dissect every single one, but the shame of it was that a good 80% of the presenters used this 6:40 minutes to self promote and hawk their goods. Certainly I shouldn’t have to PAY to be sold to!!
Those who stood out and performed in the true art of Pecha Kucha were:
Mariano Favetto - graphic artist who took political and religious symbols, modified their significance in an artistic context and urged people to question cultural meaning of these symbols in an effort to promote world peace. (Bravo! He won in my book).
nobrand - Hernan Berdichevsky and Gustavo Stecher redesigned traditional icons representative of Argentina in a project that attempts to marry traditional and contemporary concepts of national identity. (Good presentation, shameless plug for their new store at the end).
Libre Amotinada Ideas - An experimental project whose directives are not well defined - but equally entertaining how they abandon bicycles on streets and film how long it takes for someone to steal it. (Great PowerPoint, but the three people who came up to speak need presentation skills).
Esteban Sehinkman - jazz pianist who performed to the images that appeared on his presentation. (It was a 4 minute presentation. The other two minutes were plugging his disc and when you can see him performing).
Here’s an example of a good Pecha Kucha presentation:
Guy Dickinson - Pecha Kucha
Pecha Kucha Night was originally started in 2003 by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein - two architects based in Tokyo who wanted to give their architect friends an opportunity to discuss their ideas, projects, designs and inspirations. However to curb the long-winded speeches of the presenters, they decided to impose some rules: first of all a presentation had a limit of 20 slides presenting images and each slide could only be played for 20 seconds. This limits each presentation to exactly six minutes and forty seconds - hence the Japanese word ‘Pecha Kucha’ roughly translated as ‘chit-chat’.
Buenos Aires’ famous Pecha Kucha presenters is singer-songwriter Kevin Johansen who last presented in December of 2006. This coming Pecha Kucha’s line up is boasting architects, visual artists and musicians all preparing to share their motivations with Buenos Aires on that night.
