Perejaume. ‘Make Room’.

In the middle of the Raval it is very easy to see the current space of the Filmoteca as a trench of projections. Likewise, within the activity of the institution, the functions of conservation, archive, receptacle and hoarding of images, are very present. Both things have invited us to show this fixed plane of a projector that, facing a ditch in the middle of a field, will spend four months endeavouring to restore some images to the world.

I don’t know to what extent, with this proposal for restitution, planting and rest, we´ll be able to make a bit of room, liberating the corresponding corner of the world of its saturation. In the end, it is very easy for the operation to take the form of yet another image. But!

For years now, I have been preaching this gesture of returning works to the world, with the aim that creation and dissolution coexist in a more intertwined way. The more fertilely they are intertwined, the better. And it goes without saying that fertility arises, to the extent that, more or less slowly, any creation becomes reabsorbed into the environment. The relations between fertility and conservation are complex by nature, but it is clear that when intervening in a space like the current one, which is increasingly crowded with imagery, the alternative between creating a gap and occupying a gap becomes increasingly clear and decisive.

Just as silent film exists, with all the agitation of images it entailed more than a century ago, I wonder if we could not talk about blind film as a name for the prevalence of possible imaginings, images that have that have not yet wanted to take form: just the right capacity of images, with a minimal presence to glimpse what lies in the background. It is wonderful to think of the absence of form as a state prior to the presence of form and not as a deprivation of form. Wonderful to think of the as yet unborn light of a cinema that cannot be imagined because its images prefer to remain inhumed, trapped in the general magnitude, encrypted, black in the black earth.

Let’s go back to the gesture of the action. A smell halfway between ruffled grass, and that of grass crushed by the weight of light. The nocturnal film projection on tilled earth now raises a different order of questions: Can the illusion of cinema space regenerate a field? Can we conceive of stalks of grass as images botanically reborn? For example, can a blade of fescue, arise from an enacted scene? Has anything ever sprouted from a land irrigated with images?

Perejaume