LABoral offers an audiovisual cycle on its online television on the occasion of the exhibition 'Fleeting Stories'
Including works by Patricia Esquivias, Dora García, Cecilia Barriga and Stephen Dowskin
The audiovisual cycle will be shown at LABtv
Tomorrow, Friday 8th July, LABoral inaugurates Historias fugaces, the third exhibition framed within the Universo Vídeo series, through which the Art Centre has been tracing a review on the state of video art throughout 2011. An exercise in the reconstruction of memory is the common thread which guided the curator María del Carmen Carrión in her selection of the video art works which are shown, sponsored by Fundación Telefónica. Two intersecting planes give form to this exhibition: historical evolution and narrative. The exhibition includes works by Latin American artists which bear testimony to our relationship with time, of collective forgetfulness and the choices we make when remembering and, at the same time, highlights the way in which we recuperate forms in order to tell these stories.
With this in mind, the Centre of Art and Industrial Creation in Gijón has organized an audiovisual cycle as an additional activity, although closely related to the exhibition, which will be broadcast via LABtv, LABoral’s online television channel. The cycle is produced in collaboration with Lux and Hamaca, two of the most important experimental video and film distributors on the scene, and includes a series of works by the artists Patricia Esquivias, Dora García, Cecilia Barriga and Stephen Dowskin. All of these artists deal with similar themes to those presented in Historias Fugaces and complete the exhibition proposal with a series of reflections on image, time, memory and forgetting.
Beyond the classical documentation in printed version which invariably accompanies all exhibitions, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial aims to provide the opportunity for the spectator to view, through the Centre’s online platform (http://www.laboralcentrodearte.tv/), audiovisual content which discusses, reinforces and questions the works shown at Mediateca Expandida, contributing at the same time to a platform which brings together artists, distribution companies and spectators.
The Works
08-14.07.2011
Folklore by Patricia Esquivias
15-21.07.2011
All the stories by Dora García
22-28.07.2011
Im Fluss by Cecilia Barriga
29.07-05.08.2011
Mom by Stephen Dwoskin
Patricia Esquivias. Folklore, 2006
Based on an extremely complex mind map transferred to paper, Patricia Esquivias sums up the recent 70-year-history of Spain focusing on three representations: the dictator Francisco Franco, the businessman Jesús Gil and rave culture in Valencia. Comparing both characters, she is able to explain the concept of techno party in that area by means of her mental hypertext in a kind of private performance to learn English. Using the drawn and annotated structure on paper, she continues defining it through images which she places over constructing and revealing unexpected relationships among ideas with the challenge of explaining them in an uncertain English, as if she were telling them to someone from a foreign culture. The mix and jump between concepts, as well as the bridges she builds to establish relationships lead to a confused differentiation in which the equestrian statue of Franco is used to illustrate the horse of Jesús Gil and the sculptures by Lladró to speak of ecstasy and speed. Based on the title, Folklore develops a mental map of personal concepts, intuitively arranging them in the interest of artistic communication. To achieve this, she relates rumorology to objective data, putting them into effect to achieve a specific explanation of Spanish culture as a promotion of the country in a distorted way in a non-native language. An analytical system, personal, psychological guidelines combined with folklore archetypes through which she links incompatible ideas, giving the spectator a confused mental shorthand of the thinking of Patricia Esquivias (and perhaps the key to why “Spain is different”.)
Patricia Esquivias was born in Caracas and grew up in Madrid. She currently lives in Mexico. She studied art in London and San Francisco. In Madrid, for four years she was in charge of the exhibition programme at Los 29 Enchufes cultural association together with Manuela Moscoso. She has been working with video since 2005 and has exhibited her works in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Galería Maisterravalbuena, Madrid; FrankfurterKunstverein, 5th Berlin Biennale, Germany; White Columns, Murray Guy, New York; Arcos Museum, Artissima, Italy; and East International, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom.
Dora García. All the Stories, 2001
This video by Dora García documents a performance, which is enacted by a narrator willing to recite “all the stories in the world”. For the recording she selected forty of the three thousand stories that have been collected up until now and which can be read on the web page also conceived by the author which functions as a hypertext:
An individual who could be anybody, neutrally dressed, recites endless stories. In spite of giving in to this mental, imaginary world...the body is not dispensed with. The only image on the screen is that of the narrator, whose physical presence and voice is emphasised: his vocalisation, his breathing, the movement of his body in the neutral space. In refusing to evoke the narrations through images, this piece lends all its power to the spoken, almost liturgic, word, and to its capacity to create double fictions and realities. Infinite time loops, lives on the edge between reality and fiction are some of the themes that the artist has explored in depth. Some of these stories have as many folds as the structure upholding them: “A man dreams all his life the same dream. He even thinks that he is actually living two lives, one interrupting the other when he sleeps or wakes up”. Obsessions that remind us of Borges in his search for the absolute book. The author once wrote: ”I don´t find it unlikely that there is lying on some shelf in this universe a total book; I plead to the gods that one man- just one, even if it has been a thousand years ago! – has read it”. Whitman also comes to mind: “These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands” (Songs of Myself) The video, far from being a closed work, is the resonance of an unfinished project which is always open, which survives in our mind for a long time: “A man, a woman, recites out loud all the stories in the world. When she finishes, all the stories, all the men and all the women, all the time and all the places will have gone through her lips”.
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland (1985-1992). She lives and works in Brussels. Dora García uses exhibition space as a platform to carry out research on the relationship between the spectator, work and place, often using performance and interaction for this purpose. Through slight changes, without invading the space, she turns the space into a sensory experience which all the visitors leave with changed perceptions or, at least, with some degree of skepticism. Coming into contact with the work by Dora García, we develop a sense which begins to read the slightest signs as possible signifiers. The artist deals with the question of scripted experience and, in this way, the spectators become protagonists in a fictional work: sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.
Cecilia Barriga. Im Fluss [Crossing the River], 2007
Two elderly women narrate their contentment on being together for more than 30 years, of how love and companionship has brought them to a positive mutual dependency and they reflect on the possible passing away of one of them. As they float down the river, the two ladies reflect on a whole life spent together. In a pastoral scene of them swimming in the river, having a shower, grooming and going back home on a day-off, they share happy moments. Both agree that life is wonderful. Thirty years and as if it were the first day, a couple that knew how to overcome the social norms of their youth and claim their love. A positive and encouraging testimony. The current of a good swim, radiating an atmosphere full of affection and support, accompanying thoughts and feelings that allow them to be themselves. Starting from this public sphere of swimming in the river, Cecilia Barriga succeeds in showing a high level of intimacy in these images, which is reflected in the shower moment, relatively private, to move onto the hustle and bustle of public transport, with both of them sat down next to each other and even this situation, after hearing their reflections, reinforces ideas of intimacy. What is personal, private and everyday life is publicly consolidated claiming enduring permanence in each other. Transitions between the private and public spheres which have a bearing on the idea of the flow in reciprocated experiences, in memory, of backs bent by time, of hands cracked by the years.
Cecilia Barriga (Concepción, Chile, 1957) left her country at the age of 19 to study in Madrid. In 1984 she graduated in image and sound from Universidad Complutense [Complutense University in Madrid]. In 1994 she set herself up in New York to study scriptwriting and video-creation at Columbia University. Since returning to Spain, she has made numerous documentaries and television reports, without giving up the fictional domain. Cecilia Barriga and Claudia Lorenz have worked together since 2006 on the production of two short films: Im Fluss [Crossing the River] and El día del euro [The Day of the Euro].
Stephen Dwoskin. Mom, 2008
Mom is in the words of the author “a tribute to my mother just after her death at the age of 96. The film remembers her through pieces of early footage, searching to hold on to and capture the elusive feelings and warm gestures she left behind and still remain in my memory today”. Stephen
Dwoskin (New York, 1939) is one of the key names in American independent film in the 60s and 70s, through writing the book Film Is and making a countless succession of film work shot in 16 mm from 1961 onwards. In 1964 he settled in London to make short films –the first of which Dirty- paved the way for feature films at the beginning of the 70s with works such as Dyn Amo, Tod Und Teufel, Behindert and Central Bazaar".
In 1976 Filmoteca Española [Spanish Cinemathèque] held a retrospective and edited a catalogue which includes an interview with Dwoskin, from which the following comment has been extracted: “The objective is to create a film which is totally dependent on itself as a film. In this field, film can start to liberate itself from the distance of romantic history, reproduced and unreal, and return to being genuinely expressive. When filmmakers can use the medium to express themselves, and also their own emotions, cinema insofar as an expressive form, can begin to get the spectator involved”.
