CINEMODERNO 2018

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CINEMODERNO 2018

A CURA DI
Martina Angelotti

CON
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Filipa Cesar & Louis Henderson, Eli Cortiñas

From 29.05.2018 to 7.07.2018

At its second edition, CINEMODERNO is structured around the imaginary of video and its performative potential.
The project is manifested in the form of festivals diluted over a period of two months, in which artists are invited to perform every two weeks and to present a re-elaboration and reformulation - in a performative key - of a video research already started.

Since from the first edition it has involved the artists Eva and Franco Mattes, Anna Franceschini and Diego Marcon, Teresa Cos, Francesco Fonassi, with a prologue by Massimo Carozzi and wants to explore the language of video in all its multiple dimensions - sculptural, sound, visual - in order to investigate forms of interaction between the visual narration of the film and its hypertextuality, between the two-dimensional form of the projection and the three-dimensional one of its "staging".
CINEMODERNO is inspired by an anthropological perspective, which Rachel O. Moore identifies in cinema through the definition of magic ritual with the power to revive, heal and enchant.

For this edition CINEMODERNO is configured through three live interventions that return different sets of space - designed for both live and exhibition - for the duration of two weeks each. The invited artists, coming from different physical and mental geographies, are united by research aspects focused on the analysis of performative practices related to cinema or its ritual dimension, often approached through found-footage and documentary techniques, and which investigate the dimension of the "exotic" from very different perspectives and geographical gazes.

From the video performance of the Argentinean and half Italian artist Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Facultad, 2018) who investigates through the movement, language, sound and video, the relationship between the female body and the social body. The "westernized" jungle of the Tarzan series and other previous projects by Eli Cortiñas, whose lecture performance reveals the research process and the relationship between artist and ethnographer, to the political potential returned in a live form, by Filipa Cesar & Luis Henderson's Op-art: a film made with lenses and celluloid photosensitive to the desktop localization engine, which passes from the production of Fresnel lens material to the invention of global satellite navigation systems (GNSS), an instrument announcing the obsolescence of the sighting beacon.

PROGRAM

29.05.2018 - 8pm

Live performance by Mercedes Azpilicueta
La facultad, 2018
set until 12th June

CINEMODERNO 2018 #1 > La facultad, performance di Mercedes Azpilicueta

a live work introduced in three acts
a test for a vulnerable body in an unknown space
a staccato of different voices, sound clips and projected images.

La facultad is a term coined by Gloria Anzaldúa that refers to the capacity developed by many on the border “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities”. It is an instant “sensing”, a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols -which are the faces of feelings.

13.06.2018 - 7 pm

Project by Filipa César and Louis Henderson
Live projection and reading by Louis Henderson
The Opal and the Sunstone, 2017
set until 26th June

The interview with Roque Pina, the lighthouse guardian of Cabo da Roca - located at the western end of the European continent - becomes the starting point for an investigation that explores the way in which optical technologies - widely developed in the military and colonial field - they have profoundly transformed the way of reading, governing and "possessing" the world visually. Starting from the Fresnel lenses of the lighthouse - created by man to shed light on the unknown - up to the global GPS satellite navigation systems, the artists move a criticism towards the western construction of knowledge and communication, based on the projection of light , of which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought perfectly embodies the desires.
Incorporating 16mm, digital, CGI images, the film thus maps a technological trajectory: from the old methods of optical navigation to the new localization algorithms; from the singular projection to the multi-perspective satellite visions. And one wonders, in the end, what the role of the lighthouse and its guardian can be today, when the whole functioning and surveillance system has been automated. Weaving a live dialogue, Luis Henderson alternates his voice with that of Filipa and Roque, retracing the recent results of technological progress in the optical field and analyzing the reasons also in metaphorical terms, which led to an obsolescence of the lighthouse, emptied of its original function as a powerful and all-encompassing control object, it has become a mythical and dead place.

27.06.2018 - 7 pm

Lecture Performance by Eli Cortiñas
All Voodoo Happens at Night, 2018
set until 8th July

All Voodoo Happens At Night!, 2018, digital collage, Eli Cortiñas

In All Voodoo Happens at Night Cortiñas explores the performativity of the archival material she employs in her video installations. By re-employing such material and diffracting the outlines where the ideas of testimony and monument, of narration and technical media overlap, Cortiñas’ montage brings about a blurring of the point(s) of view(s) in modern Western myths of origins.
In a current situation of over-production of moving images, archaeological sites and nature reserves represent an exhaustible source of fantasy with yearnings driven by these primordial myths. Through the phantasmagoric transformation capability of cinema, nature in the case of the Tarzan films - which material forms the center pillar of Cortiñas’ lecture performance - function as a mere ornament, which can turn under a new negotiated narrative into a living figure. In the words of Jean Epstein: “If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant or a stone can inspire respect, fear and horror, those three most sacred sentiments, we must watch them on the screen, living their mysterious silent lives…”.

Thanks to Studio Azzurro, Show Biz Milano and Elianto Film

ARTISTS BIO

Mercedes Azpilicueta (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual and performance artist from Argentina based in the Netherlands. In 2017 she received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, Paris and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015/2016. She has an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ, Arnhem, and a BFA from the National University of the Arts, Buenos Aires. Exhibitions and performances include, among others, Museion (Bolzano, 2018), MACBA (Barcelona, 2018), D21 Kunstraum (Leipzig 2018), Villa Vassilieff (Paris, 2018), REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles, 2018), Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (Móstoles, 2017), Chinese European Art Center (Xiamen, 2017), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, 2016), Zmud Projects (Buenos Aires, 2016), TENT (Rotterdam, 2015), Móvil (Buenos Aires, 2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2014), Het Veem Theatre (Amsterdam, 2013), Galata Fotoğrafhanesi Fotoğraf Akademisi (Istanbul, 2013), Raw Material Company (Dakar, 2012) and The Poetry Reading Program, Documenta13 (Kassel, 2012). In 2018 she will present her first major solo exhibition at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. Mercedes´work is represented by the gallery Zmud Projects in Buenos Aires.

Filipa Cesar & Luis Henderson

Filipa Cesar, born 1975 in Portugal, is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Berlin, and studied at the Faculty of Arts in Porto and Lisbon (1996–99), the Academy of Arts in Munich (1999–2000) and MA Art in Context, University of Arts, Berlin (2007). Filipa César has exhibited, among other places, at 8. Istanbul Biennial, 2003; Kunsthalle Wien, 2004; Serralves Museum, 2005; Locarno International Film Festival, 2005; CAG- Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2006; Tate Modern, 2007; St. Gallen Museum, 2007; International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Prague, 2008; SF MOMA, San Francisco 2009, 12th Architecture Biennial, Venice, 29th São Paulo Biennial 2010, São Paulo and Manifesta 8, Cartagena.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker whose works investigate the networked links between colonialism, technology, capitalism and history. His research seeks to formulate an archaeological method within film practice, reflecting on new materialities of the Internet and the possibility for techno-animistic resistance to neocolonialism. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Video Artist at the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA, and a European Short Film Award – T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland. Recent exhibitions include Projections: New York Film Festival (2015); The School of Kyiv: Kiev Biennial (2015); Conversations at the Edge 2015: Gene Siskel Film Centre, Chicago; Capture All, Transmediale, Berlin (2015). His work is distributed by Video Data Bank. A graduate of London College of Communication and Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains, Henderson is currently completing a post-diplôme within an experimental art and research group at the European School of Visual Arts.

Eli Cortinas, born 1979 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, lives and works in Berlin. A large part of Cortiñas‘ practice revolves around the idea of challenging cinematic memory through analysing and re-editing pre-existing footage, or her own material. Disrupting and re-structuring narrative flows, she creates shifts of meaning (No Place Like Home, 2006). This method of editing as writing‘ generates a mixed feeling of both identification and alienation. In her videos, as well as in her collages and object arrangements, Eli Cortiñas creates an ambiguous and affirmative transparency – unveiling the role plays of a generation vaunted in the media as ‘lost’. Eli Cortiñas studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and at the European Film College Ebeltoft, Denmark. Selected solo exhibitions include Always bite the hand that feeds you at Convent Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent (2017), Five Easy Pieces and Some Words of Wisdom at Soy Capitán, Berlin (2015), Awkward Studies and a Decent Take on Serious Matters at Rokeby, London (2013), Love Is Worn Around The Neck, curated by Veit Loers at Kunstraum Innsbruck (2012). Her work was part of several group exhibitions, such as Film Footage Fotografie. Bildnerische Augenblicke mit filmischen Bezügen, Museum for Photographie Braunschweig (2017), 10 Emerging Artists. Contemporary Experimental Films and Video Art from Germany, Goethe Institute Canada (2017), Double Feature, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2017), Les Rencontres Internationales at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011). Eli Cortiñas has been awarded with grants and fellowships from Berliner Senat (2017), Villa Sträuli (2017), Villa Massimo Rome (2014), Marianna Ingenwerth-Stiftung grant for residency at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo La Regenta (2013), Shortlist Award for young Film Art, Freunde der Neuen Nationalgalerie und Deutscher Filmakademie (2011), et al.