DIALECTAL CINEMA

CINEMA IN THE CA2M COLLECTION

Fotograma de El Futuro, Luis López Carrasco, 2014.

This autumn's cinema series is a celebration of the audio-visual media that is part of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Museum’s public heritage. Our collections feature many pieces of video art encompassing the last decades of audio-visual history, both nationally and internationally. In recent years, we have also decided to make a strong commitment to promoting experimental and exhibition cinema, as we consider the moving image to be a fundamental heritage in present-day culture and, above all, because it is important to have a museum record of the great moment that film is currently experiencing in Madrid.

Dialectal Cinema is an ideal accompaniment to Dialecto CA2M. It will allow us to watch some of the most interesting films acquired in recent years in their authors’ own voices. In other words, it will follow the traditional cinema and colloquium format, but with exceptional artists.

Non-commercial cinema is a fundamental element for the opening of the CA2M Collection. Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981) will open the cycle with The Future (2013), a film of unique generational importance. This was his first big hit before the acclaimed The Year of Discovery (2020). Another documentary film, Everyone likes bananas, brings Rubén H. Bermúdez (Móstoles, 1981) back to our museum, collectively addressing the day-to-day experience of blackness in Spain as part of an impressive community exercise. The Science fiction category will be represented by Ion de Sosa (San Sebastian, 1981), who adapted Philip K. Dick's Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into a dystopian Benidorm during low season.

Lois Patiño (Vigo, 1983) has been a leading voice in the field of exhibition cinema, a less narrative format that acts as a loop for exhibition spaces, over the last decade. In Shady Mountain, the viewpoint and light reveal the geological formation as a place of coexistence, a sublime place to live. Films by Alex Reynolds (Bilbao, 1978) defy conventional narrative by displaying the affective structures that glue viewers to the screen.

In the final session can chat with three quite different video artists. Ana Esteve (Agres, 1986) discusses cinema itself and its conventions in her films. In The Magic Screen she turns a city built on the East Coast of Spain, the Levante, which is still a potential dream, into an archaeological site. Cristina Garrido (Madrid, 1986) uses a cliché promotional documentary to explain a new kind of art. This film is shown at art fair stands and Garrido herself considers it to be another artistic genre altogether: just like painting, the art featured at the fair pavilion. Finally, Mar Reykjavik (Sagunto, 1995) reflects on the creation of identity through new technologies and the virality of networks. My body, my rules analyses the potential relationships and escapes resulting from viral challenges.

In addition to these dates, and for the duration of the CA2M Dialect exhibition, all the video pieces from the CA2M Collection and the ARCO Foundation Collection will be available for viewing in a cinema on the second floor of the museum. There, visitors can choose which piece they want to watch and enjoy the possibilities that the cinematographic medium offers for current artistic expression.

Luis Lopez Carrasco - Futuro

Cinema. Luis López Carrasco. The Future

THURSDAY OCTOBER 28 18:30 - 20:30

Luis López Carrasco. The Future. 2013 (67 min.)

A group of young people are dancing and drinking in a house. The atmosphere is festive and lively. The victory of socialist party PSOE in the 1982 general elections seems recent and the night is filled with a contagious spirit of euphoria and celebration. The attempted coup d'état of 1981 seems so far away, as if it belonged to a rapidly-receding past.
It could be said that in Spain, in 1982, everything was yet to come, everything was still in the future. However, the future seems to be approaching fast, like a black hole that will devour everything in its path.

Cinema. Rubén H. Bermúdez. Everyone likes bananas

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 4 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Rubén H. Bermúdez. Everyone likes bananas. 2021 (60 min.)

"Suddenly he woke up, and Black Lives Matter was also Spanish. The photographer Rubén H. Bermúdez, whose 2017 book ‘And why are you black?’ was a turning point for the visibility of Spain’s Afro-descendant community, now presents the audio-visual evolution of his work. A choral, warm and mature feature film, in which he entrusts the camera to seven black people in Spain for them to attempt to make a film. Self-representation and doubts come together to create an intimate, fragmentary and necessarily partial portrait. Skins and bodies, filmed intimately, that speak, that listen to each other, that are exposed. A film that makes you want to live". Gonzalo de Pedro

Fotograma de Sueñan los androides. Ion de Sosa. 2014

Cinema. Ion de Sosa. Ion de Sosa. Androids Dream

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 11 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Ion de Sosa. Androids Dream. 2014 (61min.)

Androids dream. Director's statement (Director's statement)

Earth 2052.
A beach without sea. Cartography of a future with no future.

Setting the Earth of 2052 in Benidorm is not a gratuitous decision. The Alicante town is the supreme example of the growth model that Spain developed through the second half of the 20th century. A model of sun and beach tourism that has turned Benidorm from a fishing village into a city of skyscrapers that now has half a million inhabitants during the summer. These holiday destinations have undergone accelerated growth over a short period of time. Enclaves designed in the late fifties to sell the idyllic image of Spain as a society of services, as a place of leisure and fun.

A Benidorm of cheap skyscrapers and swanky hotels, a Spanish version of Dubai and Hong Kong, is portrayed in the film as the Earth’s future, an oasis for the elderly. A paradise dying in slow motion. Las Vegas style, in a Mediterranean location for tourists with limited economic resources.

The film’s detective protagonist walks through a town that is difficult to place, a non-specific location designed for pensioners. We could be anywhere in the world, and yet we are nowhere at the same time. By never showing the sea, the tourist location takes on a rather delirious and claustrophobic dimension. Also, by shooting a summer city in autumn, it appears empty and gloomy, its skies overcast, its shops closed. The dance halls, the nightclubs, the streets crammed with neon lights and posters promising alcohol and revelry are only working at half throttle, staining the future of the Earth with a decadent and obsolete atmosphere.

The appearances of tourists and local people, acts as an anchoring and endearing counterpoint to the protagonist’s bloody and ruthless investigation. All those happy elderly people wandering the streets and cafes on motorised wheelchairs seem to be oblivious, unresponsive to the protagonist's murders, making the town look like an increasingly unreal and rarefied space.

Cinema. Lois Patiño. Shady Mountain.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 18 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Lois Patiño. Shady Mountain. 2012 (14 min.)

A contemplative look at the snowy mountain and the activity of the skiers on it.
The immensity of the space contrasts with how insignificant the people seem, almost invisible from a distance.

In contrast with the white snow, the film’s image becomes unreasonably darker and darker, transforming the view into something unreal, dreamlike and spectral. Its appearance also somewhat resembles the image of an artificially illuminated model, where the skiers are nothing more than dots in the distance, gliding in a hypnotic motion. The image flattens out at times, losing all depth, in search of the pictorially abstract.

This play on the perception of scale, where the immensity of the mountain becomes confused with the view through a microscope, continues to develop throughout the film. This treatment also allows the visualisation of the landscape to become tactile - emphasising the texture of the snow, blending with the scale of the space – allowing us to experience the image of the landscape as something tangible: a tactile vision.

But finally, the view we are shown is somehow identified with a possible view of the mountain from its summit, where men can be seen gliding down its slopes, like insects along an animal’s skin.

Alex Reynolds. This door, this window. 2017 (36 min).

There are no doors or windows that block the passage of sound or, conversely, anything can serve as a door or a window.

Ana Esteve. La pantalla magica.

Cinema. Ana Esteve. Cristina Garrido

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 25 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Ana Esteve: The Magic Screen. 2018 (21 min.)

The Magic Screen is a piece created following a promotional video that depicts the City of Light, a 320,000 square metre film studio built in Alicante in 2005 by public initiative, with the intention of turning it into the European Hollywood. However, fourteen years later, its sets, warehouses, set construction workshops, dressing rooms, make-up rooms, production support facilities and outdoor filming areas are in disuse, after it officially closed in 2014. Since then, it has been put up for auction twice and is currently for sale with the intention of it resuming operation in some way.

In the video, we learn about all the filming locations available within the City of Light as a presenter explains the functions and features of each area in detail. During this visit, we unpack the construction of the audio-visual image while reflecting on the importance and power of fiction, in this case cinematographic fiction, as the basis for the construction of reality and its perception. How important are cinematographic stories as a scenario and projection of collective dreams? This audio-visual journey through the interior of the City of Light reveals the history and life of the moving image, while questioning the existence and survival of this type of imaginary. The film studio is presented in ruins, prompting a reflection on failing projects, but also on how they can become places to be visited, venerated and mythologised.

A reflection on the importance of cinematographic fiction in the construction of the collective imaginary and a subtle but stinging criticism of the building of huge infrastructures that, over time, become deserted and unused.

Cristina Garrido - Boothworks. 2017 (13 min.)

Boothworks is a fictional documentary in which a narrator describes, from an uncertain future, an international art form that consolidates around the 2010s. This new art form, created by the gallery owners of the time, took the gallery booth as an artistic medium and the art fair as its exhibition space. Booth art, as the narrator calls it, was nomadic, portable, "anti-gallery," ephemeral, performative, site-specific, and resistant to becoming a commodity. However, the narrator complicates this challenging art form by questioning its relationship to capitalism, its social impact, the focus shift from the art object itself to its context, the institutional and curatorial objectives that promoted these practices, and how the figure of the art critic became unnecessary under these new circumstances.

The text is a collage composed entirely of (edited) quotes from renowned art critics, curators, art historians, artists and other artistic agents who talk about conceptual, site-specific, performative and ephemeral art practices of the 1960s and 70s, such as Lucy Lippard, Miwon Kwon, Germano Celant, Helen Molesworth, Seth Siegelaub and Joseph Kosuth, among others.

The visual part of the video comes from video documentation of art fairs and other events found on the Internet, on platforms such as Vernissage TV.

Fotograma de My Body, the Rules. Mar Reykjavik. 2018.

Cinema. Mar Reykjavik. Claudia Claremi.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 2 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Mar Reykjavik - My Body, my Rules. 2018 (14 min.)

My Body, My Rules is an essay about the YouTube Challenge conceived as a mechanism for the body’s emancipation and for the democratisation of performance.

Dolores doesn't have the answer, and neither do I.

The representation of the body’s presence on social networks responds to the phenomenology of the use of the physical body in the digital space.
Everything is about intention and form.
We can all perform or establish body-space-object relationships that are divorced from convention.
Everything is absurd and necessary.
It is produced and reproduced. This is the Nowist Culture.
These are the rules, this is my body.

It is the moment where we encounter the otherness, the new equals who are also participants, where we decode the canons we have assumed, and spit them out:
Where we look at the objects once again, accepting bottles as new fossils or objects
for garbology, or the archaeology of the ephemeral.
We accept the shift from tradition to trend,
to be trendy,
to stop being trendy.

Claudia Claremi. Colonial amnesia. 2020 (12 min.)

Colonial Amnesia is a set of several audio-visual pieces that present different cultural practices and social spaces manifesting our contemporary "amnesia" towards the colonial legacy, while also allowing us to discover how the colonial order renews itself and lives on, all at the same time.

Within this series, Colonial Amnesia (stupor) is a film constructed from sounds and images documenting the parade of the Three Kings in the town of Alcoy (Alicante), a Christmas tradition charged with an orientalist aesthetic in which blackface is practiced. The project is a sensory, hypnotic and disturbing film essay that addresses structural racism, colonial forgetfulness, whiteness and its modus operandi.

Since 1885, the Three Kings of the Orient parade through the town of Alcoy every 5^th of January accompanied by hundreds of pages who hand out gifts to the children, surrounded by music bands, camels, torches and fireworks. The pages, also known as els negrets, are young men who dress up as uniformed servants, with their faces painted black and the outline of their mouths painted red. In the Alcoy festival, els negrets are not recognised as representing people of African descent, probably slaves, so the celebration that takes place does so completely disconnected from the meaning behind what is actually being represented.

In this festivity, Colonial Amnesia (stupor) explores other meanings that question what today appears to be innocuous due to its cultural acceptance and establishment, as well as the convenience of disregarding the other meanings behind what it represents. The piece proposes an immersive aesthetic experience that allows the viewer to connect with his or her own ethical and political considerations, exploring a state of mind, a suspended moment in time, a spiralling phenomenon.

Activity type

Cinema and video

Target audience

Anyone interested

Duration

18:30 - 20:30

Dates

Del 28 de octubre al 2 de diciembre

Cinema. Luis López Carrasco. The Future

Event Date

2021-10-28 -2021-10-28

Cinema. Rubén H. Bermúdez. Everyone likes bananas

Event Date

2021-11-04 -2021-11-04

Cinema. Ion de Sosa. Ion de Sosa. Androids Dream

Event Date

2021-11-11 -2021-11-11

Cinema. Lois Patiño. Shady Mountain.

Event Date

2021-11-18 -2021-11-18

Cinema. Ana Esteve. Cristina Garrido

Event Date

2021-11-25 -2021-11-25

Cinema. Mar Reykjavik. Claudia Claremi.

Event Date

2021-12-02 -2021-12-02

Access

Attendance open and free while places last

More information and contact

912760221

ca2m@madrid.org

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Exhibition

CA2M DIALECT

For the first time, more than 400 works by 250 artists are coming together in an exhibition that showcases the CA2M collections and takes up the entire museum space. It is a celebration of what the museum represents and has represented from the beginning. This journey begins with the historical avant-garde - all the artists who accompanied Picasso at the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic - and continues through history up to the present day. It is not only an international exhibition, as are all the CA2M and the ARCO Foundation collections, but also a story that is told from inside this institution, from the collections it holds, and ultimately, from Móstoles.