(Somewhere between) The Wind and the Dove”, screening and talk between artist Xavier Marrades and Joseph del Pesco, curator

(Somewhere between) The Wind and the Dove, brings together a feature length video artwork with a short film, presented within the faceted interior space of the Fundació Enric Miralles. What is the wind without something moving to make it visible? How can the dove fly without the wind to lift its wings? The artwork by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis (UK/US), and the film by Xavier Marrades (Catalunya) bring the international into conversation with the local, and remind us of timeless subjects, and modes of attention, care and memorial. Each work, in different ways, establishes a rapport with the aesthetic and structural logic of EMBT and the Fundació Enric Miralles. A relationship is the very raison d’être of the foundation, and this spirit is echoed in the practice and subjects (respectively) in these two works, presented not as a program, nor an exhibition, but instead as a pair.  

The Wind, 2024
Lenka Clayton, Phillip Andrew Lewis (UK and US)

77 min
Single Channel HD Video with Sound
Commissioned by The Pittsburgh (US) Cultural Trust
Sound mix and master by Simon Keep

Cucli, 2016
Xavier Marrades (Catalunya)

16 min
Director: Xavier Marrades. Cinematography: Oriol Colomar, Xavier Marrades. Editor: Xavier Marrades. Drone operator: Pol Thomas Ferrero. Colorist: Enya Rodriguez. Producer: Xavier Marrades, Nanouk Films. Executive producer: Jerome Thelia, Oriol Colomar. Sound: Sergi Nogué, Alejandro Castillo. Graphic design: Giovanni Jubert.

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The Wind is a feature-length video artwork composed of ~1,400 clips found and collected from across the history of cinema (spy dramas, rom-coms, westerns, etc.) each depicting the invisible force of the wind. In most settings the wind is not the ‘figure’ of the scene but rather animates the background. In this film it shifts to a point of attention, the protagonist, showing us all that it touches—giving it shape as it flutters through clothes on the line, undulates grasses in the field, spins weather vanes, rolls tumbleweeds, or shrugs the branches of a tree. 

Often footage of the wind in films can signal an emotional tone or foreshadow an ominous turn. It can also be used as a pause or rest—a temporal transition. In The Wind, these in-between moments accumulate with an increasing intensity according to the Beaufort Wind Scale, progressing from barely perceptible quivering plants to a devastating tornado that tears a building from its foundations.

Ranging from a half second to several seconds, the clips are presented with their original sound, one that accompanies the presence of the wind. Each resonant sonic fragment—a scream, a car door slam, dialog in various languages—sends the mind off along hundreds of narrative tangents creating a concrete poem, a collage de sons trouvés. The experience of attending to an invisible presence invites a new form of awareness, approaching a meditative state, as The Wind moves across time and space. 

Cucli is a short film and intimate portrait of a cross-species relationship, set in Cervera (Catalunya), the hometown village of the artist. It’s a film about trust: between one man and a bird, but also implicitly between the artist and his subjects. According to the artist: despite an abundance of pigeons in the region, doves are quite rare. This symbolically charged creature—an international symbol of peace—appeared in the life of a distant relative of the artist, Ramon, after the passing of his wife, and keeps him company on the long-haul truck transport from eastern Spain to Portugal and back. Cucli, tells a multi-layered story of the transformative power of love and companionship, “Since the dove came, I see life in a different way,” Ramon says in the film. “I’ve changed radically.” It also invites the viewer to consider their own thoughts and beliefs about reincarnation, divine intervention, and the process of healing after loss.