The moving image proposes an art of seduction. It amazes by promising a present that is repeated –in a loop- in distant space and time. This is, roughly, what television proposes: Instead of encountering the world, it introduces it in our living room. Closeness and immediacy as a result of technological development that, far from proposing a new paradigm, is based on previous models.
Just like in front of a stage, that conceals its depth behind the black paint to guarantee the illusion, when we look at a territory we tend to see only the surface. Landscape is actually a skin that conceals successive layers of past that contain, under human actions, the ruins and scrap of history.
The eight video pieces included in this exhibition show how any territory is supported by a succession of physical and virtual layers. Landscape is a body: A mental site and a physical place, where the real dimensions come into contact with our fears, desires and, finally, with the language that tries to shape them. As shown in many fables dealing the topic of returning home, home, once we left it, is never the same again, no matter how similar it may be. Or as it happens with contemporary experiences about the construction of identity, in spite of biological certainties, there is a wide range of intermediate spaces between sexes. In summary, mankind and nature are united by a mesh that, in a mimetic way, outlines metaphors in both directions, as trying to underline the close dependency of both spheres.
Based on the Archive of Asturian Artists, Eight Views of a Landscape that Never Fully Materialises shows, in addition, different ways of approaching contemporary videographic production. While trying to dig out the pas of our present through the alleged objectivity of the documentary format, fiction is eventually up to its old tricks. Even if it questions traditional drama and its illusionist tricks, its role is to be the vehicle for our understanding of the world: An artifact able to bring our relationship with the world with a more human scale.
Curator: Alfredo Aracil
Artists: Ramón LluísBande, Elisa Cepedal, Colectivo DV, Cristina Ferrández, David Ferrando, Alicia Jiménez, Marcos Merino, Amalia Ulman
Presentation video [+]
Press kit [+]
