Retrato nº 2. Cuaderno de ensayos

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.

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.

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).

Patricia Lamas, with her generosity and energy, invited us to improvise-play-share at the recently opened creation centre L'animal a la esquena (Celrá, Girona). From that meeting resulted, among others, these improvisations.

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.

Within the project “Anatomía poética" (Poetic Anatomy), by Elena Córdoba.

City-dance-video

A bitter remake -comic at times- of the first work in the history of cinematography (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l'Usine Lumière), which happens to be the last film in history.

'Puerta Beta' was based on the site specific performance ‘Fuera de la fábrica Beta’, a collective creation directed by Nilo Gallego, in which the public, located inside an abandoned factory, a symbol of the industrial decline of the area, could observe the busy transport routes that connect the outside with the centre of the city of Bilbao, through a game between the everyday, chance and a series of interventions in which the residents of the Zorrozaurre neighbourhood participated.

If any cinematographic experience belongs from beginning to end to spectrality (Derrida), in “Kubrick” the relationship between cinema and ghostliness is explicitly evident. Through a performative spell, the projected light frees the images from the proper territory of the specter (neither alive nor dead), giving them life, or, which is the same thing, giving them death.

Video constructed from the discarded sound recordings made in the process of developing an archive that works with domestic images. Showing and hiding as possibilities in the exercise of the same right, memory and forgetfulness, silence and word, creating a diffuse narrative, although millimetric, that accompanies the images, or their absence.

‘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.

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.

Villa 31. Buenos Aires is about life in its most physical sense, the life that, despite everything, beats unstoppably in every corner of the planet. It speaks of happiness, suffering, and the learning of both, and takes place, perhaps by chance, in one of the various shantytowns of Buenos Aires: Villa 31. The recording was made as part of Rodrigo García's stage project ‘Cruda, vuelta y vuelta, al punto, chamuscada’.

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.