Wednesday, November 24
BIENALSUR works in each of its editions from an extensive International Open Call, without predetermined themes or formats or other limitations such as the trajectory, age or origin of those who participate. In 2020, we received more than 5,500 projects from artists and curators from more than 100 countries. From the Open Call emerge the curatorial axes that conceptually organize the different routes of each edition, and the works that make up the exhibitions, actions and different presentations of BIENALSUR are selected throughout its vast cartography.
From it also arises the BIENALSUR 2021 Video Program, based on works specially selected for their screening in different venues, according to the projects that each one hosts; and this is why, in the Xirgu Espacio UNTREF, we will present in a marathon format on a single date: Wednesday, November 24.
Programme:
4 p.m.
Rocha Matriz, Liquid Crystal Duo (BRA) 25 min
Today, Espírito Santo is one of the largest suppliers of ornamental rocks in the world. Its mountains have been carved, stacked and shipped to Miami and Beijing. The industries that drive this process frame the past and future of Espírito Santo. Navigating through fairs, ports and quarries in southeastern Brazil, the film traces the relationships between power and labor in the various stages of ornamental rock production.
River Overflow, Vivian Castro (BRA) 15 min
River Overflow is an audiovisual essay that follows the banks of the Tietê River, in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Mapocho River, in Santiago, Chile, in its urban perimeter. An observation and record of the people and places affected by the waters and forgotten. The Tietê River and the Mapocho have been the subject of great and endless public works -“Despoluição do rio Tietê” and “Mapocho urbano limpio” -, which always promise a bright future for two of the largest metropolises in Latin America. River Overflow proposes a reflection on the floods and the crisis of the development model of two Latin American cities.
5 p.m.
A smooth pan, Laura Preger (ARG) 16:54 min
A camera that wants to sweep everything away and, like the family, does not stay still. Based on observing the compulsive gesture of panning on her family's VHS in the '90s, the author organizes a tour where everything becomes a landscape: exteriors, interiors, meetings, television consumption, overlapping voices. The characters grow, the father worries about having "the best of the images". Something of that way of traveling, filming and enunciating perhaps at some point will fade.
The Order Reigns (work in progress), Fernanda Pessoa (BRA) 15 min
An experimental short film filmed in seven countries that have gone through socialist experiences. A female voiceover reads excerpts from Rosa Luxemburg's "Order reigns in Berlin", published the day before her assassination in 1919. With the return of authoritarian conservatism in the West, what are the possibilities of another, non-capitalist system?
Jordão, Gian Spina (BRA) 25 min
The Jordan River is not just a river. The strip of water that divides countries and beliefs is important, above all, in its symbolism. A fluid monument that erects and demolishes ideas, a place where economy, tourism, religion, geopolitics and national identity collide, and are reflected in the form of water. The film explores -in an essayistic way- the transformations of the river over time, to draw a fragmented portrait of this liquid monument.
7 p.m.
ÍNTEGRO, INTEGRO, INTEGRÓ, Gaby Messina and Ana Paula Penchaszadeh (ARG) 8:45 min
Through different daily scenes, the gaze stops on what has been made invisible and removed. The fundamental idea is to offer viewers an opportunity to review the way in which the past has been built, how exclusion is naturalized in the present and imposed valuations and expectations are based on prejudice and the devaluation of the other due to their skin color.
YO, AFRO, Gaby Messina and Ana Paula Penchaszadeh (ARG) 23:45 min
Being Afro is not necessarily being black or black. / The one who discriminates is the one who has the problem. / The human race is one, period. / The word "black" defines a field of struggle. / A person should not be called by their color. / The skin has no color, it has a complexion. / Being Afro implies being a foreigner in your own land. / I recognize myself because I love my Africanness. / The fight is one.
A film for Ehuana, Louise Botkay (BRA) 30 min
A film for Ehuana is a work made with Yanomami women, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela. The film takes place in Watorik, in a community that lives outside the world of capital and that for many years has been actively working to protect itself, to stay as far as possible from the white man and the State. The film is about female care and work relationships, but also about the exchange relationship with the director who is filming.
Tupi Valongo - Cemetery of the New Blacks and Old Indians, Anita Moreira de Azevedo Ekman Simões (BRA) 18:13 min
In Tupi Valongo - Cemetery of the New Blacks and Old Indians, the artist Anita Ekman, with the actor Hugo Germano, investigates -in a performative way- about the Brazilian Afro-indigenous identity and the current situation of the Brazilian Afro-descendants. The Valongo dock, in Rio de Janeiro, was the port that received the largest number of enslaved people in the world (2 million Africans). Those who arrived dead, or died after disembarking, were thrown into a shallow grave in the New Black Cemetery.
Super M, Emilio López, Maria Belen Cerdá, Pablo Sabando Aburto (ARG)
The documentary shows the mobilizations of women, trans and transvestites who claim for the right to abortion in front of Congress. It concentrates a diversity of views on this historical fact, where the emotional charge of this struggle that is still in force can be appreciated. The work is made from experimenting with film, using super 8 cartridges, as a way of giving a physical body to the event.
9 p.m.
The Glass Island, Alejandro Borsani (ARG) 12 min
The Glass Island is a video based on the Huemul Project, a secret program to develop the world's first fusion reactor. In March 1951, President Juan D. Perón announced his success in obtaining nuclear fusion on a remote island in Patagonia. The news travels the world, "Argentina achieves an unlimited source of energy". To this day, the Huemul Project remains a mystery and a source of local mythologies.
Egoo from the series Loneliness in Netflix Times, Felipe Lozano (COL) 12 min
D.A.V. (Death Assist Volunteers), from the series Loneliness in Netflix Times, Felipe Lozano 9:49 min
In a world of prefabricated, packaged and ready for sale affections, company ceases to be a vital necessity to become an object of consumption. Companies come to meet these emotional needs, offering products and services designed for an individual whose time must be optimized with alternatives that suit their individual existence.
Emerge, Magali Suescun and Laila Meliz (ARG) 13:08 min
Mother and daughter are immersed in an absurd and animal daily life. Its apparent habitual stillness will be affected by the presence of a person outside the binomial who will alter the order known to the daughter so far. Through an eroticism-laden experimentation, her mental limits will crumble and she will take her body to a new state.
The Unreal, Gloria López Cleries and Sive Hamilton Helle (ESP) 13:50 min
A meditative and guided journey to the core of an artificial mine. Through the recreation of a utopian land, we present an immersive experience. A soft female voice-over leads a contradictory narration to exalt the failure of the alternatives of techno-capitalism and the colonization of all imagined spaces. This trip is an invitation to explore the contradictions between the techno-liberal rhetoric and the geological materiality ignored by the media.
7FF ON¢IDIA, Ж 8:12 MIN
In Ancient China, the tiger's skin represented the "constancy of change", in the Mayan world in the walk of the Bolom Chon (jaguar) constellations were read: the dance of the cosmos. Flows are added in the film; jaguars, 7 pancades, plants-stains, ounce-worth, spider-flower. Matter-energy-information varies. Communication to the side, added value of the code. Commodities, bitcoins, mountains of data. 7FF On¢idia: the real impossibility of capital life.