Issue 2: Autumn 2008: Spanish Avant-Garde Film
PARACINEMA & HAPPENING IN DUBLIN
Esperanza Collado
The small-scale Spanish avant-garde art festival Márgenes: Experimento y Praxis (Dublin, June 12-25) presented two works of a nomadic, improvisational and ephemeral nature which sought to involve the audience in active participation. Beyond the idea of installation and performance, Fog by Marta Fernández Calvo, and my own on-going ‘happening' project Cinema... Corpus versus Cerebrum functioned as situations with a strong emphasis on notions of process and social interchange. By generating a series of micro-narratives within the social construct, both works aimed to transfer art to the praxis of life.
Fog functions according to the temporal availability of the audience, and, like natural fog, moves in the landscape, appearing and eventually disappearing. This piece is conceived as a series of situations emerging from an intervention and its encounter with an audience: the artist created a ‘portable fog kit' which, by request of a number of Dublin inhabitants, was installed on a daily basis at different locations around the city. Consisting of a large screen-like sheet on which photographs of actual fog taken in Dolomite (Italy) were printed, its surface, made of white micro-perforated vinyl, interacts with the fluctuations of natural light and eventually becomes transparent.
A range of participants -Anne-Marie Kilfeather, Nora Duggan, Jessamyn Fiore, Ulrike Klein, Donal Foreman, Victor Beckett, and Seoidin O'Sullivan- requested the installation of Fog in public and private spaces, which generated a series of situations based on creative interchange that eventually led to collaborative works such as St. Anne's Park, a video piece by Nora Duggan, and Seven Ways of Rain, an on-going project Fernández Calvo is developing at the moment with Irish artist John Lambert. Taking the ‘portable fog kit' -the rolled sheet and other elements required for its installation- from one location to another, the action of unrolling it, setting it up, and the time during which the piece was at a specific site, make notions of process and duration important, defining components of Fog.
Temporal sequentiality, spatial modularity and luminous change are three aspects implicit in Fog that emanate directly from a dematerialized condition of film, and characterize this work as paracinema. This term implies works that, while not being embodied in the traditional materials of cinema, define themselves as films or share with cinema its modularity in terms of time, space and light. Cinema... Corpus versus Cerebrum challenges conventions of exhibition formats, more specifically those pertaining to traditional film screening. In this respect, CCC could be understood as a paracinematic work as well, since its presentation, beyond established projection formats and against unidirectional spatial distribution, falls into an arena parallel to cinema in which shadow play and other interventions are performed.
Cinema... Corpus versus Cerebrum was especially conceived for thisisnotashop gallery space as a live action cinema event consisting of four simultaneous projections interacting with improvised live music generated with an analogue synthesizer by Irish composer Neil O'Connor. The piece was originally intended to take place outside the gallery, with various projectors pointing at its windows; the idea was to create an audio/visual dialogue with the intermittent presence of the tram, which stops right in front of the gallery at regular intervals. Owing to weather conditions, such an arrangement wasn't possible, although some footage was eventually projected outside the gallery. Four Super 8mm and 16mm film projectors were distributed within the gallery space, projecting simultaneously on two previously treated windows. The projections could be perfectly perceived from both outside and inside the gallery. The audience, therefore, went in and out periodically in order to contemplate the event from both viewpoints.
Participating artists Oriol Sánchez, Albert Alcoz, Antoni Pinent and Maxi Viale, (who had all previously shown works during the Márgenes festival) were asked to project different films, mostly found-footage as well as clear leader, and perform, along with the audience, a series of actions during the projection event. These actions were partly planned although there was great room for chance operations. Examples of the activities of both artists and audience during this event include moving projectors around the space, painting on filmstrips as they were being projected, getting in the way of projection beams, various forms of shadow play, and using mirrors to direct the beams of light on to different walls, the ceiling, and even outside the spatial boundaries of the gallery.
The idea was to destroy, or at least raise questions around, the loss of corporeal awareness conventional screenings impose on the audience by breaking the double-sided point of view in cinema generated in its elemental bifurcation: projector and screen, which occur simultaneously before and behind our eyes, our heads. Ultimately, by producing a tactile experience of cinema in which the image becomes flexible and nomadic, the gallery space was literalized (as opposed to a cinema space where one is encouraged to forget the space one is in during projection) through the use of its different planes as projective surfaces, while the attention was equally drawn to the different activities that took place around the projection and the resulting projected material.
Antoni Pinent during Cinema... Corpus versus Cerebrum
Esperanza Collado is an artist, curator, and writer based in Dublin. She has recently finished a PhD on dematerialized processes of exhibition cinema. She lectures on Visual Culture and Politics of Representation in Dublin Business School college. Previous curation includes Márgenes: Experimento y Praxis (The National Gallery of Ireland, thisisnotashop gallery, 2008), Structural/Materialist Film (Irish Film Institute and Filmbase for the Darklight Symposium, 2007), and Zero Degree: The New Image of Thought (thisisnotashop, 2007). She is a co-founder of and frequent programmer with the Experimental Film Club in Dublin. Her works have been shown at Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2006), Micromuseum (New York, 2006), thisisnotashop (Dublin, 2008), Annecy Film Festival (France, 2008), Loop Video-Art (Barcelona, 2007), and Directors Lounge (Berlin, 2007).