Living scents /
Living scents /
Magueyes
Rubén Gámez, Mexico, 1962, digital format (shot on 16mm), B&W, 8’50’’, no dialogue
The film explores an allegory of the Mexican revolution through the most iconic plant of the Mexican cultural imaginary, the maguey. Unlike Eisenstein and other authors who spoke on this subject, Gámez decides not to take a side in the struggle and although he makes his magueys fight through visual experimentation, the battle is that of nature.
Altiplano
Malena Szlam, Chile/Argentina/Canada, 2018, DCP (shot on 35mm), colour, 15’30’’, no dialogue
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, the film takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, the film reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.
Con cierto animal
Ivonne Sheen, Rebeca Albán, Peru, 2018, DCP (shot on 16mm), B&W/colour, 11’44’’, no dialogue
Humans, Animals, Earth, Wind and Water, all converge with the same energy of a filmic fire that traverses and relates them. Composed of educational images from 16mm films, once used to educate us, the film evokes a poetic collision between images of the human and the animal.
Sobre Aquilo Que Nos Diz Respeito
Cristiana Miranda, Cristiana Miranda, Brazil, 2016, DCP (shot on 16mm), colour, 8’35’’, no dialogue
The Roman statues of the Hanging Garden of Valongo hide histories of blood and death. A garden seven meters up from the ground, with long stairways that border the Hill of Conceição, from where they stand guard over the bends of Guanabara Bay, that the city insists on occupying. A monument for a city of slaves. The film brings the memory of the slave markets, which took place there before the construction of the Garden, before the landfill of the Valongo Port. We cover the Roman statues with straw of Omulú, an originally African God, to question the symbolic narratives of the so many oppressions that constitute us, the daily violence of worshiping distant and imposed symbols.
Corteza neón
Bruno Varela, Mexico, 2020, DCP, colour, 14’08’’, english and slovenian subtitles
An exercise in random materialist cinema, reels inhabited by structures where several temporalities collapse in the film development and scanning, becoming embedded in a common memory, and end up for weaving a mutated piece of light and vapours. Speculative fiction, vegetal narration, dream of seeds.
Piramide Erosionada
Colectivo Los ingrávidos, Mexico, 2019, DCP, colour, 8’50’’, no dialogue
The Pyramid used to be a mountain.
Deep Blue
Sebastian Wiedemann, Columbia, 2020, DCP, colour, 7’45’’, no dialogue
Springs and Apneas between Worlds to resist and re-exist the pandemic. The power of the womb of the world. Faced with thousands of bodies that cannot breathe and die from Covid-19, this work was meant to reflect on the force of apnea as a way to access primal states of life. If Covid-19 was a consequence of anthropic actions, this work is proposed to be a gesture of resistance by appealing to a connection with the cosmos and the sources of life.
» Deep Blue: A Cinematic In-Between-Living’s Memories of Future by Sebastian Wiedemann
Program will be introduced by the curator Jean-Jacques Martinod.
WARNING: Some of the films contain strong flashing light and sound signals