session 11
JOAN LEANDRE & MAYA WOLIŃSKA
screening + discussion
JOAN LEANDRE
Now established in Poland, he created the Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat and has been a member since it was founded. His work explores intuitions of reality and areas of artifice. His current practice is a continuous work-in-progress in the lab and in the open air. He has produced several investigative series focusing on translation-interpretation and continuity-interruption in the media. Among other subjects, his trajectory includes ruminations about artifice, reduction, spectacular cons and standardisation, the intersecting areas in the over-accumulation of contemporary shared visions, the machinery and weightlessness of software, the silence on the net.
MAYA WOLIŃSKA
Established in Poland, she is an author, academic researcher and professor at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw. Her research and practice centre on the narrative methods used in contemporary audiovisual media over time. For the past few years she has been developing a body of work using software and images both static and in movement.
Her most recent work is submerged in profound biophilia and growing solastalgia, observing and interpreting patterns, rhythms and landscapes that manifest in miniature biological worlds, often misunderstood or ignored.
presentation
EN LA FRÁGIL SUPERFICIE
Beset by doubts and a certain need for silence, we’ve been working for a number of years on an unfinished videographic series, as yet untitled, that gathers thoughts about wavelengths invisible to the human eye, vacuum and feeling in times of emergency.
This has led us to think about common sense, about what’s common under this sky we all share.
We dream under the night firmament in the city and on mountain peaks; under vast, stormy skies, but also under the artificial ceiling of an empty room. In this cubicle we imagine, among simulations, what microscopic life in the undergrowth of a wood is like, and in the woods we glimpse the breath of a closed space between four walls. We recall forgotten dimensions of things and those moments in continuity when extremes meet and join together.
We also think about images that transcend words and hypotheses, when their magic dimensions speak for themselves at the slow and irregular beat of mediatic drift: “Sharply-defined illusions, illuminated in a row by electrical devices connected to power networks where the spaces between frames lose their reason for being. Interfaces blocked in between weak binary pulses. Either here or in the beyond lies their promise of an open space in liberating time”.
This set contains two commemorative essays, Earth Rays of the Sun and Earth Time Episodes, two pieces of work where attention is not so much focused on sole authorship or conceptual kaleidoscopy as in the shared good fortune of being able to marvel at subtle intuitions and tensions.
Earth Rays of the Sun
2017-2018_29 min
In 1965, a dreamer reached the highest point of Chomolungma:
“I finally understood that this was the Sun, that the Sun rose from the lands on the Tibetan side. First like this, and then another way. At that point, for a few moments, for five minutes the World was almost completely red. The whole world. Then, that approaching force and the rays of the sun, one heading up, the other heading down, left, right, but perhaps not from the south. Then the whole world turned yellow. The Sun kept coming with force and made us happy, at six o’clock in the morning we started on our way.”
Sri Sonam Wangyal, August 2014
Earth Time Episodes
2020-2021_30 min
Moments on the surface scratching that loss of depth where the last recording took place.
Slow illusions of space and time, dreams in white when sister storm was still with us. Human voices can be heard from indoor spaces absurdly and artificially lit, strange artifacts of vision and electric screens are already in permanent hibernation:
“We hear two strains of music that we seem to remember, we hear the nocturnal avalanches when the giant hand deposits a minute precious stone atop the glacier. The slow progression of the ice river and laboratory flowers. Perhaps it’s the tension and gravity imposed by each moment that make us look closer and try harder. The ticking of the clock in the next room. How empty the room is, with its silent northern corner, dark and sterile, and how interminable the day that extends before us, insistent in its marvellous loneliness.”
FLUX CLUB celebrates its 13th season at the Antic Teatre and the 22nd anniversary of its creation in 2000.
This is a fortnightly video programme that reflects the vitality of video creation in Barcelona. It hosts all kinds of sessions with screenings, video performances, and debates offering direct contact between audiences and video creators. The sessions focus on a range of subjects, from monographics of well-known directors to specific themes such as video dance and video poetry, or collective sessions dedicated to emerging authors.
The programme is open to everything currently going on in the field of video in Barcelona, complementing the FLUX Video Auteur Festival with its content and extending its sphere of influence beyond the dates of the festival, which takes place in December.
HABITUAL VIDEO TEAM is a non-profit association that has as its main objective the promotion of activities related to the visual arts, specifically, video art: www.habitualvideoteam.org.
A fundamental area of their work is the organisation of festivals, cycles and video shows, such as the FLUX Video Auteur Festival: www.fluxfestival.org, and the INFLUX Audiovisual Performing Arts Festival: www.influxfestival.org.
Another area of Habitual Video Team’s activity is video documentation of cultural events mainly related to experimental music and poetry performances. In 2012 they launched the SUMMA project in order to convert this audiovisual heritage (more than 1000 recordings) into a non-profit online video archive: www.summa-hvt.org.
