IDENSITAT. ‘Into the River’

Into the River is a video-performance session that brings together three works developed within the framework of Transversal Aesthetics, a platform for experimenting on the intersection between art, mediation and social space, activated by Idensitat in collaboration with art centres in Valencia, Alicante and Castelló, in collaboration with the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana, and in Huarte, Burlada and Villaba with the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte.

Transversal Aesthetics offers a place of confluence among artistic practices as a vehicle for critical research; among cultural mediation activities as a vehicle for the production of content, interaction and knowledge transfer; and the urban context as a vehicle for connecting specific themes of work to a specific active social space to these themes. This latest 2021 edition, Ecosystems of Fiction, both in Navarra and in the Valencian Community, has explored the conceptual premise of Fiction, using a setting common to all the participating locations: rivers.

In each of these contexts, artists, local participants, and a number of educational organisations have enacted various processes centred upon the tensions, paradoxes or connections that exist between imagined realities and fictions, based upon a view of the river environment and its multiple components and perspectives (natural, social, landscape , political, etc.) as elements that outline and blur the boundaries between rural and urban.
The waters of the Arga river in Navarra, or their absence, as well as the waters in the riverbeds of the Riu Sec (Dry River) in Castelló, the river Túria in València, and the river Monnegre in Alicante, together create dialogues and deploy various imaginary or fictional visions connected to those locations in which the project was developed.

Three audiovisual pieces will be screened in this session. Three experimental audiovisual productions in dialogue with these rivers, resulting from the artistic residencies carried out within the framework of Transversal Aesthetics – Ecosystems of Fiction between 2019 and 2021. The Night Flier by Jorge Núñez de la Visitación, realised in Alicante during the residence at the Las Cigarreras Cultural Centre, De Perdidos al Río by Joana Capella and Roc Domingo, and La Guaca o Tesoro by Alfonso Borragan, both pieces realised in Huarte, with the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte.

The Night Flier
Jorge Núñez de la Visitación
The Night Flier AKA Fleeting AKA Full Exposure is a fragmented fantasy horror movie presented as performative cinema, filmed during Jorge Núñez de la Visitación’s artistic residency at the Las Cigarreras Cultural Centre, using Alicante’s Monnegre River (Riu Sec). The mixture of video, sound and text reassesses the construction of filmic aesthetics in the fantastic cinema genre, linking them to the location, a landscape formed by a discontinuous and weak river course. How may the fear of the unknown be narrated? What happens in the friction between the unexpected and the conventional?

The narrative revolves around Margot. She lives with two scientists in a house next to the beach. Suspecting that they are performing murky experiments in a room in the house, Margot one day takes advantage of the fact that they have left, and while she is snooping around the laboratory, she touches an unknown substance. Afterwards, she begins to feel strange and has a recurring dream; a plane crosses the Mediterranean Sea in the middle of the night, while broadcasting strange signals on the radio. Margot comes into contact with an entity that emerges from the night, The Night Flier.

La Guaca o Tesoro
alfonso borragán
La Guaca o Tesoro is a video essay made in collaboration with Patxi Alda, Ione Lameiro and Hasier Larretxea. The piece is a semi-fictionalised narrative which imagines a relationship between the fragments of treasures accumulated in the river and carried by the current, and the seeker who allows herself to be found by them. The treasure is elusive, and, as the treasure hunter herself recounts, the treasure escapes from its seekers. The guaca finds you. The video essay is constructed through reflections that search for these treasures in the water and fragmented images of the reconstruction of photogrammetries of treasures that escape their representation.

La Guaca o Tesoro is part of the long-term No Man’s Land project that uses water and the game as revelatory of the illicit, the means of re-inhabiting a forgotten space free of social norms and possessors. The project, on the one hand, attempts to recover the hidden practices that were carried out in situ and the memories that passed through it; while on the other, it recreates new stories, experiences and myths for future recovery. In this phase, the project explores the magnetism of the destiny and the sweep of the Arga river, and the three towns that follow its course: Huarte, where the Contemporary Art Centre is located, Burlada and Villava (Navarra).

De Perdidos al Río
Roc Domingo y Joana Capella
De Perdidos al Río is a project resulting from a residence aimed at examining the dialogue between reality and fiction, as applied to the context of the Arga River as it passes through the towns of Burlada, Villava and Huarte.
In this project, the artists experiment with the intersection between the imaginary linked to memory and the identity attached to the river, and the construction of a new mutant imaginary elaborated from fiction. The project’s formalisation was adapted to the new circumstances that arose from the pandemic, converting it into a particular aesthetic experience without an audience, a strange solitary pilgrimage of two beings emerging from the Anthropocene, who on their journey connect the Huarte Art centre with the Góngora waste treatment plant, following the course of the Arga river, passing through Burlada and Villava.

The action becomes a long audiovisual piece that is broadcast live. The performance-film is a sequence shot that captures the entire journey, from the beginning of the project, its production process and the pilgrimage itself as executed by the artists. The use of live shuffle, the multiscreen and sequence shots, serve to question the narrative linearity of the events, creating a tension between directionality and transition, attempting to deploy or disclose those mechanisms that construct these ideas. The piece is accompanied by a text, which turns into a voice-over that appears while the images are being shown.