In 1895, an almost magical device was invented that was capable of capturing the moving image, images that could then be reproduced anywhere in the world. To do this, a couple of fundamental elements were needed, a cinematograph, which was later separated into a camera to collect the image and a projector (the element that gives its name to this festival) and which had the capacity to uncover the image by pushing light through the film. This film is the physical element, the tape that records the images.

This tape has lost its prominence since the late 1990s, when the digital format began to gain popularity, synonymous with the constant evolution and experimentation of the artists and craftsmen in this guild. However, the artists that will be screened these days at Sala Equis are examples of experimentation with the physical format, the photographic tape.

«Opaline» is a videopoem brought to us by Alix Galdin, a self-taught French-Canadian photographer and filmmaker who first with polaroid and later with film in its various formats (35mm or, as in the case of the projected piece, 16mm and Super8) has worked with the technique of developing on silver and has combined it with other more modern techniques.
As the artist herself tells us, this work was first captured with a 16mm camera, then re-filmed on Super8 and finally coloured by hand.

This manipulation of the physical format aims to create a blurred image, close to a memory that is present, but that in no way wants to be sharp and that, together with the poem written by Alix Galdin herself and with the music of Vivian Lee, narrates the story of a childhood submerged in the maelstrom of a broken family, an anxious and violent memory that still has to be carried.

As we have seen, the history of the moving image is a history of experimentation, and as the artist Beatriz Freire (Portugal) reminds us, primitive film projectors are a construction that was born from the adaptation of a sewing machine for this filmic function.

Freire is a textile and visual artist who seeks to create her work under the approach of «expanded textile» and in her work «Descartes LAV«, she unites filmic and textile craftsmanship, joining discarded 16mm tapes with a black cotton thread, focusing on the materiality of the format over the content of it. This fusion between film and sewing will be culminated with the sound, which will be precisely that of the sewing machine, evoking those original projectors.

Following the path of experimentation with film, we have the work by Abinadi Meza (USA/Mexico), «Eyes Break Into a Thousand Lights«, where the artist dispenses with the use of the camera to work directly with the physical format, specifically with 16mm film. He manages to create a changing image, which through the light, the «errors» that are generated in the negative, and the sound environment (also designed by Meza), seeks to take the spectator to a deep, «oceanic» state, as the artist describes it, which invites the spectator to immerse himself in it.

Text: Diego Prior