The Two Stories, 2009
16 mm film transferred to video, b/w, sound. 9’
Alejandro Cesarco. The Two Stories, 2009
Language and the ways in which writing and reading engage with it are at the very core of Cesarco’s production, which mines the limits of language and its relationships with the image using strategies close to conceptualism yet charged with affectivity. The Two Stories examines the psychological space of the narrator: a realm that is at once mental, intimate and performative. A character recalls a public reading made years ago in a family living room, yet the memory is not centred on the story in the text he read, but on the thoughts that crossed his mind while reading. The memory emerges from the opaqueness of the public reading, creating an introspective narrative that takes us on the same path followed by the reader, focused repeatedly on people and objects. Using slow, detailed shots of the living room, the camera strikes a balance with the voiceover and lends the space a specific texture, walking the tightrope between a real place that evokes a memory and an imagined one which is the product of memory and nostalgia.
