name

title

year

length

about

Ana Laura Aláez (SP)

Superficiality

2003

6:26 min.

Superficiality is a video clip that deals with the appearances and archetypes that define today's concepts of beauty and identity. The female busts that appear in this video are deprived of the lavish make-up job that the artist herself underwent in Make-up Sequences. The extravagant wigs, pronounced eye-shadow and painted lips disappear and give rise to faces that are clean and pure, which takes place through a pictorial process that questions notions such as ideal beauty and social conventionalism. Although cosmetics again are used on the female face, they physically and formally go beyond commonly accepted facial limits: the make-up around the model's eyes looks as if it were a mask; lipstick is smeared across her entire face. The accentuation of feminine features takes on the form of a disguise, of social camouflage. Aláez undermines, through the transformation of her surface, the standards of beauty that reduce the naked body to a social stereotype. (Carlos Ordás)

Dora García (SP)

La lección respiratoria

2001

10:00 min.

La lección respiratoria shows the relationship that is established between the two main characters of a performance shot on video. Through a series of gestures, words, shrieks and diverse body movements, a woman gives instructions to a girl located in the foreground, who receives them and puts them into practice as breathing exercises. As in her other works, we find the usual contradiction between the artificial - reflected in the choreography performed by the woman, the instruction and the training - and the basic needs for survival, such as air. A dialogue is struck up between the two characters, one of the recurring elements in Dora García's oeuvre, which takes on the form of the orders given by the woman, who plays the role of the coach intent on instilling her pupil with knowledge. The characters' relationship of interdependency is materialised in a questioning of identity, in the cancelling out of one's own will, which may even interfere with the basic survival instinct. Thus presented in paradoxically clear fashion is the ease by which certain contradictory elements can form a part of the same game. Yet the same order/obedience concept questions the identity of not only he who is subjugated by the dictates of the other, but also that of the person giving the orders. A cathartic process takes place in which there is a supplanting of personality on two fronts: he who receives the orders does the will of the person giving the orders, who in turn needs to put himself in the other's place in order to carry out his will. (Carlos Ordás)

christian Jankowski (D)

Rosa

2001

18:54 min.

Rosa is the title of a cinematic fiction of interrelations - it is not by chance that its creation runs parallel to that of a film, with which it shares different actors and plot structures - in which Jankowski recounts, in fragmented fashion and from multiple perspectives, the story of a multimedia artist and the varied bunch of art-related characters that gravitate around him. The relationships established with the leading figure serve as a pretext to conduct a detailed (and highly ironic and humorous) study of the different attitudes adopted in the art milieu. Ambition, resignation, self-importance, deceit, misunderstanding - these are some of the aspects that come to the fore as this story unfolds. Deliberately breaking narrative rules, Jankowski lets his characters slip out of the film's linear flow to give their impressions in front of the camera about the nature of art. The disparity of approaches ties in with the multifarious cast of characters presented. The author's vision, insofar as his immediate surroundings are regarded as a field of study (even making direct use of some of his earlier performances), serves to unify these diverse criteria in an ambiguous, moral-like conclusion that reduces the grandiosity of the artistic context to a mere reflection of everyday life, mediatised as it is by the partial visions of those belonging to it. (Carlos Ordás)

ISAAC JULIEN (UK)

Paradise Omeros

2002

18:51 min.

Set in 1960s London and the island of St. Lucy, Paradise Omeros offers a poetic glimpse into the construction of identity as a bulwark against - the other�, the foreign. Based on different poems written by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott a propos of Homer's Odyssey, Julien reflects on love, hate and xenophobia.
Using two such different settings as the beaches of the Caribbean and the grey skies of London, this story analyses the effects of migration and dislocation resulting from the post-colonial period. The main character's journey brings him full circle and becomes a metaphor for the psychological and linguistic problems stemming from this driftage. (Carlos Ordás)

ANRI SALA (AL)

Dammi i colori

2003

15:24 min.

In the year 2000, the artist Edi Rama was elected mayor of Tirana, Anri Sala's birthplace. A fervent anti-communist activist, he mounted a powerful campaign to regain control of the zone under his jurisdiction. The inevitable budgetary deficit and consequent scarcity of the necessary resources to refurbish the city's façades was what led him to throw himself in his free time into the task of repainting the buildings in the most rundown areas. Dammi i colori accompanies Rama on a tour of the various settings the mayor had worked on. Enormous geometrical patterns in rich and striking colours stand in stark contrast to the impoverishment of the area. The various patterns and chromatic codes used are explained in front of the camera, and thus open up the possibility of new interpretations of the buildings' original modernist structures, as well as to the norms of social stratification that the latter at first established. The visual refinement in the plastic results of the work rest on cinematographic viewing angles with lyrical undertones that go to make up a curious poetics of image, reflecting a restrained hopefulness: that of the forgotten ones of present-day Europe. (Carlos Ordás)

MARKUS SCHINWALD (A)

Ten in Love

2006

5:00 min.

The dining room or a former convent-school in Granz is the anatomic space for a mysterious ritual in which ten characters, burdened with prostheses, interact without emitting any sound a all, or without any apparent cause or purpose, flirt constantly with the inertia. In the instant in which they seem to recognise each other, the interaction becomes deliberately ritualised: they dress and undress each other, they embrace in surprise, or take strange vows. Meanwhile, a disturbing soundtrack based on childish rhythms, which appear to have been taken from ancestral children’s songs, and mechanical buzzes that seem to drive the actions of the characters, highlight the poem-like male voice-over in which the expression “gestures mask intention” is repeated. Dysfunction and disorder are the core notions upon which the work is based. Prostheses and mechanical applications in the leading characters reintroduce a vision of a human body transformed into artefact. (Marta Gerveno)

MARTÍN SASTRE (U)

Videoart: The Iberoamerican Legend

2002

16:00 min.

This work was originally conceived as an installation comprising objects and costumes from Martín Sastre's audiovisual productions, though it also includes posters for films from the - future United Iberoamerican Artists film studios. A space hallowed by idealised representations of the pop media universe and Hollywood culture. The core of this work is the showing of Videoart: The Iberoamerican Legend, which is presented as the guiding thread running through the complex situation of Iberoamerican art in the international arena. Using real-world pictures, scenes from American blockbuster movies and a range of youth-culture and pop icons, Sastre plays the part of a sinister master of ceremonies in introducing viewers to a very special History of Art. The underlying notion behind this work is the possibility of Latin American artists becoming the power centre of an art emerging to take the place of the North American dictatorship in the wake of the latter's self-destruction and ensuing bankruptcy. For that purpose, the work analyses the various discourses employed by these artistic practices and then reworks them, turning their meanings and intentions upside down, and sarcastically concluding that the only valid way for Iberoamerican art to win a place for itself in the international arena is for it to be significantly cheaper. (Carlos Ordás)