Contactos

Contactos opens cinema up to the other artistic disciplines and knowledge-related activities we call science. This is especially relevant when thinking about documentary cinema, which by definition is oriented towards reflection and knowledge, and shares an interest in investigating reality with the other contemporary arts. The section takes its name from one of the most radical and overwhelming films in the history of Spanish cinema, Contactos (Paulino Viota, 1970), which was included in the festival’s first Heterodocsias Rewind in 2010.

In this edition, we have given Fernando Gandasegui carte blanche to organise a small living arts programme —one of the most fertile components of the latest editions of the festival, which was launched by the previous artistic director Garbiñe Ortega and we enthusiastically wish to continue—, and invited Bruno Delgado Ramo, Esperanza Collado, Paula Guerrero and Javier Montero to treat us to a set of performances and installations. Fernando took one of this year’s avenues for reflection as a basis, the rivers present in one of the two retrospectives, while Bruno, Esperanza, Paula and Javier will work on the subject of the screen as geometry and minimum element of cinema. Everything is set to take place at the Museo Oteiza.

Finally, in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, we will host the world premiere of Aquí no hay nada que comprender, a documentary about the work of Elena Asins (19402015), an artist from Madrid who lived for a long time in Azpirotz (Navarra). We will also screen Líneas y puntos (2010), one of the numerous videos that Asins made with her collaborator, the composer Gorka Alda. The piece has been chosen by Gorka himself for the occasion.

Desbordes: otra historia del ojo

Our eyes have turned to water. Laia Estruch, Sibina

In Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, there is a scene which takes place in a bullring, which, like theatrical architectures, is a place from which to look. In the scene, “under a blinding sun”1, among other ocular conjunctions, the spectators witness a bullfight in which the bull charges the bullfighter, flipping him in the air as it gores him. One of its horns spears an eye, which comes out of its socket, overflowing like a river when it grows.

Within Desbordes: otra historia del ojo flow works whose performativity surpasses the pre-eminence of the scopic regime, the relationship of vision with events, the body or the territory, works whose iridescence opens up space for the configuration of other possible agencies in the gaze of the spectators. Like a river, the programme proposes a route which flows through the connection between Aumentar el caudal de un río by Luz Broto, Pigmeus do Mondego by Nilo Gallego and Respiración oceánica by Itziar Okariz with the collaboration of Izar Ocariz.

It begins with Luz Broto’s intervention —two pictures which were part of the original installation are shown here. The basis of the work consisted of literally and minutely increasing the flow of the Segre River in Lleida, which has been lower for a century due to economic interests. Preserving the relationship of visual scales or volumes of the project, one of the images is the furtive view of the hidden hose from which the water gushed into the river, while the other shows an aerial view of the river running through the territory with its imperceptibly increased flow.

The curatorial project continues with Pigmeus do Mondego, a performance by Nilo Gallego which was presented at Citemor, a festival held in Montemor-oVelho, one of the longest-standing and most important performing arts events on the peninsula. The Mondego River meanders through the paddy fields of this small Portuguese town, and Nilo Gallego and his collaborators turned the river into an astonishing stage for their performance, turning the Mondego into a sonorous participant. The video of the work will be accessible on the living arts web platform Teatron during the week of the festival.

The programme ends with Respiración oceánica by Itziar Okariz at the Museo Oteiza. In this performance, the sound produced by Ujjayi breathing, as used in yoga, emanates from the bodies of Itziar Okariz and Izar Ocariz, flowing through their speech apparatus just like rivers flow into oceans. Like great masses of water, the amplified breathing of Itziar and Izar floods everything, transporting us towards the zero degree of meaning, where before the word there was sound, a horizon of images yet to be created.

The physical phenomenon by which certain bodies absorb moisture from the air until they form an aqueous solution and become water is called deliquescence. Imagine that these bodies are eyes. Deliquescent eyes which absorb everything that happens until they spill from their sockets. Spectators with eyes of water which recover the agency to build another place from which to look, another story of

the eye. Fernando Gandasegui

Aumentar el caudal de un río Luz Broto

An intervention which tries to minimally offset, from the furtive and the precarious, the incidence that major infrastructure has on the state of a territory.

The project consisted of creating a new channel to divert water from the Seròs canal, built a century ago to feed a hydroelectric power station, and return it to the Segre river, whose reduced flow as it passes through the city of Lleida is below the minimum that environmental standards set.

While the canal takes water from the river and returns it to the Segre 25 km further on, this intervention worked as a shortcut to return some of the water diverted into the river.

Although its impact on flow volumes was not visible, it worked on a small scale trying to offset (about 40 l/h) the current distribution: 60,000 l/s for the canal and 2,000 l/s for the river. The rechannelling, effected with hidden hoses, worked thanks to the siphon effect. The set-up remained in place for seven months before it disappeared.

Aumentar el caudal de un río was produced in 2014 for Campo Adentro (Centre d’Art la Panera) and is part of the MACBA collection.

Luz Broto is an artist and lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. She works with space, with what is here, taking into account the architecture of the place, its urban environment or position within a territory, its infrastructure or organisational structure, its regulations, uses and protocols; and proposes minimal operations which change everything. She has carried out site-specific intervention projects in collaboration with different institutions and in various contexts, such as Asimilar la temperatura exterior (Secession, Vienna, 2011), Aumentar el caudal de un río (Centro de Arte la Panera, Lleida, 2014), Abrir un agujero permanente (MACBA, Barcelona, 2015), Derogar las normas de uso relativas al silencio (Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, 2016), Tensar una línea entre dos interiores paralelos (FLORA, Bogotá, 2018) or recently Prolongar los pilares (ethall, L’Hospitalet, 2021). She has received production grants such as Blueproject Foundation, BCN Producción or currently the Botín Foundation’s Visual Arts Grant. luzbroto.net

Pigmeus do Mondego Nilo Gallego

Performance on the Mondego river near Montemor-o-Velho using sound elements from the environment, together with percussion, wind instruments and electronic devices. Project designed especially for the Citemor festival with the participation of seven musicians/partners and the collaboration of different people from the locality.

Produced by María Ordás / Video recording Hugo Barbosa, Pamela Gallo, Adán Santiago / Video editing Raúl Alaejos, Nilo Gallego / Citemor technical coordination Carlos Ramos / General coordination Vasco Neves / Production Joana Macias / Citemor Festival directed by Armando Valente, Vasco Neves

Nilo Gallego is a musician who produces performances based on experimentation with sound. In his works, which always involve a playful component, he seeks interaction with the environment and the quotidian. He plays drums, percussion and electronic instruments. He also creates music and designs sound space for theatre and contemporary dance companies, is part of the experimental action group Orquestina de pigmeos (with Chus Domínguez) and regularly collaborates with creators such as Silvia Zayas, Alex Reynolds or the company Societat Doctor Alonso.

Pigmeus do Mondego are Nilo Gallego, Noemí Fidalgo, Ana Cortés, Raúl Alaejos, Varis Fuertes and Pedro Sousa Coias, with the collaboration of the musicians Katsunori Nishimura and Markus Breuss, and the participation of Guilherme Barbosa, José Dias, Pedro Miguel, Mario Neves, Andreia and Jessica, Ignacio Martinez, Saul García, Sinead Conolly, Jessica, Joana, Joí¢o, Mariana, Mariana Pardal, Mariana Vizinha, Rafael Nobre, Ruben, Tiago and Clube de Canoagem do Infante Montemor.

Respiración oceánica Itziar Okariz with the collaboration of Izar Ocariz

This work is built from a chorus of breaths. Ujjayi is a type of breathing used in yoga. The word means I victorious and is usually translated as ocean breathing because that is the image it evokes. The piece is figurative in nature, between the abstract space of the sound of breathing and the image it generates, as if sign and sense were separate, fractured.

Itziar Okariz works within the framework of action and performance, questioning the ways in which language is regulated and the signs which define us are produced. Her work —vocal performances, instantaneous acts, videos, installations and pieces of text— examines the ties between architecture, territory, body ritual, sexuality and semiotics. Often associated with feminist practices, punk rock and queer criticism of normative constructions of gender, Itziar deploys a form of aesthetic dissidence associated with Situationism. Her projects include: Unquiet Objects, Disjecta, Portland (2021); Respiración oceánica in Moving Words, Rimi Scenekunst, Stavanger; Personae, máscaras contra la barbarie, Els Baluard, Palma de Mallorca; La noche de las ideas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2021); Las Estatuas, Fundación Oteiza, Alzuza (2020); Bodies of Water, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2020); Perforado por, Spanish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, together with Sergio Prego (2019); Footnote to a Footnote, Academia Española, Rome; I Never Said Umbrella, Tabakalera, San Sebastian (2018); Una construcción… CA2M, Madrid (2018); Ideorritmias, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2017); Itziar Okariz, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2017); Dream Diary, Ars Parcours, Basel (2017).

Izar Ocariz likes reading, writing, drawing and doing karate. They both live in Bilbao.

Acciones para la pantalla Bruno Delgado Ramo + Paula Guerrero + Esperanza Collado + Javier Montero / Las Synergys

The rectangle was here before we came, and it will be here after we have gone. So it seems that a film is, first, a confined space, at which you and I, we, a great many people, are staring.

Hollis Frampton

But were the light reflected on our faces to come from a window, and the image projected parallel to it were to be lost in the sunlight of the landscape, were the film to have been sustained in time for a week or so, and we found ourselves there, observing, waiting, what form would the absence of the screen then take? We think of the missing rectangle, and yet, from our empirical location and experience, we always saw a trapezoid, many trapezoids, all different, and each person, at each instant, had ours.

Starting up the screen, giving it certain autonomy, could help us confirm the proposition that Isidoro Valcárcel Medina expounds in 9 secuencias sobre la pantalla: projection as servant of the support on which it rests. In the projection environment, the audience’s level of attention fluctuates and is nuanced according to different environmental parameters while some specific elements are maintained, favouring attention as a shared gesture, a filmic gesture. Kidnapping the screen would undoubtedly disrupt attention, but what if the state of confusion and the need to search for a support for the light brings back that shared gesture?

Bruno Delgado Ramo approaches his interdisciplinary work as investigations based on the experimental, material and spatial practice of cinematographic media in which the ideas of specificity, procedure or spatial reading are important, leading him to see filming and projection as light processes at specific locations in specific contexts. This time, he has prepared Acciones para la pantalla with Paula Guerrero, Esperanza Collado and Javier Montero as the group Las Synergys. The idea was devised with the participation of the Gabinete kino~okno project, which the group develops in Espacio Santa Clara in Seville, with which it shares its inquiry into the connections between the window and cinema.

With the support of Ayudas Creación Injuve

We are screening this film programme as part of the actions which make up the intervention at the Museo Jorge Oteiza. Continuing with the same reflections which drive the most manifestly spatial moments of the proposal, with this series of films we aim to trace different hypotheses on the filmic experience resulting from sensitive investigation of the network of connections between screen and window, and support and light. Under this premise, each film presents us with a hypothesis. This relates different states, materials or actions linked to the luminous instant that projection and the window activate. Far from establishing a code, these concepts could configure a structure in which to begin to support a tautological exploration of our conventions and uses of the screen and the window. We learn to inhabit the projection with the grounding of the window. We project on the window the sensitive education we have developed on the screen. Although the circumstances of projection and the windows vary (we are not talking about an ideal scheme), our sensitive training activates certain elements or perceptual structures in the absence of their intrinsic factors. In general terms, we recognise three components in the use of the window implicit in the practice of projection: the cut (outline of a field), the insurmountable threshold (a boundary which, embodied in the support, is not designed to be crossed but sustains the coexistence of two divided spaces) and the irruption of waves in a stable environment (vectors, for example, of light, sound or wind). The interplay of these three components heightens the tensions between the contained and the expansive, between the interior and the exterior or between the surface and depth. In particular terms, each window and each screen motivate specific factors. And so it is with the programme.

The order of the films can be seen to trace a sequence of concrete notions, part of a path to walk without interruption. First of all, the focus, in search of a figure, squinting towards that luminous moment we were talking about and depositing our attention through it. We leave that other space in which we find ourselves, a void nuanced in shadow, where our body is immersed and sustained by the conditions of the environment. While our eye receives the light reflected by the flat support, the rigid fabric on which to pour the two-dimensional image has the ability to transform the space in which we find ourselves. A place shaped by the concentrated light and by its absence outside the limit established by the support. Like the window (we are talking about the window that is no longer door), the screen actualises a threshold which our bodies, in principle, do not cross. We see the wind, but it does not cross the threshold. This is the interface of the luminous instant. Sunlight reflecting off the landscape, the glare of the projector reflecting off the screen: both light sources have the potential to dazzle, the glare could imprint black or blue spots on our retinas. That is why we will always choose to see the reflection, being at most the only thing that we can see (the reflection on things), which will produce softer retinal persistences.

We find that the films implicitly contain, within themselves and between each other, concepts which could be antagonistic, such as, for example, the most obvious one, light and darkness. But we also seek, through them, other analogous figures, such as the window and the screen. This leads us, firstly, to understand certain mechanisms of vision and, secondly, to reflect on the conventions of the filmic situation on the basis of these observations of everyday life.

Bruno Delgado Ramo, Paula Guerrero

Focus I Jenny Okun United Kingdom, 1977, 3 min, 16mm, colour, silent

A Proposal to Project in 4:3 Viktoria Schmid

Austria, 2016, 2 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Windmill II Chris Welsby United Kingdom, 1972, 8 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Room Window Sea Sky Peter Todd

United Kingdom, 2014, 3 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Arequipa Barbara Hammer

USA, 1981, 12 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Window Stan Brakhage USA, 1976, 10 min, super-8, colour, silent

Eye Eclipse + 3 Suns + Solar, the blindman eating a papaya + Heat Ray João Maria Gusmao, Pedro Paiva Portugal, 2007-2011, 9 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Double feature: Elena Asins

Líneas y puntos Elena Asins, Gorka Alda

Spain, 2010, 5 min, DCP, B&W, no dialogue

In her later work, Elena Asins experimented intensely in the medium of video alongside the composer Gorka Alda. It was a way of giving a new, temporal development to her long-standing investigations into geometry. Líneas y puntos is one of the twenty-two videos which remain from the collaboration between Alda and Asins, one of the artist’s lesser known and least studied bodies of work. It has been chosen by the composer to open this session.

Olga Sevillano is head of Digital Projects at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. She is in charge of coordinating, managing and developing the museum’s website and won a 2018 Webby award for the best cultural institution site.

Javi Álvarez is a musician and artist. He makes video, outreach and documentary pieces. He won a 2017 Ondas award for the podcast Catástrofe ultravioleta.

Aquí no hay nada que comprender. Un documental sobre Elena Asins Javi Álvarez, Olga Sevillano

Spain, 2020, 62 min, DCP, colour, Spanish World premiere

An exploration of the uniqueness of Elena Asins’ work, which spans a wide range of formats and media, from concrete poetry, drawing and video to sculpture and installation. An ensemble story in which different voices try to answer many of the questions posed by a strict and demanding art.

Film presented in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.