Carmen Menendez
1 February 2023 – 11 March 2023
Her first short film as a director, “No Jungle” (2017), shows the experience of a group of Syrian refugees trying to cross into England from a makeshift camp in the city of Calais (France). Present in more than 20 national and international festivals, it was premiered in the official section of the Malaga International Film Festival and received – among others – the award for Best Filmmaker from the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA) and the special mention of the jury at the Alcances Festival in Cádiz.
In her role as an editor, she does advertising work, video art – she is a regular collaborator with the artist Rosana Antolí, with pieces such as The Immortal Jellyfish (2019) for the Tate Modern in London – video essays and documentaries. Developing found footage creations is one of the main focuses of her practice, with pieces like “Is This Human?” for the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) – which she also co-runs and co-directs – on the mechanisms of perception manipulation in far-right political discourses. In relation to this topic, she has developed participatory workshops in centers for unaccompanied minors in the city of Barcelona in collaboration with an international NGO.
She is currently developing the feature-length documentary “Guide to Sewing without a Pattern”, conceived as a sewing manual and other practices based on the experience of the former workers of the IKE – Confecciones Gijón shirt factory in its 10 years of strikes.
Project in residence
Patternless Sewing Guide is a feature-length documentary that makes visible in the public space of today’s Gijón the experience of the workers of the IKE men’s shirt factory: 277 women were fired in the midst of industrial reconversion in the 1980s, which caused a ten-year labor conflict and even a confinement in the factory during the last four.
They learned to make barricades, occupied a merchant ship and even ran for office. They never got back the job they fought for. This film talks about how society, historically, has given little space to women to be aware that they can defend themselves. The IKE workers represented a dysfunction: they broke the pattern of behavior that had been imposed on them and took their own pattern into the public space, based on the defense of the colleague next to them.
Reconnecting the city with the memory of former IKE workers amplifies the entire community’s capacity for action and repair. The film builds a large citizen agora for the reflection of the protagonists and the witnesses. And it connects the protagonists with the workers of the present.
