María Cañas
Spain
www.animalario.tv

Project: Kiss the Murder

Kiss the Murder is a serie of compilation movies that reflect on love and death, eroticism and catastrophe by means of collages of film melodramas, art images and contemporary icons. Film-essay in Spain: the melodramatic realism of María Cañas: From the tradition of Valle-Inclan novels’ grotesque realism emerges a cinema of thinking that leans on melodramatics forms to explore reality. María Cañas is one of the main representatives of this eccentric trend of the Spanish contemporary documentary genre. The purpose of this paper is to explore, through her work, some of the new ways the cinema essay introduces into the panorama of current postcinema… Josep Català (University of Barcelona, Spain) Kiss the Murder and Kiss the Fire consist of micro-stories about indifference, internal fires and the marks of life on the edge. Cañas´ iconoclastic understanding of the spiritual applied to art allows her to connect with classics like Bosch and Caravaggio with the Dadaist corrosiveness of Duchamp and the other avant-garde artists. Artistic tradition and her fascination for classical melodrama, full of extreme feelings, lie at the root of her works. Her obsession with penetrating the dual face of Love-Hate is articulated in Kiss the Murder, in which the screen is split painfully in two, creating twin figures divided by hate like doppelgängers: the phantasmagorical double which bites us and raises us up when we least expect it. The artist shows us love as a source of pain and death, the madness which nourishes our emotional relationships, lighting up a sombre immobility which offers two ways of facing love in our disbelieving era: Hopperian melancholy and the animal brutality of Bacon. For Cañas, “Love is the Supreme Assassin, who, in the words of Nietzsche: “gives us pain and thus life.” In Kiss the Murder, we observe in perfect synchrony the interplay of light and shade of madness associated with a latent and mysterious violence, creating a visual illusion in which images grown tense to show love on the edge, tormented lives. The characters in Kiss the Murder act by means of erratic, amnesiac behaviour, suspended in time until violence unconscious of its actions decides whether to show itself or not. It has no future to cling to with regard to the stifling atmosphere, and tragedy hangs from a thread at every instant. As the artist says: After contemplating Kiss the Murder, it is possible that the only option remaining is to kneel down in front of The Murderer, kiss him and perhaps to die... as, in the words of the master Alfred Hitchcock: “murders should be filmed as love scenes and love scenes as murders”.

Maura Jasper
United Sates
www.maurajasper.com

Project: Weather You Remember

“Weather You Remember” is a series of video “weather reports” delivered by senior citizens, as they recall and comment on weather for the location they most identify as “home”. Relying only on personal experience and memory, participants in this project are asked to make observations about changes they have witnessed as indicators of past, present and future “weather” conditions. In particular, they are asked to consider change as it relates to technology. Uncomfortable with my own learning curve as I adapted to working digitally as an artist, I began to wonder how people much older than myself experienced the world. I also began to notice that in our culture of technology and youth, the elderly are invisible- or barely present. Weather forecasting as we know it is a modern development that became possible with the invention of the telegraph. Television weather reporting has only been around for 70 years. I am interested in the parallels between technology and weather as forces that we may or may not be able to control- and the impact those forces have on our lives. I am also interested in the way we define ourselves within a mediated culture, and the weather report is a format we all seem to be familiar with.

Mit Borrás
Spain
www.mitborras.com

Project: Deafland

Deafland is a pure videographic expression of the senses. An invitation to be stimulated and reflect. The effort to generate an experience that is authentic and heartbreaking for the emotions of the viewer. A crude piece without artifice. The beautiful, unnerving, painful and sensual perception of the human experience through sound, light and skin. An unsettling triptych about sublimation. No additives. Total message. Total experience.

Pedro Torres
Brazil
www.pedrotorres.net

Project: Corridoors

In CORRIDORS paths simultaneously intercut, fragmenting the linearity of the movements through the editing of the video; the space that is generated restructures the function of the corridors as a passageway and instead acquires a leading role and the focal point of the action, where all the voices behind the walls, kept within the rooms, are brought out and mixed together, losing themselves in the fragmented flow of the video.

Ricardo Jiménez López
Mexico
http://charcko.blogspot.com/

Project: Reconstrucción de Estructuras Informativas.
[Reconstruction of Informative Structures]

Through mass media such as the Radio, Television and the Internet, ten stories are created that tackle problems that are representative of the times we live, not only in Mexico City but in all cities. This project was carried out with popular communication techniques and new technologies for taking information sources into communities as way of strengthening the strategic role of social development.

Roser Teresa Gerona Ribas
Spain
(en costrucción) rroserpesent.com

Project: INFRALEVE industrias \"vapor\" cultural

“Art volatilised in the aesthetic ether” Yves Michaud. This video forms part of a series FUM_PRODUCTIONS which deals with the subject of the dematerialisation of the concept of art based on the theories of the indiscernible Arthur Danto, the art in a gaseous state of Yves Michaud and also the infraleve concept of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp broke the techne legacy of the Greeks whereby the artisanal, painter of surfaces, was a simple maker of appearances in the plasticity of epochal values, who had ceased to spread the word of god in the churches in order to disseminate other values of the state. Duchamp attempted to leave behind illustrated retinal representation by becoming a maker of signs and through the technique of intelligence and the use of grey matter in order to give up being a mere re-producer of taste. This is a reflection on new technologies, since they are no more than another set of visibility techniques for the value factory of the market, of industrial cultures, sold and disseminated like a new cultural pattern for their scopic, political regimes. Forbidden to smoke or infraleve, he plays with these concepts. Who constructed the value frameworks for the discernible and dematerialised works of art? If art since Duchamp is thought, then who wants to do the thinking for us?