Three video programs
The Southern Panoramas show works that require screening in a dark room will be shown at CineSesc and, later, in open air night exhibitions at Sesc Pompeia, grouped up by similarities, strategies, or thematics. Check out the curated programs below and view the schedule to book yourself.
PROGRAM 6: Ambivalences of architectural spaces
Into Thin Air into the Ground, Haig Aivazian, 30’45’’
Lago Onega N.8, Jacinto Astiazarán, 22’30”
Contemporary architectural space is of an ambivalent nature. Such condition is further enhanced by the context it is part of, especially in situations where modern Western tradition reverberates in ambiguous, at times belated, at times precarious fashion. By observing architectures as characters, video productions have tackled these urban figures aiming to reveal the power of mass media, the prevalence of technological subterfuges over projectual rationality and the more pressing issues of cities today – spaces where architecture presents itself as an element of distinction and power.
“Into Thin Air into the Ground” retraces a brief history of the tallest tower in the world, Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, unveiling the construction of its image in the collective imaginary, from the advertising of the superlative figures involved to the apocalyptic opening ceremony. As it explores the evolution of the rhetoric and material state of the tallest man-made structure in the world, the piece deals with the significance of iconic landmarks as images of power, and with the fabrication of artificial landscapes.
"Lago Onega N.8" documents the final phase in the construction of a residential building in Mexico City. Derived from certain aspects of the cultural and architectonic experience its author, a local entrepreneur, garnered on her travels to the United States, the project translates the beauty, cleanness, and organization she encountered there and which she sees as contrasting starkly with the urban environment of the Mexican capital. The artist deals with the idea of the artificialization of reality and brings to light the architectonic pastiche and historical citations of postmodernism.
PROGRAM 7: Immersions in Brazilian sociocultural space
Doméstica, Gabriel Mascaro, 75’
This piece also represents the new documental strategies employed by artists to compose in-depth investigations of our socioeconomic reality, spinning out an ambiguous take on the domestic labor relations that have become established in Brazilian households, harking back to a secular, patriarchal culture.
The artist invited middle-class teenagers to spend a week filming the daily activities of their housemaids. The film uses the raw footage that resulted from this re-negotiation of roles, which temporarily subverts a relationship based on subservience and invisibility. An immersion in a particular nook of Brazilian sociocultural space, the work examines an arrangement that jumbles relationships of employment and affection, protection and violence, familiarity and class struggle.
PROGRAM 8: Deconstruction of narratives
Journey to a Land Otherwise Known, Laura Huertas Millán, 22’17”
Vive le capital, Orit Ben-Shitrit, 15’05’’
Malleable Tracks, Gregg Smith, 22’52’’
The narrative tradition of cinema has become an element of experimentation in myriad audiovisual practices. In this program, three different approaches to building a narrative put temporal data in tension, appropriating references from documentaries, dance, and American and French cinemas, respectively. In the first two cases, social history narratives are deconstructed and adapted to film. The last film features a story in suspension, an interruption of time, metaphorically reminiscent of the first main theme of the programs, putting forth an open reading of contemporary culture.
“Journey to a Land Otherwise Known” is documentary fiction inspired on the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by colonizers, missionaries, and scientists. Shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, France, the film uses the architecture and the plants of this enclosed botanic garden as narrative supports for an initiatory journey, led by the speech of an explorer. Exploring the notion of exoticism, the film evokes the violent origins of the New World and the endurance of the imagery they engendered.
In “Vive le capital” the plot pirouettes between the protagonist, a Wall Street type who claims to have lost millions, and dancers who respond to his soliloquy in transgressive behaviors. The scenic elements evoke financial institutions; historical references include Cosimo De Medici and the roots of our banking system. The tension between performance and register drives the piece. The artist exploits a love/hate relationship with money and dwells on its connection with the ideas of domination and persuasion.
In Malleable Tracks, by a series of coincidences, a couple is befriended by an elder gentleman on a weekend retreat. The viewer is introduced to scenes rich in stylistic association and visual charm, identifying rapidly with Hitchcockian suspense. This immersion is undermined by a series of substantial ellipses in the script’s development. The film seeks to insert itself into the increasingly narrow configuration between a physical experience of time and space, and the way in which knowledge and information are acquired.