Alan Martín Segal

WWII veteran, Ray, is a self-help guru in the afterlife, guiding us though breathing exercises and spiritual release. A former Nazi air force headquarters turned 90s daytime talk-show studio becomes the unlikely setting for collective healing of deep personal trauma. Complicated symbols and histories mix into a singular filmic experience.

Lucius Glantz, a veteran hotel manager in Vienna, fights to save his beloved establishment from a scheming realtor's plan to demolish it, leading to a clash of wills that even affects the hotel's renowned soufflé recipe.

F begins to follow two young anarchists who sporty usurp abandoned commercial storefronts and apartments. These three strangers will become closer after subtle acts of trespassing and sporadic forays into civil disobedience. The longing for exile and the fantasy that a promising future is somewhere else contaminates F. The city is immersed in an eternal holding pattern, becoming into a singular artifact, as melancholy as uncanny.

Using personal correspondence and some passages from Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s The Head of Goliath, as well as recreations with paper models and minor acts of architectural preservation, Incomplete Disappearance presents a series of simulations through which an identity crisis is (temporarily) avoided.

Ghosts make the past writable, organizing the gaps in personal history. In this light, ghost stories can be funny, tender, or even romantic, rather than purely horror. In No Anteriority, ghostly matter appears as a humid vapor, sometimes taking the form of a greenish lucidity. The shadows of the dry cleaner become a site of discovery, and the hand applying drops of product onto fabric offers a clue: outside our perception, even stains don’t exist.

"Before, it was like this; now, it is like that." This recurring phrase in the work raises the question: what was like this, and now is like that? Through this wordplay, we glimpse a recurring theme in Segal’s works: a subtler, less persuasive form of magic—the trick. Falso Sport is filled with visual games, presented as yet another instance of assembly and editing. In its persistent exposure of the artificiality of images—mostly cardboard models of intentionally precarious realism—the work reveals a power dynamic that dictates what is shown and what remains hidden.

An unclassifiable film that swerves between the realms of conceptualism, comedy, sound art, every-day anecdote and a grim accounting of our “society of control”. Departing from the weird experience of being a “language strategist” in a modern work-place, it sketches out multiple systems of words, symbols, diagrams, gestures and ex-changes – only to deconstruct them, and constantly return us to the realm of “pure signifiers”, the noise that exist before any identifiable meaning, the lines and colours that precede a recognisable image. In a world of logos designed to emotionally manipulate us, Segal values our perceptual freedom.

An elliptical depiction of events from the night of an alleged rape, and the celebration after the acquittal.