City Screen 2023

This video involves 30 individuals of Cuban origin who reside in the vicinity of the Sierra Maestra mountains, a historically significant location in the Cuban Revolution. These inhabitants recreate the revolutionary soundscape using objects and materials found in their precarious environments. The project aims to expose the gap between past political ideology and the current reality of disillusionment and decay, creating a contrast between what is seen and what is heard in a context of outdated ethical and aesthetic values.

‘Fuel to Fire’ is a video that brings the viewer into a ‘pagamento’ or payback of gold to a body of water. This ritual was performed for the wellbeing and conservation of the ‘Páramo de Santurbán’, a moorland ecosystem of North West Colombia, which holds large -soughtafter- deposits of gold. The ‘pagamento’ is an indigenous ecological and economic fundamental protocol, that maintains the flow and balance of life cycles on earth. When accumulation happens, sickness arrives, and so it’s necessary to give back by letting go of something that is dear, that implies labor, or that is highly symbolic.

Homeland is at the forefront of a thriving cluster of artists / filmmakers in the Irish Midlands. This growing phenomenon is hampered by the lack of suitable venues, where art-film can be shown and disseminated to discerning audiences. Funded by the County Councils, Visual Artists Ireland and the Arts Council Ireland.

Carmen Mariscal (Palo Alto, California, USA, 1968) is a French-Mexican artist, whose artistic training was woven between England and Mexico. In his installation ‘Tláloc, Contadero’ she presents films and photographs of her encounter with the latest process of destruction of her childhood home in Mexico City. With this work she addresses the question of memory through the concept of habitat (or housing). For her, the first habitat of the human being is his body, followed by the clothes he wears, as well as the houses, cities and public spaces that contain him.

One of the great experimental composers of our time, Phill Niblock (Indiana, USA, 1933) has during his sixty-year career produced minimalist music, structural cinema, dance performance, improvised theatre, systematic art, and ethnographic photography. Since 1985, Niblock has served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York, and curator of the foundation’s record label. For this first solo show of Phil Niblock’s in Spain, we will present some iconic series of his photographs & films.

“Water Nocturne” is an exhibition that evokes the nocturnal landscape of a river on which someone has cast a spell. Anyone who crosses it will be subdued, as if hypnotized, and will find, perhaps, in the forms of water, wise and indecipherable answers to the mysteries of life, death and the afterlife.

Eden and Babylon 2023, is Rob Garbutt’s single-channel audio-visual response, with accompanying text, to Eden Creek in north-eastern NSW, Australia. The work explores the limits of language (whether visual, sonic or written) to understand a land that is far from solid; a land in creation over eons, intimately understood by First Nations Bundjalung people through knowledge developed over millennia, and radically transformed by colonists from the United Kingdom during the last 180 years. A descendant of these colonists, Rob struggles to express a connection with the babbling fluidity of Eden Creek. Curated by Fiona Fell.

“Stabat Mater” is a film about motherhood and separation. It is built upon the repetition of an eighteen seconds film. The nude portrait of the artist herself is a painting by the artist’s former husband. The audio of the film is the mix of a dialogue in Italian, between the artist’s daughter and the artist’s former husband, with the first movement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The text of the dialogue is superimposed over the footage in a gigantic sized type which grows smaller with each repetition until it disappears, while the voices subside and the music takes over. Curated by: Sophia Ma.

Cordova is pleased to present Tassili, a film and sculptural installation by artist Lydia Ourahmane. This is the first presentation of Ourahmane’s film in Spain. The work will be on display for one week from the 11th until the 18th of November. After a first scouting trip, Lydia Ourahmane embarked on a 13-day journey with a team of collaborators, friends, and local guides, accompanied by twenty donkeys. The group explored the immensity of this arid plateau, experiencing the hostile conditions of this difficult to access territory due to military and governmental restrictions. The night and day images of this lunar landscape and its millenia-old paintings shot in 4K, a digital technology qualified as ultra-high definition are striking in their hyperrealism—questioning the potential for this vertiginous, hypnotic wandering to capture an encounter with a place filled with history and spirituality.

A tree that saw history go by, saw the creation of a world, saw the first Mapuche indigenous people spend time under its shadow, saw the first wars between colonizers, a tree that speaks with its branches. The camera scans its skin, its trunk and its intimate and powerful history, slowly until discovering it in its immensity. Known as Lañilawal or Millennial Larch, it could be the oldest tree on the planet. One researcher estimates that it grew more than 5,000 years ago, long before the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

There is a theory that the moth, during the night, is guided by the light of the moon, an almost spiritual, unattainable and inconceivable journey driven by biology. The artificial light from a bulb confuses the moth and it easily falls into the light trap set by the biologist. Drawing on a trip to the Amazon, Degrees of Being presents a video and audio installation that interrogates the changing relationship between humans and nature.

The Pelele (Deán Funes, Córdoba, Argentina, 1993) is an artist/character, a phantasmagorical entity that transcends dimensions. THE NETWORK OF THE WIND is configured as a Bestiary. A selection of strange beings is presented as evidence of a fiction, as a vital component of a diegesis.

Love Collapse is a site-specific installation that arises from the collaboration between the artists Nathalie Rey, Enric Maurí and the theorist Federica Matelli. In this sense, it represents a reverse curatorial experiment, in which from a text written by the curator about desire and love mediated by technology, the artist duo has created the unpublished work that we can see at Espai Souvenir.

The exhibition will show works of art by the artist Claudio Zulián. The pieces in this project address various issues. Some of the creations deal with different groups at risk of social exclusion, others with groups that claim their rights and others that are directed to newcomers from different countries.

In the film Silent Movie (1976) a film director places a phone call to Marcel Marceau to ask him to star in a silent film. The world famous mime picks up the phone and shouts “No!”. Thirty-five years later the exact same stunt is repeated by Cesar, the chimpanzee protagonist in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Previously a speechless animal, he suddenly grabs the cattle prod out of the hands of his human prison guard and shouts “No!”.

Through an autobiographical piece, the author explores the poetics of the hidden image in a space of tension that debates the desire to remember as opposed to the right to forget, in relation to the political events of her country of birth, Iran. With an extremely austere language, in a video accompanied by drawings, the author pushes the image to its limits, questioning it between what is exposed and what is hidden. Both in the erased drawings and in the video testimony on the unexposed family photographs, the dense emptiness is translated into a highly symbolic matter.

The mind takes the form of the external object, just as the water that comes out of a tank takes the form of the ditch. OTRORA is a video installation by Argentine artist Florencia Ramón. The artwork is constructed at the intersection of color, body, and nature. Florencia approaches her creations through site-specific techniques, land art, and instant composition. She uses the video format as a vessel to exhibit a glimpse of her explorations and research on movement, improvisation, and the present state.

The Captain inspects the ship… The deck shines under the setting sun. Diagonally, with golden reflections. It emerges over the waters towards a new voyage. False, orthogonal and polyhedral… Reality as I knew it will never be lived again. The crew ends up numb… He alone, with his ship adrift… Sail to infinity. And… further… if I could.

Pere Portabella’s “El Sopar”, filmed on the day of Salvador Puig Antich’s execution, unites five political prisoners who share their incarceration experiences. The film’s experimental editing style delves into the intersection of power, culture, and politics during a pivotal historical shift in Spain. In 2018, an addendum was made by incorporating an interview with Oriol Arau, Puig Antich’s lawyer. Alongside works of Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, this film does more than portray the struggles of a society entangled in its political realities; it underscores how artistic expression can act as a powerful tool for political discourse and action.

‘RUN DOG WILD’ (2021) was created by attaching a laser scanner to a car that was driven throughout downtown Manila during the pandemic lockdown. The laserscanner projected animated frames of a running dog onto the buildings and cars, overlapping a ‘virtual’ dog onto the physical environment of the city. At the time of its creation the city was under 8pm curfew lockdown, the streets were empty, and one could only imagine being outside roaming free on the streets like the animals do. Instead, everyone was ‘connected’ inside use various technological means.

El Ring, a multimedia installation/show, in which Julián Álvarez combined dance, theater and video, in which he developed an innovative technique in which he attached a mini camera to the hands of the dancers/boxers with which the action was recorded, at the same time as (simultaniously) it was projected on a series of monitors that were distributed around the corners of the ring. The Ring was presented in 1988 at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, and became the artistic material for a new video project that we are presenting in the exhibition, together with photographs, drawings and plans

In her current work, which began during a residency at Hangar in 2022, Janine Maria Schneider photographs female employees in cultural institutions. The director of the Spanish Pavilion at the front and back of the building, Guernica, and the footprints of a homeless person are featured. The space, she says as a testimony of time. Within the framework of the Loop Video Festival, Janine Maria Schneider shows this work as part of a video in which she talks about the politics of space, people who are underrepresented in our society and our responsibility to history.

In his treatise on melancholy, Aristotle distinguished between symmetrical and asymmetrical humors. Whether melancholy was a disease or a quality of extraordinary men depended on the preeminence of one or the other. XXX, I is a journey along a mysterious road that explores the relationship between symmetry and its rupture; a journey through melancholy.

“Zona Franca” (Duty-Free Zone), the old commercial area of the traditional industry, and the new space of logistic and technological capitalism are, as we already supposed, mainly part of a large real estate business, sheltered by the umbrella of Barcelona’s post-industrial renovation. Therefore, what economic and symbolic gains do they generate, and who do they revert to? What advantages do the companies and institutions obtain from this symbiosis? And what about the workers? Right now we are getting ready to leave the loading dock and to enter the call center.

In her film practice, Leyli Alakbarova investigates the influence that the place of birth and inhabitance may have on the way we perceive the world. Her films presented in the frame of the LOOP festival explore the long-term effect that being a part of the Soviet Union had on the people of Azerbaijan. Her work is based on daily scenes, domestic situations, educational institutions, and their role in people’s lives in Azerbaijan in the 80s and 90s when everything and everyone was highly influenced by the Soviet Union regime and later its collapse. Curated by Jette Bjerg and Marc Larré.

ProjecteSD is pleased to present PROJECTIONS, an ambitious video projection project with works by three artists internationally renowned and with extensive experience in video-film production: Manon de Boer, Dora García and Rosalind Nashashibi. It is not an exhibition where the works will be presented simultaneously, but rather a program where each projection will have its space and time separately. The idea is to give each work the necessary environment so that the interested audience can view it with maximum concentration.

Pista de aterrizaje is set in Karakam, a community of the Achuar Nation in the Ecuadorian Oriente. Originally nomadic, the Achuar have inhabited the region since ancient times. Following the construction of a landing strip, several families established themselves permanently in its vicinity

Place the body in the center, but not to categorize and fix it, but to generate a movement of digression, an attempt to think of forms from which to constitute it. Images that, in their collisions and vibrations, also want to coalesce as a significant body, images, on the other hand, that are welcomed by our bodies in their multiple resonances. Traversing the space of the gallery as a passage of images that stand open and where to look also means the encounter with a limit or a fracture, an opening where the bodies take position, without reconciling their mismatch. Curated by: Andrea Soto Calderón

“Un_i[n]verso” is an audiovisual sculpture, combining sound, video, rebar sculptures, lights, and shadows in a site-specific installation. It explores the concept of matter, merging various media types to create an artistic form where the viewer experiences a cohesive whole. The work takes the viewer on a dramaturgical journey, starting from macroscopic digital landscapes, delving into deconstructed cities, and floating between reality and imagination in a constant, slow zoom. Curated by: Francesco Ozzola

Intermittent is an alert signal, and it is also a type of Spanish labor contract. It is the rhythm of an artist who must juggle their art practice with another job. Intermittent is Maíra das Neves’ first solo show in Barcelona, where she will present her most recent artworks: the video-essay Life Span, two self-portrait photographs, and the dark watercolor sets Workdays. Intermittent offers a subjective perspective from personal experience as a cognitarian worker, the proletarian class of the late capitalism and its data economy.

Simona Žemaitytė (1984) is a Lithuanian artist-filmmaker. Her work was previously awarded at 15th Tallinn Print Triennial and nominated at Sheffield Doc Fest. She exhibited internationally, including Oberhausen, 13th Kaunas Biennial; Centrala Birmingham, Kasa Gallery Istanbul; Galata Perform Istanbul; BAFTA, RichMix, London, CAC Lithuania; Galleries Vartai, Malonioji and Kaire-Desine in Vilnius; Riga Cinema Shorts; CreArte traveling exhibition in Pardubice, Linz, Genoa. She recently (April 2024) defended her PhD thesis at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is teaching at Vilnius Art Academy. She lives and works in London and Napoles.

Artificial intelligence vs. painting on canvas, a debate and an active and latent conversation, constant and limited by the spatial temporality of the physical environment. Curated by: Uxval Gochez and Daria Nikit.iuk

On a pentagram, 25 “Postales Sonoras” (Sound Postcards) follow one after the other, giving an account of the sound identity of the island of Ibiza. An audiovisual plurality that works with sound and visual superimposition. The “Postales Sonoras” are significant fragments that emerge from focusing on the logics of space, the dynamics of behaviour, the flow of everyday life, a collection that arises from fieldwork to record the soundscapes and images, from the recording of an audiovisual diary for 70 days on the island of Ibiza. The pieces reproduce a space of their own and practised in Ibiza, to create an inventoried space, which allows the different sonorities to be noted, which when listened to, apprehended and manipulated to transform them, become an invitation to a particular interpretation so that the spectator can make it their own.

Zielinsky is pleased to present “La herida, la venda, la cura” [The wound, the bandage, the cure] a solo exhibition by Sandra Monterroso (1974, Guatemala City). Monterroso has developed an artistic practice in which she commits to restore her cultural and ancestral heritage as a Mayan artist. Her research raises awareness both of the current political reality and of the history of violence in Guatemala –racial, social and gender–, as well as of the power structures inherited from colonialism, from a situated knowledge, “heal colonial wounds through art, Mayan rituals, and the rituals of other cultures”.