Chus Domínguez

Architecture is a hunt for harmony in the chaos, a way of putting order in the universe through the creation of regular angles. The severity of the forms of a Francoist building – the Universidad Laboral in Gijón, Spain – is distilled and decomposed into its patterns, in this piece made with a mobile phone device for filMO (a project commissioned by Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón).

Sometimes, in order to get to the essence, one departs from the essential. In 'Silent Karaoke' the performer has to contribute more than just his or her voice.

‘In the realm of the visible, all epochs coexist fraternally, even if they are separated by centuries or millennia’. John Berger. ‘The third eye turns on a recognition: the Other perceives the veil, the process of being visualized as an object, but returns the glance [...] the third eyes winks at us [...], but notice how ridiculous my cage and my image are’. Tobing Rony.

An audiovisual excavation in the mining area of Gordón (León), in the village of Ciñera, affected by the dismantling of the mining industry and the ways of life associated with it. The project has been conceived as a collective work through local groups, in which the last images of the mine are intermingled with the conversations held between women miners throughout the period 2016-2017. The resulting film adds layers of complexity to an epic reading of the class struggle, while highlighting aspects such as care work or affective components, usually relegated in the conventional narrative about the mine.

All the rooms of Hostal España, a modest and centrally located establishment in the city of León, are occupied by elderly people, many of them coming from the abandoned rural environment. In its rooms, corridors and dining room, the seasons go by without pause for a community that has been invited to record their daily life and thus participate in the creation of a film that shows another possible way of life in the so-called third age.

In the Serra da Estrela (Portugal) silence is sometimes broken by the calls (chamamentos) of shepherds to control their flocks of sheep. These sounds are the basis for the sound poet Américo Rodríguez's compositions.

The film is based on the oral testimony of Josefa Castro García, recorded in 2013 when she was 90 years old, in which she recounts her life marked by the Civil War and post-war repression. Through her narration, the students with the same age as Josefa Castro was during the Civil War, 16-18 years, have developed a cinematographic proposal in parallel to their process of shared discovery of audiovisual language.

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