In the early years of cinema — a medium named after the act of ‘recording movement’ — optical toys and chronophotography were born from a desire to see the chain of motion where cause becomes effect, and effect becomes cause. Although not explicitly stated, it can be said that the performance and films in this program are motion studies in their own right. Using collage, painterly interventions, repetition, and animation, they expose and fracture the material conditions and mechanisms of the various objects, people, media, and actions they seek to present. Movement is fragmented and deconstructed. It is here, in-between one frame and the next, or one medium and another, that meaning emerges. It is not gathered through narrative continuity, but rather actively constructed through the perception of motion, or the creation of new temporalities.
Reflecting not only on the history of cinema, but also on its many precursors, the works featured in the program playfully reimagine the possibilities of film and its multiple ‘origin stories’. Encounters between film and painting form an interactive relationship where each becomes contingent on the other, and where film provides the structure through which painting can be explored as a temporal medium. Parallels are drawn between painterly optical techniques and the camera’s capacity to mislead the human eye. With a cartwheel, Muybridge’s scientific experiments are summoned, then playfully reworked. Flowers flicker alone and in pairs, as they waltz through a passage of time. A river, and one’s experience of it, becomes a site of material intervention. In an interval between two films, there is a thought: matter is to be continuously rediscovered — each day, each night, in a new light.
At the centre of it all, a single verb: Play. Play as an embrace of tactility and experimentation. Play as a generative practice, as a calling driven by joy and wonder. Play as a series of questions: What does it mean to be in a world? What does it mean to feel moved?
In the presence of Elena Duque
Curated by Natalia Orasanin
In collaboration with EQZE — Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola
While images are projected in 16mm, Elena Duque paints over the screen in real time. Four simple lessons on art for beginners, each an ode to canonical genres of painting. In For Sonia, Duque evokes Sonia Delaunay’s bold geometric shapes. Still Life instructs the audience on how to paint those commonplace, inanimate objects. In Action Painting, Duque takes inspiration from Joan Mitchell’s abstract expressionism. During the final lesson, Seated Portrait, faces are rendered into cubist paintings.
Playing with the technique of the trompe l’oeil in visual art, Duque self-reflexively extends this optical trick into the realm of cinema. The title takes its inspiration from the song Ojitos mentirosos by Tropicalísimo Apache. Its lyrics read “Mienten, mienten tus ojitos / miran, miran tan bonitos / y mi corazón se hace pedacitos,” and translate to: “Lie, lie, your little eyes lie / they look, they look so beautifully / and my heart breaks apart.” Through images of Madrid, the architecture becomes a playground for the eye’s tricks to roam free. Interventions of painting and collage create layers of depth that never drift too far from the personal.
Anne Rees-Mogg’s takes on Muybridge’s studies of motion are stopped, sped-up, re-shuffled, slowed-down, and re-ordered — transforming a scientific endeavour into a personal portrait of friend and fellow filmmaker, Renny Croft. Mogg’s editing and transparent manipulation of the image does not act as a document intended to demonstrate or prove motion. Instead it playfully exposes the deceptive nature of a medium that is constructed by both stillness and fragmentation. Muybridge Film is one of 11 films made by Rees-Mogg prior to her death in 1984.
Flowers flutter in a tank of water, where they spin, flicker, merge, come apart, then back together. Mack’s long-standing admiration of material ephemera is explored in her most recent 16mm film. She integrates and transforms botanical forms previously encountered throughout works such as Wasteland N. 2: Hardy Hearty (2019), Wasteland N. 3: Moons, Sons (2021), and M*U*S*H (2022). Through the creation of spellbinding rhythms and visual patterns, the film observes and traces life’s cycles, transformations, and decays. Singularity becomes plurality, and through the camera’s rendering of these movements in space and time, the seemingly abstract takes on a material dimension.
Combining live-action with experimental animation, Portales centres on the Guadalete river in Cádiz, Spain. The river and its surrounding landscape become both a subject and a conduit to explore the many ways in which a place may open itself up to us. Each moment becomes a window — or portal — into the next. The river, the surrounding vegetation, and the animals are encountered then transformed through Duque’s material interventions. A personal experience of a place that is driven by memory, imagination, and the playful incorporation of its material histories.
