With ex aequo results, the yearly joint co-production award promoted by the 8 art centers’ network of Catalonia, Arts Santa Mònica and LOOP, has been assigned to artists Mireia Sallarès and Lúa Coderch.
Titled Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field (provisional) and Palau de Vent, respectively, the projects by Sallarès and Coderch will both premiere in the context of LOOP Festival 2021, to take place between November 9th and 22nd.
Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field is the provisional title of a film halfway between documentary, essay, speculative fiction, and experimental cinema. A sentence by Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles from one of the most well-known statements in the surrealist manifesto, Lautréamont’s famous formula: “beautiful as a casual encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table”. Without knowing if the mistaken quote was deliberate or not, what we do know is that Tosquelles was a doctor who revolutionized and politicized psychiatry, worked precariously and unforeseen, deployed cinema and the arts at large, was incredibly open to experimentation, to the insistence of the unconscious, and to the gaze on the body as demanded by the avant-garde. The complicity of Tosquelles with art, politics, insurgent thought and the moving image is the origin of this film project, which has the aim to reconstruct a forgotten legacy for Catalonia and the world in general, while opening up a critical space about its oblivion. To do so, the cinematic language is deployed as an ideal narrative space, with the desire to make a film radical in content and form as it was the life and work of Francesc Tosquelles.
Palau de Vent is a video project that takes the forms of classic tragedy, except that there is no hero here. The narrative seems suspended in time, without any specific outcome or moral lesson, and the heart, which traditionally acts as a guide and intermediary for the protagonist, is now made up of dubious, hybrid characters born of a revision of the figure of the mythological mermaid: voices representing knowledge, attraction and danger at once, partly woman, partly animal and machine. The project is structured according to nine capsules that work independently of each other, yet forming a unified cycle when combined.