In the Era

A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary.

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.

Ficciones is a spell that conjures representations as if imagined from the perspective of the plant world, that which invents prior to consciousness, as a thinking before thinking (M. Marder). Ceramic sculptures were gardened for a year letting plant life grow on them as their skin. Four super-8 cameras were made into a mobile, thereby also filming the process and its shared motion. To embrace the filmed material as a fictional construction, it was optically printed and altered; to accompany the notion of the sculptures as possible chests, containers of heart, vocal sounds were recorded with Camila de Laborde and weaved into the film.

Intimate play locating the phenomenon of animation; once the hand comes in touch with the object, the other. La araña (Spider) to my hand is what my hand is to the spider. A duet, a revelation of intention, while leaving the point of inception unlit.

Luis Carricaburu executes the movement languidly but at the same time with emphasis, with generous patience, towards the camera, as if he feared that the negative would not be able to record it. The movement has been stripped of its perpetual combustion. Abstract gestures from their surroundings recombine to produce a language without content, ghosts of something that, elsewhere, is still alive at the same time.

Manuela de Laborde's experimental film, 'As Without So Within', explores the possibility that the surface of things is an entity worthy of is own depth for itself and in itself, demanding to be seen and confronted as such. The project accepted what is visual as emotion the moment the images were created with a focus on the sensorial.

Much of its visions, like the conceptual frame the title gives, still holds for me.