Echo Chamber

A multiple projection work from Valentina Alvarado Matos & Carlos Vásquez Méndez.

If the heart is the muscle that never rests, the hands are not better off as the body’s laborers. They touch, hold, pick, and create, they bring things into existence. This film explores the relationship between art and labor in the most tactile of enterprises. Matter is present both in front of and inside the camera. In front we have ceramics, collectively mixed, molded, and shaped. Inside we have film (celluloid) collecting the light that comes from the world around ARROJALATIERRA. A film about making things that leave a trace in space and time. (Lucía Salas)

A hand becomes the protagonist in a piece that outlines, from a macro viewpoint, a city seen as a tactile scenario, with different women working on artisan crafts.

These images, filmed in Venezuela and Spain, belong to a brief essay of these round trips where I search for a tension built on the idea of being native and foreign. Starting from a series of thoughts on the territory, while defining or blurring the borders, and terms like traveling and return, I started to film postcards, flashes and/ or blinks of metaphors. These are associations or links that I have with my place of origin, exploring the phenomenon of moving from one place to another, the itinerancies.

In AÍ, I propose different ways of relating with the territory. To do so, I travel through the space, explore it and display a flag on one of the mounds that make it up –a vestige of previous occupations–. The flag has a textual plot with the words country and root. The sound, an echo of these words, becomes a mantra.

“To blend the sea and the sky with a brushstroke, to erase the horizon, to raise a new dawn. El mar peinó a la orilla searches for new geographies in a visual game that intends to alter the filmed landscape” (Valentina Alvarado).

Tocant la llum is a film constructed out of meetings and workshops with children in Vic, in collaboration with the Gurdwara Guru Teg Bahadur community and the MEV museum. The film captures the perspectives, games, and gestures of the little ones, exploring their ways of understanding the transitions between inside and outside, and how childhoods inhabit sacred spaces.

The first of four letters in correspondence with artist Nazli Dinçel as part of the project "Hay cartas que detienen un instante más la noche" for La Casa Encendida.

In this film, Alvarado uses collage, paint, and ceramics as a means to build a possible territory to be inhabited from the diaspora and from a constant questioning of identity and roots.

APARICIÓN, PÉTALO Y LENGUA (APPARITION, PETAL AND LANGUAGE) traces a journey through a dream in which landscape, language, description, and the tropics become intertwined. The film presents an essay in which images anticipate, evoke or reveal the word and vice versa, while reflecting on how landscape is perceived in diaspora. Shot between Venezuela and Spain.

Like a huntress, the director began capturing moments of light during blackouts in her hometown of Maracaibo, seeking out elusive chances in the half-light.

A walk. A hand. Sorry: my hand. Can you spell the leaf? It's a short journey. It is also a petal, a little bug, a breath, a rehearsal, a sigh. Again, a walk: a round trip. An excursion through the workshop, garden, courtyard, archive, and footprint. A first approach to a series of essays on travel writing and the description of those landscapes we see for the first time.

Postcards of urban landscapes, words reconstructed, framed and reframed. Juxtapositions, tracings, paintings. The hands manipulate the objects, seek their second life from the images/words, according to the layers of memory. «Don't let my memories be stolen (….) Geography is history».